How East Germany's Stasi Hid Ten RAF Terrorists for a Decade

A new ARD documentary, "Staatsgeheimnis RAF – Terroristen in der DDR," directed by Claus Räfle, has drawn renewed attention in Germany to one of the Cold War's lesser-known arrangements: East Germany's decade-long sheltering of former Red Army Faction (RAF) members. The film became available on ARD Mediathek on October 7, 2026, and aired on the channel Das Erste on October 12, 2026 at 11:35 p.m., according to the entertainment outlet wochenblatt-reporter.de.

What the Stasi did

According to reporting by the Deseret News, which covered a 1997 West German trial, former Stasi colonel Harry Dahl — who headed the Stasi's counterterrorism division — admitted to helping Red Army Faction dropouts leave West Germany and build new identities in East Germany during the 1980s. Dahl said he had acted on orders from East German leader Erich Honecker and in line with East German law, and argued his actions had helped prevent further attacks, the outlet reported.

The Deseret News reported that ten former RAF members were helped into hiding in East Germany in this way, and that Stasi colonel Günter Jaeckel arranged new identities for the group while other officers helped them settle into ordinary life. According to Silke Maier-Witt's English-language Wikipedia biography, Inge Viett, a former RAF member who had earlier contact with Dahl, held exploratory talks with him that opened the way for the group's relocation to East Germany.

Silke Maier-Witt: the documentary's central case

The best-documented individual case is that of Silke Maier-Witt, born in 1950, who joined the RAF in 1977 and played a support role — including scouting locations and transcribing interrogation recordings — in the kidnapping and killing of employers' association president Hanns-Martin Schleyer, according to her English-language Wikipedia biography. After a 1979 bank robbery linked to the group left a bystander dead, Maier-Witt and several other disillusioned members sought a way out, and the Stasi relocated her under the false identity "Angelika Gerlach," and later "Sylvia Beyer," while she worked as a nurse in Neubrandenburg.

The collapse of East Germany in 1990 exposed her true identity. She was arrested, tried in Stuttgart, and sentenced to ten years in prison in 1991; she was released early in 1995. According to the same biography, she later studied psychology and worked on reconciliation projects in Kosovo and the Balkans, and met Schleyer's son in 2017.

How West German intelligence got it wrong

For about a decade, West Germany's domestic intelligence service (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), federal police (BKA) and foreign intelligence service (BND) searched for the missing RAF members, generally assuming they had fled to the Middle East rather than East Germany, according to the regional newspaper Nordkurier. Winfried Ridder, who served as chief analyst at the Verfassungsschutz during the 1980s, told the newspaper he felt "shame" once it became clear that he and his colleagues had reached a completely wrong assessment of where the fugitives were.

Nordkurier reported that the arrangement stayed secret for years in part because its exposure risked derailing diplomatic relations between East and West Germany at a sensitive time.

Discovery and arrests in 1990

The hidden lives of the ten former RAF members ended as East Germany collapsed. Wochenblatt-reporter.de reported that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the secret arrangement began to unravel, and the Deseret News reported that the group's identities were exposed once Stasi files were opened following unification. All ten were arrested in 1990, according to the Deseret News and wochenblatt-reporter.de.

Of those ten, eight were later convicted on various charges connected to their RAF activities, according to the Deseret News; all have since been released from prison.

The documentary

Director Claus Räfle's film combines interviews, archival footage and AI-animated sequences to reconstruct the period, with Maier-Witt's story as its central thread, according to wochenblatt-reporter.de. The documentary also examines the political considerations that may have led East German authorities to take in the group in the first place, and how West German investigators pursued the case for years without success.