Germany’s Far-Right on Trial

“With the Second (eye) you see more”—for many years this was the catchy slogan of ZDF, one of Germany’s two biggest public broadcasting companies. Between May 2013 and July 2018—for more than five years—ZDF’s audiences could follow what commentators later would characterize as unified Germany’s longest, biggest, and most contested criminal trial. The main defendant before Munich’s Higher Regional Court was Beate Zschäpe, an inconspicuous, pudgy woman in her early 40s who had been born in the idyllic Thuringian town of Jena in what was then Communist Germany. The prosecution accused her of membership in the far-right terrorist organization National Socialist Underground (NSU), the murder of immigrants in 10 cases, and 32 counts of attempted murder and arson.

The way Zschäpe repeatedly acted in the courtroom and in the presence of hundreds of international media teams became a worldwide symbol for the limits of a judicial reckoning with neo-Nazi criminality and self-designated “white supremacists” in unified Germany, even decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not only did Zschäpe deny all charges against her. She also used every opportunity to turn her back toward the victims’ families and their lawyers, thereby demonstrating her lack of empathy and remorse. Even more than Zschäpe’s failure to find appropriate words for her deeds, lamenting instead the death of her two cats, it was this kind of blunt body language that unmistakingly conveyed the message to national and international audiences: Don’t look, there is nothing to see here.

The “NSU trial,” as it is known in Germany, has already been the subject of several documentaries and collections of (unofficial) court transcripts compiled by journalists—in German criminal proceedings, no official protocols are allowed due to strict procedural regulations. But Jacob Kushner’s gripping and timely book “Look Away” provides the first comprehensive account of the NSU serial killers and their victims. Kushner, an American foreign correspondent who writes for the New York Times and The Atlantic, among others, stresses in the book’s introductory note that he was especially eager to make those voices heard that had not been represented in the mainstream media coverage of the trial––most notably the relatives of the murdered Turkish, Kurdish, and Greek businesspeople and shop owners.

Based on a broad range of sources, including interviews with family members, records from federal and state parliamentary inquiries, trial transcripts, and media reports, Kushner’s book grapples with a number of core questions, all of them extremely vexing and disturbing: How could it happen, that “blinded by their own prejudice” and 80 years after the Holocaust, “some white Germans could still be radicalized to the point of carrying out racist mass murder”? Why did Germans—whose ancestors murdered millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II and who liked to think of themselves as not only having atoned for this past but also having learned the right lessons from it—ignore the emergence of a terrorist far-right scene and then blame the immigrant victims for the racist violence committed against them? Finally, the book explores the possibility of a link between the disregard for hate crimes against so-called foreigners and guest workers (Ausländer und Gastarbeiter) and the blind spots in Germany’s Holocaust-centered memory culture.

Approaching the topic chronologically, the book’s first part tackles the rise of a violent neo-Nazi subculture in the East German “new” states (neue Bundesländer) in the first years after reunification. Fueled by the nationalism of the 1989 street demonstrations and the temporary collapse of state structures after the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), especially the police and the judiciary, a first wave of pogroms and xenophobic street riots began in the early 1990s. These violent outbursts mainly targeted asylum-seekers, Sinti and Roma, and former GDR “contract workers” from Mozambique, Angola, and Vietnam, including in the Saxonian town Hoyerswerda in 1991 and the northeastern harbor city Rostock in 1992. The attacks during these so-called baseball bat years also targeted ethnic Germans, mostly teenagers and young adults, belonging to East Germany’s relatively small leftist, antifascist, and punk counterculture.

It was in this climate of nationalistic upheavals and societal disorientation that the friends of the later NSU trio met. They had their first encounter at Jena’s “Winzerclub” (Wine Grower’s Club), one of about 144 youth clubs in the “new” German states that Angela Merkel—at that time Christian Democratic minister for Women and Youth—had initiated in order to keep discontented East German youth out of the streets. While Merkel’s formula seemed to have worked well in numerous cases, the Winzerclub later became infamous as a hotbed of a young, extremely militant neo-Nazi crowd. Meeting under the eyes of local social workers and in a venue subsidized by the German welfare state, Zschäpe and her two friends and occasional lovers Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt transitioned from acts of juvenile delinquency toward full-fledged far-right terrorism.

