The long read
The
neo-Nazi murder trial revealing Germany's darkest secrets
The
only known survivor of a far-right group accused of a series of
racist killings is now on trial. But the case has put the nation
itself in the dock
by Thomas Meaney and
Saskia Schäfer
In the beginning,
they were known as die Dönermorde – the kebab murders. The victims
had little in common, apart from immigrant backgrounds and the modest
businesses they ran. The first to die was Enver Şimşek, a
38-year-old Turkish-German man who ran a flower-import company in the
southern German town of Nuremberg. On 9 September 2000, he was shot
inside his van by two gunmen, and died in hospital two days later.
The following June,
in the same city, 49-year-old Abdurrahim Özüdoğru was killed by
two bullets while helping out after hours in a tailor’s shop. Two
weeks later, in Hamburg, 500km north, Süleyman Taşköprü, 31, was
shot three times and died in his greengrocer’s shop. Two months
later, in August 2001, greengrocer Habil Kılıç, 38, was shot twice
in his shop in the Munich suburbs.
The crime scenes
indicated that the killers favoured a particular execution method.
Typically, several shots were fired at close range to the face. Most
of the bullets were traced back to a single weapon, a silenced Česká
CZ 83 pistol. Police assumed that the professional method of killing,
as well as the intimate nature of the murders – when they died, the
victims were presumably looking directly into the eyes of their
killers – meant that the executions must have been carried out by
Turkish gangsters fighting out turf battles. No hard evidence ever
substantiated this theory. Nevertheless, the taskforce assigned by
the German authorities to the case was given the name “Bosphorus”.
The Bosphorus team
tried to persuade the widow of Enver Şimşek, the first victim, to
say that her husband was connected to the Turkish mafia. They
invented a false story of marital infidelity – that Şimşek was
having an affair and had a secret family elsewhere – in the hope
that her fury would lead her to reveal his non-existent underworld
ties. She said nothing, but the police continued to waste time and
resources attempting to prove the killings were the work of Turkish
gangs.
Three years later,
in 2004, Mehmet Turgut, 25, was murdered in a kebab shop in the city
of Rostock on the Baltic coast. The next attack came later that year
in the form of a pipe bomb detonated in the Keupstrasse area of
Cologne – a part of town popular among Turkish immigrants.
Twenty-two people were wounded. In June 2005, İsmail Yaşar, 50, was
shot in his kebab shop in Nuremberg – the third murder in that
city.
The following year,
a 41-year-old Greek-German locksmith named Theodoros Boulgarides was
killed in his newly opened shop in Munich. He was the first victim
without a Turkish background. In 2006, a kiosk vendor named Mehmet
Kubaşık, 39, was shot in the western city of Dortmund. Only two
days after that, Halit Yozgat, 21, was executed while sitting behind
his desk in the internet cafe he ran in the central German city of
Kassel, 160km away.
The killings
occurred in seven different cities across Germany, and were often
separated by months or years. This made it difficult to connect them,
though no one expected it to take until 2006 for the authorities to
grasp how they were related.
From the very start,
the investigation was riddled with basic errors and faulty
assumptions. First, at least two of the murders took place at
locations close to police stations, which should have made them
unattractive sites for mafia executions. Then there was the problem
of the two “Eastern-European-looking men” on bicycles whom
eyewitnesses described leaving several of the crime scenes. More
baffling still was a fact that surfaced during the investigation of
Halit Yozgat’s killing: a German intelligence agent had been inside
the cafe when the murder took place – something he later neglected
to report.
In 2006, Alexander
Horn, a young police profiler who prepared a report on the case for
the Bosphorus team, began to cast doubts on the idea that the murders
were connected to the Turkish mafia. In several cases, the victims
were executed on days when they had broken with their daily routine,
and were in places that no one could have predicted. It seemed more
plausible that the victims had been chosen randomly by the killers,
rather than singled out for vengeance by professional hitmen.
