Schleyer son: Only one RAF perpetrator has apologized

The son of RAF terror victim Hanns Martin Schleyer has paid tribute to the apology of fellow perpetrator Silke Maier-Witt. She "is and was the only one from the RAF who has apologized so far", Jörg Schleyer told the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". He finds that remarkable, which is why he is talking to her. For him, however, the past is not over: "Forgiving, forgiving and forgetting are not all the same thing."

The 75-year-old Maier-Witt has just published her autobiography, in which she describes her involvement in the kidnapping of the then employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer. She turned her back on the RAF at the end of the 1970s, served a prison sentence and some time ago asked Jörg Schleyer for forgiveness. She told the SZ newspaper: "When you kill people, you only change your own world, you fill it with guilt. But you don't improve anything."

Despite her remorse, she has not yet contacted the families of Schleyer's four companions, who were shot by the RAF during the kidnapping in Cologne on September 5, 1977, to apologize. "I should actually still do that," said Maier-Witt. "There is still so much to do."

Maier-Witt expressed incomprehension about the support of some left-wing circles for the alleged RAF members Daniela Klette, Wolfgang Staub and Burghard Garweg. "They have lived like ordinary criminals for years - and put themselves in line with all the great revolutionaries of this world," she said. Klette was caught in Berlin in February 2024 and is due to stand trial in March.