Paul Mayer (activist)

Mayer died November 22, 2013 at his home in East Orange, New Jersey. He was 82 years old at the time of his death.

The trial of the 13 ended in a hung jury in 1972 and charges against Mayer were dismissed.

On February 8, 1971, Mayer was indicted as a co-conspirator along with radical priests Philip Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan, and 10 others in an alleged plot to bomb the U.S. Capitol and kidnap Henry Kissinger, a top policy advisor to President Richard M. Nixon. Mayer acted as the head of the defense committee to support the defendants, who were known in the popular press of the day as the Harrisburg Seven. The defendants charged that the alleged plot was a fabrication constructed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Shortly after the time of the indictment, Mayer sought to connect the Harrisburg Seven case with Nixon administration efforts to intimidate domestic opponents of the war. In a February 1971 interview with the Los Angeles Free Press Mayer said:

Mayer converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1947, at the age of 16, drawn to the church, he later recalled, by an "adolescent drive to belong." Aspiring to become a priest, Mayer joined a Benedictine monastery, where he lived for 18 years.

Following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, repression rapidly engulfed Germany's Jewish population. As Jews Mayer and his younger brother were expelled from school by government edict, contributing to his parents' decision to emigrate to the United States in 1938. He spent a year living in an orphanage before his parents were financially able to obtain an apartment for the family in New York City.

Paul Mayer (1931–2013) was a German-born American peace activist. Mayer is best remembered as a leading radical pacifist of the 1960s and early 1970s, taking part in acts of civil disobedience in an effort to speed an end to the Vietnam War.

Paul Michael Mayer was born February 24, 1931 in Frankfurt, Germany to Ernst and Bertha Mayer, ethnic Jews of German nationality. His father was a concert violinist who made ends meet working as his salesman, while his mother worked as a nurse.