By using the same
weapon, the killers also appeared to be drawing attention to their
crimes and underlining the connection between them. Horn identified
this as a typical tactic of far-right groups. Some officers were
assigned to pursue this lead, but the focus of the investigation
remained on the police’s initial theory. The media continued to
refer to the killings as die Dönermorde.
In November 2011,
more than a decade after the first murder, DVDs containing a curious
recording were dropped off at the offices of several German
newspapers. They featured a doctored episode of the 1960s cartoon
series, the Pink Panther, which appeared to be a message from the
killers. For the first few minutes, the Pink Panther strolls around a
city, where he sees a poster calling on citizens to “Stand with
your country” and “Stand with your people”. Accompanied by the
jaunty chords of Henry Mancini’s theme song, the character bombs a
grocery store – then the video cuts to news footage of a shop that
had been similarly attacked in Cologne in 2001.
The Pink Panther
lounges on his couch and watches television news clips about the
so-called Dönermorde. The clips flickering on his cartoon television
are of real news reports from the murder scenes, with gruesome
photographs of the victims. The Pink Panther’s eyes glaze over with
boredom at how long it takes the German public to realise who is
behind them. With a huff of impatience, the narrator indicates a sign
on the screen: the murders, the video suggests, are the work of a
group calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU).
By the time the
German press was puzzling over the Pink Panther video, the
investigators’ focus had finally narrowed to a cluster of extreme
rightwing groups operating in the country. The authorities had still
not figured out how to find the killers, but their confusion was
brought to an abrupt end on 4 November 2011, when two men used
bicycles in a bank robbery in Eisenach, a town in the central German
state of Thuringia. After the robbery, they loaded the bikes into a
rented camper van.
After a tip-off,
police found the vehicle nearby, and surrounded it with officers. The
two men had a vast stockpile of guns and ammunition inside the
vehicle, but they did not try to fight their way out. Instead,
according to investigators, they chose to kill themselves and set
fire to the van. (An official report later concluded that one of the
men had set the van alight, killed the other and then himself.)
The bodies were
identified as those of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, two
longstanding but hitherto unremarkable members of Germany’s
enduring far-right scene, who had escaped the police with their
friend Beate Zschäpe 13 years earlier. Even before identifying the
corpses, investigators had found in their van the gun of a murdered
police officer, Michèle Kiesewetter, whose killing five years
earlier had never been solved.
Two days after the
death of Mundlos and Böhnhardt, Zschäpe called the police in the
Thuringian city of Jena. “Beate Zschäpe here,” she said. “I’m
the one you’re here for.” The local authorities did not
immediately grasp the significance of the call, even though more than
a decade earlier the police had searched for all three in connection
with a series of smaller crimes. German intelligence services had
also been keeping tabs on the rightwing radical scene that Zschäpe
was a part of, but had lost track of her, along with Mundlos and
Böhnhardt when they went underground.
The three had been
living together in the town of Zwickau in the an apartment that
Zschäpe burned down after she learned of the deaths of Mundlos and
Böhnhardt. When police later searched the scorched apartment, they
found newspaper clippings about the murders of the Turkish-German
businessmen, copies of the Pink Panther DVD, and the Česká pistol.
This was early evidence that linked Mundlos, Böhnhardt, and Zschäpe
to the murders that had first been investigated by the Bosphorus
group.
On 11 April 2013,
after two years of sensationalist speculation about the NSU in the
German press, Zschäpe appeared for the first time in a Munich
courtroom, charged with nine murders, an attack on police that
included a murder, and two attempted murders by bombing. Four other
men also stand accused of providing support to the NSU.
For the media, it
was Bonnie and Clyde and Clyde – offering the salacious possibility
of a murderous menage a trois
Rather than
investigating how far-right killers could have operated undetected
for so long, most of the German media opted for lurid coverage of the
NSU, insisting that it consisted of only three people. Der Spiegel
took the lead with a cover story dedicated to “ice-cold precision”
of what it called the “Brown Army Faction”, with photographs that
portrayed Zschäpe, Mundlos and Böhnhardt as natural-born killers,
ready for their Hollywood close-ups. For the media, it was Bonnie and
Clyde and Clyde – offering the salacious possibility of a murderous
menage a trois. The German tabloid Bild ran the headline “The Devil
has dressed up,” after Zschäpe appeared at the opening of the
trial in a trouser-suit, jewellery and freshly dyed hair.
