Thomas Meaney & Saskia Schäfer - 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.. 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.
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.)...
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….
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.
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…. Read more:
