Otto Schily  Otto Georg Schily (born 20 July 1932) was Federal Minister of the Interior of Germany from 1998 to 2005, in the cabinet of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Born in Bochum as the son of an iron works director, Schily grew up in a family of anthroposophists. His younger brother is Konrad Schily, an academic and also a politician. They spent their adolescence during the war in Bavaria. The family opposed Adolf Hitler. In 1962, he passed his second state exam after having studied law and politics in Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin, thus being admitted to the bar; a year later, he opened his own law practice. On 2 June 1967 Schily went to a demonstration in Berlin against the violation of human rights in Iran. A student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead by the police. He subsequently decided to represent the student's family. In the 1970s, he became a public figure as a trial lawyer, defending several guerrilla activists of the left-wing Red Army Faction. In 1971, he represented his friend Horst Mahler (who much later would become an advocate of the fascist National Democratic Party); during the Stammheim trial (1975–1977), he was the only remaining attorney of Gudrun Ensslin. While he gained popularity and respect for acting according to his own moral principles, some accused him of supporting the radicals' goals. In 1980, Schily became founding member of the Green Party. In 1982, he joined other members of the Green Party for a meeting with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who offered to help groups allied with the European anti-nuclear movement to try to close United States military bases in Europe. In the 1983 elections, Schily was elected to the German Bundestag and in the first electoral term in which the Greens were represented in parliament, he was one of the spokespersons of the parliamentary group, together with Petra Kelly and Marieluise Beck. In parliament, he became a leading exponent of the party's "realist" wing, which favored striving for a governing coalition with the Social Democrats following the 1987 elections. In 1986, he was the Greens' sole representative on a Bundestag committee investigating the so-called Flick affair. Due to the party's policy of rotating its representatives, he had to leave parliament in 1986, but he was re-elected in 1987. Increasingly estranged from the fundamentalist wing of the Greens, particularly regarding alliances with larger parties, Schily left the party in 1989, resigned his seat in parliament, and joined the Social Democrats (SPD) instead – which he represented in the new "Bundestag" in 1990.