Zschäpe, now 41,
has been sitting in court every weekday morning in Munich for the
past three years, but she has revealed almost nothing – despite the
urgent pleas of the families of the victims. While she claims that
she now understands that Mundlos and Böhnhardt had conducted bank
robberies and killings, she claims not to have known anything about
their plans or activities while she lived with them. “They had
become my family,” she said. Her plea is not guilty.
But the significance
of the trial is far larger than what Zschäpe did or did not know
about the killing spree. Germany’s sense of itself is also on
trial. The findings of the prosecution suggest that Germany, a nation
that prides itself on having confronted the dark recesses of its past
with unique diligence, has left a thriving underground culture of
rightwing extremism untouched.
Alternative für
Deutschland – the first far-right populist party in Germany to
enjoy sustained electoral success since the second world war – is
only the latest in a series of symptoms of a widespread animosity
toward the postwar liberal consensus. Darker currents of discontent
are openly displayed on the internet – and on newsstands and
television, where rightwing arguments have increasingly found favour.
The German
government has been content to write off the NSU as a stand-alone
terror cell of sociopaths – an unfortunate, but exceptional
recrudescence of a political syndrome that the country has long since
inoculated itself against. However, the NSU murder investigation and
Zschäpe’s trial suggest that the organisation may have been
carefully supported and protected by elements of the state itself.
The first thing to
understand about the National Socialist Underground is that it was
never really underground. Beate Zschäpe first met Uwe Mundlos when
they were teenagers, at an after-school youth club in Jena, a
renowned university town, perched on the slate mountains of the
former East German eastern state of Thuringia. It was 1991 and many
East Germans were still feeling the shock of the fall of the Berlin
Wall and acutely aware of how much they lacked in comparison to their
western neighbours.
The youth club is
still there today, set in a strip of single-storey buildings on a
quiet street with dramatic views of the surrounding valleys. When we
visited the neighbourhood earlier this year, it seemed normal enough:
well-maintained apartment blocks, playgrounds full of children,
direct trams to the city centre. A new school was being built across
the street from the youth club, with placards advertising places for
the children of asylum seekers.
There were a few
ominous signs, though, such as the German flags that were hanging
from a few high-rise balconies. Anywhere else, they would be an
innocuous show of patriotism, but in this part of Germany the flag
can send a different signal. Thuringia has long been one of the
heartlands of Germany’s radical right. In the 1990s, the youth club
was a focal point in the emerging far-right scene. Former supervisors
at the club remember turning a blind eye – for fear of losing the
trust of the cool kids – when teenagers gave each other birthday
party invitations with small swastikas on them. At her trial, Zschäpe
described meeting and falling in love with Mundlos during her
adolescence in the late 1980s. Then on her 19th birthday, she met and
fell in love with Mundlos’s friend, Uwe Böhnhardt, who was even
more committed to the rightwing extremist cause.
Before the fall of
the Berlin Wall, to become a neo-Nazi in East Germany was a form of
youthful rebellion
Before the fall of
the Berlin Wall, to become a neo-Nazi in East Germany was a form of
youthful rebellion against the state. What better way to antagonise
communist elites than to parade around as their old enemy? After 1989
and the fall of the wall, neo-Nazism became a conduit for rage
against the pieties – and the perceived humiliations and betrayals
– of the newly unified Federal Republic of Germany. West Germany’s
identity had long been bound up with its productivity and wealth in
comparison to East Germany. Meanwhile, its politicians and
intellectuals embraced what the country’s leading philosopher,
Jürgen Habermas, called “Constitutional patriotism”. It would be
an identity based on a shared commitment to ideas rather than one
founded on blood.
