Waltrude Schleyer

Who was Waltrude Schleyer?

Waltrude Ketterer Schleyer was the widow of Hanns Martin Schleyer, a high ranking German official and former Nazi who was killed by the Red Army Faction which shocked West Germany during the 1970s.

She married Schleyer in 1939. She was the daughter of the physician, city councillor of Munich and SA-Obergruppenführer Emil Ketterer. They had four sons.

During the couple's times in Prague, Waltrude Schleyer lived in a formerly jewish owned house whose owner died in a German concentration camp within in the same time period.

Schleyer's husband, Hanns Martin Schleyer, was the head of the employers association in West Germany and a former SS lieutenant. He was kidnapped and then killed by the Red Army Faction in 1977. The RAF was also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was named after two of the group's early leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. The RAF was a radical Communist terrorist group, with a Marxist-Leninist ideology, which sought to overthrow the West German government, which was capitalist and a close ally of the United States during the Cold War.