Growing bored of stealing chewing gum from vending machines, the three friends turned their frustration against people they identified as “enemies” of the German Volk. The fact that immigrants and asylum-seekers formed (and still form) an almost invisible minority in many parts of Eastern Germany did not dampen their xenophobic resentments. Rather, it encouraged them to increasingly turn their attention toward the more liberal and multicultural Western states. There they mingled with other right-wing extremists whom they found among the ranks of the National Party of Germany (NPD), right-wing fraternities, and paramilitary groups as well as in the Bundeswehr, the German army. Despite his many documented transgressions, among them denial of the Holocaust and the celebration of Hitler’s birthday, Mundlos finished his military service at the Kyffhäuser barracks in Bad Frankenhausen with a certification of “satisfactory” leadership.

The second part of the book turns to the trio’s actual crimes and the amateurish attempts by law enforcement to bring the perpetrators to justice. In the mid-1990s, Zschäpe, Mundlos, and Böhnhardt began terrorizing their hometown with Nazi graffiti, dummy bombs, and, finally, real explosives. One of their targets was a kindergarten in northern Jena used as a shelter for Bosnian refugees from the Yugoslav civil war, who had fled to Germany in large numbers in the early 1990s. After taking several years to collect the necessary evidence, investigators finally showed up at Böhnhardt’s home in November 1998. In a remarkable blunder, the police officers managed to let the suspects escape (though the police secured large amounts of TNT and partially constructed pipe bombs).

This marked the beginning of a 13-year-long killing spree during which the trio, now in hiding, committed 14 robberies of banks and post offices, three bombing attacks in Nuremberg and Cologne, and nine murders of immigrants of Turkish, Kurdish, and Greek descent. In 2007, they also killed a young policewoman on patrol who had moved from Thuringia to the southwestern town of Heilbronn. To plan and implement their crimes, they relied on a network of hundreds of helpers and sympathizers who provided them with accommodation, fabricated identities and aliases, money, and weapons.

Although the terrorists refrained from the usual public proclamations justifying their deeds, they nevertheless left revealing traces. Apart from the fact that almost all of their victims had an immigrant background, police forensics teams quickly found out that all of them were killed in their shops at point-blank range with a silenced Ceska 83, a rare semiautomatic pistol manufactured for the Czech military in the former Communist Czechoslovakia. Several witnesses also reported that they had noticed two younger white men on mountain bikes either approaching or leaving the crime scenes. Unfortunately, these substantial clues made little impact on the German investigators. As if following a sinister unwritten script, police authorities in each case confidently designated the victims as drug dealers or pimps who had run afoul of the mafia.

As Kushner stresses in several passages, the authorities’ incompetence and unwillingness to acknowledge the common methods and thus likely common motive behind the killings—ridding the country of foreigners—had dramatic consequences for the victims’ relatives. Whereas ordinary police work focuses on the search for evidence and the reconstruction of facts, the investigation by task force “Bosporus” indulged in wild and often openly Islamophobic speculation. Police interrogations of the victims’ family members became prime examples of this racist stereotyping. Adile Simsek, wife of the NSU’s first victim, Enver Simsek, told Kushner about her first encounter with the Nuremberg police. Instead of asking her about her husband, the officers inquired about a pilgrimage to Mecca she and her husband had taken a few years earlier. When they would interrogate her daughter, Semiya, about Muslim prayers, she understandably objected: “I have no idea what this has to do with the shooting of my father.”