This new West German
identity was something Zschäpe, Mundlos and Böhnhardt fiercely
rejected. But there was nothing in their backgrounds that made them
particularly susceptible to rightwing extremism. Zschäpe’s
childhood does not appear to have been especially tumultuous, though
she had a troubled relationship with her mother. (Zschäpe never met
her biological father, who was Romanian.) The backgrounds of the two
men are even further from the stereotype of the backward, resentful
easterner. Böhnhardt’s father worked as an engineer and his mother
as a teacher; Mundlos’s father was an IT professor at the Jena
University of Applied Sciences. The parents treated their children’s
developing interest in Nazi history and knick-knacks as a passing
phase. (Although Zschäpe’s mother later reported that she was
concerned when she heard that Mundlos’s grandfather collected Nazi
curios.)
“Their experience
was far from unique,” said Martin Debes, a journalist for the
Thüringer Allgemeine newspaper, who grew up in Jena at the same time
as Zschäpe and the two Uwes. “But in the youth scene at the time
you often had to choose: become a neo-Nazi or a punk.”
Zschäpe started out
as a punk, joining a nominally leftwing group known as “the Ticks”
that got into fights with local neo-Nazis. But at the Jena youth club
Mundlos and Böhnhardt encouraged her to switch sides, and in a few
years the three of them had joined the flourishing neo-Nazi scene in
the newly reunified Germany. They devoted weekends to battling
leftwing punks in the streets and attending concerts of far-right
bands such as Türkenjäger (“Turk hunter”) and Endsieg (“Final
Victory”). Some of their early stunts included touring the former
grounds of Buchenwald while dressed up in self-tailored SS uniforms,
and inventing a board game called “Pogromly”, which rewarded
players for sending as many Jews as possible to concentration camps.
The fall of the
Berlin Wall offered East German neo-Nazis a new focus for their rage.
As Turkish-Germans and Germans of other backgrounds began moving into
the east, there were flare-ups and violence. Kebab stalls that sprung
up in the tiniest towns of Thuringia became regular targets for young
neo-Nazis. In September 1991, rightwing extremists attacked housing
facilities for asylum seekers in Hoyerswerda, a town 200km east of
Jena in the state of Saxony. The attacks were the start of a new
brand of violence throughout Germany. During a three-day riot in the
city of Rostock on the Baltic coast in August 1992, several thousand
people surrounded a high-rise asylum shelter and watched while
neo-Nazis threw Molotov cocktails through the windows. The building’s
Vietnamese and Roma inhabitants barely survived by fleeing to the
roof, and passing their babies up the stairs along a human chain.
The attacks were not
confined to the former East Germany. On the night of 22 November
1992, neo-Nazis set fire to two houses of Turkish families in Mölln,
a small town in the north-western state of Schleswig-Holstein. Two
girls and a 51-year-old woman died in the flames. Nine others were
seriously injured. In 1993, skinheads in Solingen, a town outside
Cologne, set fire to the home of a Turkish family, killing five
people, including three children.
This violence seemed
senseless and random, but it was effective. All the major political
parties of the time bowed to pressure applied by rightwing
extremists. Helmut Kohl’s conservative coalition government called
for new limits on immigration. In 1992 and 1993, his expanded
coalition, with support from the Social Democratic party, changed the
German constitution to limit the country’s obligation to admit
asylum seekers. The far-right rejoiced at finding its arguments
winning the day on mainstream TV.
For Zschäpe,
Mundlos and Böhnhardt this was apparently not enough. After their
early years of small-time crime, investigators claim that they began
trying to build homemade bombs. In January 1998 the police, tipped
off by an anonymous source, searched Böhnhardt’s garage in Jena
and discovered 1.4kg of TNT – enough to destroy a car. By the time
an arrest warrant was issued later that day, Böhnhardt had fled
Jena. Soon after, Zschäpe and Mundlos joined him in hiding in the
city of Zwickau, 200 miles to the east.
