The Stasi gave ten former RAF members new names, flats and jobs. In June 1990, all ten were arrested.

02Objekt 74, near Briesen

They learned their new lives by heart in a forester’s lodge

The Stasi’s “Objekt 74” was a forester’s lodge, “An der Flut”, in the woods near Briesen, east of Berlin. Silke Maier-Witt, Monika Helbing and Susanne Albrecht learned their new biographies by heart there. Later the ten met there once a year.

Each had to invent a life story that gave nothing away and could not easily be checked, in case a colleague or neighbour later moved West. On paper they then went through the same admission procedure as any other migrant from the West, and applied for East German citizenship.

The Stasi watched them, bugged their flats, and later recruited some of them as informers. The Stasi listed Susanne Albrecht as an informer, under the male code name “Ernst Berger”; the archive notes that no signed commitment from her has been found. The files name Silke Maier-Witt, too, as an informer, “Anja Weber”.

05Berlin and Karlsruhe, 1997–98

The officers who hid them were acquitted

On 7 March 1997 the Landgericht Berlin found the head of the "Stern" working group in Abteilung XXII and his deputy, both colonels, and the case officer guilty of attempted Strafvereitelung (obstructing prosecution); warnings only, with the fines reserved.

On 5 March 1998 the Bundesgerichtshof set the verdict aside and acquitted all three. Its ruling set limits, under international law, on applying the West German offence of obstructing prosecution to what East German officials had done for their own state.

“Letztlich verurteilte kein Gericht auch nur eine Person aus der SED oder ihrer Geheimpolizei für die Kollaboration mit der RAF zu einer Haftstrafe.”In the end no court sent a single member of the SED or its secret police to prison for collaborating with the RAF. Harald Bergsdorf, bpb Deutschland Archiv, 2024.