After the murder of Süleyman Tasköprü, a greengrocer’s shop owner who was shot in the head three times, the Hamburg police officer in charge of the investigation declared during the interrogation of Süleyman’s father that his son was “what we state detectives call a normal Turkish man—passionate, very energetic, and dominant in nature.” Considering the police’s handling of the individual cases, it was perhaps no surprise that German media coverage largely mirrored the police’s xenophobic framing. Neglecting the possibility of a racist motive, the Nürnberger Nachrichten ran a headline referring to the murders simply as “Döner-Morde” (Kebab Killings), thereby evoking the association of an inter-Turkish gang war. When in June 2005 the Greek-German locksmith Theodoros Boulgarides was found dead in his Munich shop, one paper ran the title “Turkish Mafia Strikes Again.” Kushner writes: “Such headlines pleased the terrorists immensely. Lumping immigrants together with their German descendants and describing them as one big nefarious criminal class—this was precisely what the NSU wanted.”

In the last part of his book, Kushner recounts the NSU trial. The court proceedings started in May 2013, a year and a half after the two Uwes had killed themselves and Beate had turned herself in to the police. Early in 2012, Angela Merkel, then Germany’s chancellor, had invited the victims’ relatives to Berlin for a nationally televised ceremony. Reflecting on the ongoing pain and humiliation experienced by the families, Merkel stated: “Few in this country thought it was possible that right-wing extremist terrorists could be behind the murders. Some relatives were themselves under suspicion for years. For this never-ending nightmare … I ask them for forgiveness. How bad it must be to be subjected to false suspicions for years instead of being able to mourn.” But contrary to what had already been revealed about the secure economic position of many members of the NSU network, Merkel still attributed its members’ radicalization to “high unemployment” and “strong migration.”

Because the first two murders had been committed in Bavaria, the trial took place before the Munich Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht). Manfred Götzl, the chief judge, had made headlines a couple of years earlier when he convicted a 90-year-old former Nazi officer of war crimes in Italy and sentenced him to life in prison. Zschäpe was the main defendant, along with four men accused as accessories. The federal prosecutor’s indictment alleged, contrary to Zschäpe’s claims of having been dominated by her two friends, that she had been a murderer herself by actively participating in the preparation of the serial killings and the protection of the shooters. In July 2018, after five long years, the court finally issued its verdict. While it convicted and sentenced Zschäpe to life imprisonment, the maximum sentence for murder, it let her four accomplices get away with relatively lenient sentences.

If Germany’s executive authorities had hoped that this judgment would bring closure to the case, they were mistaken. The trial had shown that the NSU trio had been part of a much larger network, which was still intact and well-funded. By focusing on only five suspects, the prosecutor and the court reinforced the myth that crimes of such magnitude could have been the work of a few people.

The victims’ families’ grievances were also deepened by the fact that the issue of alleged state complicity had hardly been addressed in the Munich courtroom. Later inquiries revealed that the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency designed to secure the liberal democratic order, had more than once withheld crucial information from the investigators in order to protect informants. Moreover, it had funneled huge sums of taxpayer money into neo-Nazi circles via those informants, thereby feeding and shielding extremist groups. As if it were a late irony of history, the Western Allies had created the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 1950 to prevent a recurrence of white nationalism after World War II. Yet it was that agency that established long-term and firm cooperative bonds with a bunch of dangerous neo-Nazi criminals.

Kushner warns in his epilogue that state authorities and society should not repeat the same mistakes by neglecting the danger of white supremacism. Quoting the observation of a German political scientist who called the new Nazis “conspicuously inconspicuous,” Kushner points to the many parallels between Germany and the United States today. As the FBI documented more than two decades ago, in the United States “right-wing extremism has been on the rise for several years.” And despite shocking cases of domestic white supremacist terrorism such as the murderous attacks in Charleston, Pittsburgh, and Charlottesville, U.S. prosecutors have charged many more people for supporting international terrorism than for engaging in domestic acts of terror. All of this leads Kushner to the conclusion that the NSU example should be a cautionary tale for the United States no less than for Germany: “The United States will not be spared Germany’s crisis, or its carnage, if we continue to look away.”