They allegedly
conducted the longest, and most intricate, political killing spree in
postwar German history
During their decade
on the run, Zschäpe, Böhnhardt and Mundlos worked odd jobs and in
shops that sold Nazi paraphernalia under the counter. At the trial,
Zschäpe has been accused of helping the two men supplement their
income with a series of bank robberies, which the three friends
carried out together in a number of towns in Thuringia and
Mecklenburg-West-Pomerania between 1999 and 2011. Sometimes they
entered wearing gorilla masks, sometimes masks from the movie Scream.
Their trusted escape method was allegedly to ride bicycles to a
nearby rented van, in which they waited until the search for them had
ended. The German police managed to link the robberies to each other,
but not to Zschäpe, Böhnhardt and Mundlos.
The three fugitives
showed few signs of concern about their possible capture. They used
fake IDs and rented their apartment under aliases, but took few
precautions beyond that. Neighbours fed their cats when they were
away, and it appears that friends visited each week when they were
home, sometimes bringing their children. With patience and an almost
languid sense of impunity, Zschäpe and the two Uwes allegedly
conducted the longest, and most intricate, political killing spree in
postwar German history.
When we visited the
Munich courtroom earlier this year, all eyes were trained on Zschäpe,
who stared at her laptop and seemed more worried about running out of
the crate of coconut water she had brought to the trial than anything
that might happen there. With her neat long hair and signature
trouser-suit, she appeared deeply at ease, smiling like a
professional model for a brief press photo session, before she
settled back among the lawyers, from whom she is almost
indistinguishable.
In the press and
visitors’ spectator booth, set behind glass above the courtroom,
conspiracy-theorists, bloggers, newspaper reporters, and law students
studying the trial all sit together – alongside a few loyal Zschäpe
groupies. (The most notorious of Zschäpe’s fans, Anders Breivik,
the extreme-rightwing Norwegian terrorist, sent her a letter of
solidarity from prison in 2012.)
Zschäpe originally
chose her defence lawyers on the basis of their martial-sounding
surnames: Sturm (“Storm”), Stahl (“Steel”), and Heer
(“Army”), but she soon turned against them. Four years into the
trial, she has finally found a young lawyer she likes. The two
whisper and smile during the court proceedings. The main judge at the
trial, Manfred Götzl, has ordered the state lawyers she fired to
remain in the courtroom because their departure could be grounds for
an appeal: he wants to fend off any claim by Zschäpe that her
current lawyer does not have full knowledge of the trial. Sturm,
Stahl, and Heer sit a few chairs down from Zschäpe in what appears a
state of permanent listlessness. Behind Zschäpe sits Ralf Wohlleben,
a neo-Nazi accused of providing Böhnhardt and Mundlos with the Česká
pistol used in the murders. His lawyer, Nicole Schneiders, first
appeared in police reports on the extreme right when she was just 16
years old. The members of the extreme-right have taken up different,
coordinated positions in the Munich courtroom. The lawyers and the
accused sit side by side, and greet each other with kisses on the
cheek.
The prosecution has
decided to treat Zschäpe’s case strictly as a murder trial. She is
essentially charged with being the last surviving member of the group
of three who are assumed to be responsible for the killings. The task
of the trial, in this view, is simply to clarify whether – and to
what degree – she was involved with the killings. There has been
little effort on the part of the investigators and prosecutors to
determine whether other rightwing extremists were involved.
When one considers
the level of local knowledge required to carry out these murders in
several different German states – the detailed knowledge of getaway
routes at the various crime scenes, the massive stockpile of weapons,
the professionally forged fake IDs, not to mention the cost of these
operations – the question of how the NSU could have operated
without the support of a much larger network of sympathisers is
unavoidable. Yet the prosecution appears at pains not to address this
question.
Still, despite its
slow-moving procedures and its limited scope, the proceedings have
provided a succession of strange revelations about the workings of
the German state intelligence agency, known as the BfV, which have
led to allegations that elements within the agency either turned a
blind eye to the NSU murders or supported the group’s aims.
In summer 2013,
Andreas Temme, the BfV agent who was inside Halit Yozgat’s internet
cafe in Kassel when Yozgat was murdered, testified that he did not
hear the silenced shots, nor did he notice the sprinkles of blood on
the counter where he placed his payment in coins when he left.
Spectators of the Munich trial agree that one of the most searing
moments of the trial came when Yozgat’s father described how he
found his dying son. It was impossible, he said, that Temme could
have left the cafe without seeing the dead body behind the counter.
“Why did you kill my son? What did he do to you?” he shouted at
Zschäpe and Wohlleben in the courtroom.
Temme, who denies
any involvement, said that it was simply a coincidence he was in the
cafe at the time of the murder and that he had been surfing dating
websites. (“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said
in an interview on German public television in July 2012.) When the
police rounded up all those who were present at the scene of the
murder, Temme did not come forward. After he was tracked down, Temme
claimed that he did not volunteer any information because he was
worried that his wife would discover his online proclivities.
Yozgat’s father won approving nods from many in the audience at the
trial when he declared: “We all know this man is lying.”
One of the
prosecution’s witnesses, a policeman from the village where Temme
grew up, testified that in his youth, Temme was known as “Little
Adolf”. When the local police tried to dig deeper into allegations
that Temme had a personal library of Nazi literature and weapons
manuals, the interior minister of the state of Hesse, Volker
Bouffier, shielded him from further investigations and from the
press. Bouffier, who is now the prime minister of Hesse, argued at
the time that it was necessary to protect Temme in order to
“guarantee the protection of undercover agents”. The brazenness
of Temme’s testimony ignited anger in the German press about the
BfV’s prerogatives, but it has since mostly subsided. Temme has
meanwhile retired from the BfV, but continues to draw his pension.
Germany’s domestic
intelligence service is charged with protecting the national
constitution – from both foreign threats and domestic extremism on
the left and right. But its record with regard to the latter has not
always been stellar. After a notorious failure to infiltrate
rightwing extremist groups with undercover agents in the 1980s –
the plot involved the BfV creating an unconvincing motorcycle gang –
it has tended to use paid informants who are already deeply
entrenched in extremist milieus.
In the case of the
country’s far-right scene – whose membership the BfV estimates to
number 23,850 as of last year – these informants are not simply
turncoats who make some money on the side by giving tips to police.
Instead, they are lavishly groomed sources who are developed over
long periods, promised legal protection, and plied with funds that
elevate their status in the movement.
By distributing cash
to their informants, the BfV has hoped to create a paper trail that
maps out connections between the far right across Germany. But in
practice, this dispersal of money has also nurtured rightwing groups,
providing them with a level of funding they would not have been able
to obtain from their genuine followers. “There’s no question
[that the] BfV overdid the financing of informants during the early
1990s,” said Hajo Funke, a professor of politics at the Free
University of Berlin, who is the author of a book on the NSU.
Before he was
imprisoned in 2014, Tino Brandt, the man who first welcomed Zschäpe,
Böhnhardt and Mundlos into the rightwing extremist scene in Jena,
openly boasted to German public television that the state had given
him 200,000 Deutsche Marks (roughly €100,000) in the early 1990s to
print flyers and organise concerts and demonstrations. For his fellow
neo-Nazis in Thuringia, Brandt’s work as a paid informant was an
open secret. He never gave the state useful information, but his
funds made organisational growth and the recruitment of young
neo-Nazis possible. (Brandt himself was never tried for his
connections to the NSU and far-right violence, but was sentenced to
five-and-a-half-years in prison on 66 counts of child sexual abuse
and child prostitution.)
In March, Judge
Götzl took an hour to explain to the courtroom that the task of the
NSU trial is simply to judge the accused, not to investigate what
German intelligence agents knew or did. The following month, Götzl
rejected a petition from lawyers representing the victims’ families
to introduce a witness who was a BfV informant in Zwickau at the time
of the first killings, when he almost certainly knew the members of
the NSU.
Ralph Marschner, an
avowed neo-Nazi and a former singer in a skinhead band called
West-Saxon Riff-Raff, was a paid informant for the BfV between 2000
and 2002. During these years, he lived around the corner from
Zschäpe, Mundlos and Böhnhardt. “Marschner was the main Neo-Nazi
in Zwickau, which is a relatively small town,” says Dirk Laabs, an
expert on the NSU.
But when a
government commission that was reviewing the NSU investigation tried
to obtain Marschner’s file, it was told by a public prosecutor in
Saxony that “a flood has destroyed the file”. According to Funke,
Marschner is one of the most important witnesses, because he “proves
that the BfV almost certainly would have known about the two Uwes and
Beate, either directly through Marschner, or by monitoring his
activities”. (Marschner, who is currently living in Switzerland,
has refused to comment on the case to the press.)
Earlier this year,
Marschner’s files and his long-lost mobile phone suddenly
reappeared in the BfV inventory, and were handed over to the
prosecution. The Munich courtroom learned that when Marschner was
working as a paid informant for the BfV, he probably employed Mundlos
in his construction company. It also seems likely that Zschäpe
worked in his clothing shop, Heaven and Hell, which sold Nazi
T-shirts and paraphernalia under the counter. The exact nature of
Zschäpe’s work for Marschner remains remarkably unclear. These
connections make Marschner a critical witness for the prosecution.
And yet Judge Götzl has dismissed the effort to explore his role,
describing his alleged employment of two NSU members as “irrelevant”.
According to Bilgin
Ayata, a professor of political sociology at the University of Basel,
who has researched the case and the trial, these omissions are
typical of the state’s unwillingness to examine the more disturbing
implications of the NSU murders. “Instead of acknowledging the
institutional racism that the case reveals,” Ayata said, “the
state has presented its investigations as a series of unfortunate
mishaps”.
Zschäpe’s trial
is the most significant courtroom showdown in Germany since the trial
of the Baader-Meinhof gang – a radical-left terrorist group also
known as the Red Army Faction, who targeted US military
installations, conservative media outlets and German corporations in
the 1970s. Both cases go to the heart of Germany’s identity in
postwar Europe. In the Baader-Meinhof case, the question was whether
German youth were willing to be integrated into western capitalism,
and whether the German state would lapse back into a form of
authoritarianism. In the Zschäpe trial, it is a question of how far
Germany really is from becoming a nation of immigrants and how far
the values of tolerance have penetrated society.
“The Red Army
Faction wanted to bring down the German state,” said Hajo Funke.
“The difference this time is that the National Socialist
Underground got some help from part of the state.”
The head of the BfV,
Heinz Fromm, resigned in 2012 while facing public pressure over the
mishandling of the NSU investigation, but he never mentioned the
reason for stepping down, nor has the BfV admitted any improprieties.
Instead, BfV
officials have strenuously guarded their sources and intelligence
from both the normal police and from a special federal commission
that was established in 2012 to probe lapses in the NSU
investigation. But critics of the federal commission allege that it
has also failed to dig deeper into the inconsistencies in the case.
“The Federal Examination Commission has chosen not to question the
claim that the NSU was confined to three people,” said Bilgin
Ayata.
The BfV has long
been regarded as right-leaning: it was founded after the second world
war by the Americans, who welcomed Nazis and former Gestapo members
into its ranks. Its mission was to spy on and root out the KPD, as
the German communist party was known, as well as members of the
Social Democratic party. The first head of the organisation, Otto
John, defected to East Germany in 1954, citing the overwhelming
number of Nazis in the organisation. His successor was Hubert
Schrübbers, a former member of the SS. Under Schrübbers’
supervision, the German communist party was finally banned in 1956,
based on allegedly incriminating materials turned up by the BfV.
Major German political parties – such as the Left party and the
Greens – have long called for the abolition of the BfV.
For now, neither
police nor trial investigators have the right to subpoena BfV
documents that may contain vital evidence about the NSU killings.
There are still many
mysteries about the true extent of the seven-year killing spree –
most notably the circumstances of the final murder, of the police
officer Michèle Kiesewetter, which did not fit the pattern of the
others. The prosecution has accused Mundlos and Böhnhardt of
attacking two police officers on duty in the town of Heilbronn in
April 2007: Kiesewetter, age 22, was killed instantly; her
duty-partner survived but has no memory of the attack.
A nightly news
report about the murder scene appears at the end of the Pink Panther
video, and traces of Kiesewetter’s DNA were found among the charred
remains of the Zwickau apartment that Zschäpe set on fire. But a
different type of gun was used for Kiesewetter’s murder, and
witnesses at the scene describe more than two people running away
from the scene with blood on their clothes. Local police have
declared these witnesses unreliable, and stated that only Mundlos and
Böhnhardt were involved in the murder. But their reason for killing
a police officer remains unknown, and the possible presence of others
at the crime scene has further stoked fears that the NSU was not an
organisation of only three people.
“For the
commissions and for the trial, the [size of the] NSU is a fait
accompli,” Ayata said. “They ignore the questions that nag at the
migrant communities in Germany: Are they still here? Are they still
killing?”
At a public
commemoration of the victims of the NSU murders at the Konzerthaus
Berlin in 2012, Angela Merkel asked for forgiveness on behalf of the
investigators who had insisted that the victims were entangled in the
Turkish mafia. “As chancellor, I will do everything I can to clear
up the murders and uncover the accomplices and supporters, and bring
all of the perpetrators to justice,” she said. But her government
is hesitant to probe more deeply into the more troubling elements of
the case, and of the rightwing extremist scene that continues to
flourish in Germany.
More than three
years into the trial the judges seem bored; they appear to have lost
interest in key witnesses
There is a telling
contrast between the laxness of Zschäpe’s trial and the
professionalism of the concurrent prosecution of the so-called “last”
Nazi, Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard.
Hanning’s trial was swiftly wrapped up in four months, and he was
sentenced to five years in prison for “facilitating slaughter” at
the extermination camp. It seems that Germany may be more comfortable
trying former Nazis than current ones. More than three years into
Zschäpe’s trial, the panel of judges now seems bored; they take
frequent recesses and appear to have lost interest in key witnesses.
Where German
officials have feared to tread, dramatists have rushed in. The NSU
murders have already been the subject of several films and plays,
including a miniseries that aired on German public television, and a
play by the Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek.
But theatrical
versions of the trial cannot capture the complexity of the case,
which seems impossible for anyone to fully grasp – especially when
so much information still remains secret. Even the numerous
fact-finding commissions established to review the botched
investigation have had trouble assembling an accurate version of
events. Most of the commissions have no authority to visit and search
the BfV files. Instead they request files of interest, which the BfV
delivers abridged and redacted. “We haven’t been granted the
power to seize their files,” said Petra Pau, a parliamentarian for
the Left party and a member of the federal commission looking into
the case. “Not to mention the files they may have already
shredded.”
One core problem is
that too many expectations have been heaped on a trial that cannot
bear them all. The victims’ families want justice and redemption,
the judge wants no loose ends that could be grounds for a retrial,
migrant communities want to know if they are safe from future attacks
and terrorism, and political activists want to know whether the BfV
was involved in a cover-up.
New pressure from
Merkel’s government would be necessary to force BfV operatives to
cooperate as witnesses. But there have been no steps in this
direction. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis has fuelled Alternative für
Deutschland’s rise to double digits in the polls, while hostility
towards foreigners has become openly acceptable.
The German ministry
of the interior counted around 14,000 far-right-related crimes in
2015, about 30% more than in the previous year. By April 2016, police
counted three attacks per day against housing facilities for asylum
seekers. Last year, a small group – one woman and two men – threw
a molotov cocktail into a Zimbabwean child’s bedroom at an asylum
centre in Lower Saxony. The savage anti-immigrant climate of the
1990s is making a return.
“The National
Socialist Underground still has members out there,” said Petra Pau.
“The question is only how many.”
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