Right-wing terrorism | State failure NSU

The members of the National Socialist Underground, Uwe Mundlos, Beate Zschäpe and Uwe Böhnhardt lived underground for over 13 years. Photo: imago/teutopress On November 4, 2011, the murderous work of the right-wing extremist terrorist cell of the “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) ended in Eisenach after more than 13 years underground. After a bank robbery in Eisenach, two police officers became aware of a trailer. As they approached, shots were fired and the trailer began to burn. The bodies of the neo-Nazis Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt were found inside. Mundlos is said to have shot Böhnhardt, started the fire and then shot himself. A few hours later, the apartment in Zwickau where the trio last lived burned down. Beate Zschäpe, the third member of the NSU, set the fire and then sent out a DVD of her confession. A few days later she turned herself in to the police.

It was only at this point that the extent of the crimes became known: between 2000 and 2007, the NSU had murdered at least ten people, carried out three bomb attacks and stolen money for living underground in 15 armed robberies. The terrorist cell is responsible for the largest right-wing terrorist murder series in the history of the Federal Republic. The fact that she was able to remain undetected for so long became a scandal that permanently shook trust in the police, secret services and society's handling of right-wing violence.

Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe met in a youth club in Jena-Winzerla in the early 1990s. They became radicalized in Thuringia's neo-Nazi scene and established contacts with militant groups such as the Thuringian Homeland Security. During a raid on January 26, 1998, the police discovered functioning pipe bombs and other explosives in a garage rented by Zschäpe in Jena. Shortly afterwards the trio went into hiding. Initially it stayed in Chemnitz, and in the summer of 2000 it moved to Zwickau. The three lived there for years under false identities and with support from the right-wing extremist scene.

On September 9, 2000, Mundlos and Böhnhardt shot the flower dealer Enver Şimşek in Nuremberg. This was followed by the murders of Abdurrahim Özüdoğru and Süleyman Taşköprü in 2001, Habil Kılıç in 2001, Mehmet Turgut in 2004, İsmail Yaşar in 2005, Theodoros Boulgarides in 2005, Mehmet Kubaşık in 2006 and Halit Yozgat in 2006. Nine of the ten murdered had a migration background; most ran small businesses or were self-employed. The tenth victim was police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, who was shot in Heilbronn in 2007. Nine of the murders were committed with the same weapon. There were also three explosive attacks in Nuremberg and Cologne. The nail bomb attack on June 9, 2004 in Cologne's Keupstrasse, a district dominated by migrant shops, injured 22 people.

Relatives and migrant communities had early on pointed out that the crimes were connected and had a racist background, but the investigating authorities did not recognize the racist motive for the crime for a long time. Instead, they looked for the perpetrators in the area of ​​so-called organized foreign crime. Relatives and those affected themselves came under suspicion, were confronted with discriminatory investigation approaches and were repeatedly silenced. Large parts of the media also adopted the police's interpretations and reinforced them with stigmatizing language such as calling the murders the "kebab murders."

After Halit Yozgat's murder, his family and other victims organized demonstrations in Kassel and Dortmund in 2006 under the motto "No 10th Victim." Around 4,000 people took part in Kassel alone. However, their warnings were not heard by the majority of society or by the investigators.

After going into hiding, however, the NSU was not completely isolated from the outside world. Several members of the neo-Nazi scene supported those in hiding by, among other things, obtaining apartments, vehicles, weapons, identification documents and money. In addition to Zschäpe, four supporters were convicted in the Munich NSU trial. Ralf Wohlleben had obtained the Ceska pistol, which was used to commit nine of the ten murders. André E., Holger G. and Carsten S. supported the trio with, among other things, papers and logistical help. How big this network actually was and who knew about the murders remains unclear to this day. The role of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution also raises questions to this day. The role of the then Hessian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Andreas T, is particularly explosive. On April 6, 2006, he was in the Internet café where Halit Yozgat was shot. Initially, Andreas T. denied this to the police and colleagues. However, he was exposed because he logged into his dating profile at the time of the crime. Only then did Andreas T. admit to having been at the crime scene. However, he then claimed that he had neither heard the shots nor seen the dead man. The Munich court found his testimony to be credible. A reconstruction by the London research team “Forensic Architecture,” however, came to the conclusion that T. must have heard the shots and seen Yozgat lying on the ground as he left the store.

The presence of a secret service agent at one of the crime scenes is not the only secret service scandal in the orbit of the NSU. Just a few days after the NSU was exposed, an employee of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had files on informants in the Thuringian neo-Nazi milieu destroyed. The action, later known as “Operation Confetti,” led to the resignation of the then head of the authority, Heinz Fromm. Critics suspected that the office wanted to eliminate unpleasant information about its own role. It is not the only time that files with a potential connection to the NSU were destroyed by an Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as was the case in Berlin in 2012.

Dealings with undercover agent Thomas Richter, codename “Corelli,” who received around 300,000 euros for his spying activities, also remained a mystery. The leading neo-Nazi had contact with the NSU environment and gave the authority the magazine “The White Wolf” in the fall of 2002, in which the editor thanked the “NSU” for a donation. A CD followed in 2006 with the label “NSU/NSDAP”. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution does not want to have evaluated it for eight years. Richter's cell phones and SIM cards are also said to have not been evaluated for years. Richter was also not called as a witness to the NSU trial. In 2012, Richter was exposed and included in the BfV's witness protection program.

In April 2014, employees of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution finally wanted to question Richter about the “NSU/NSDAP” CD, which is said to have only now come into focus, but they found him dead in his apartment in the Paderborn district. The investigators said the cause was severe sugar shock as a result of undetected diabetes. There is said to have been no evidence of external influence. In 2016, the same expert who had ruled out outside influence explained to the NSU committee of North Rhine-Westphalia that Richter "could at least theoretically have been poisoned." Like with rat poison.

Tino Brandt is also an example of the state's involvement in the NSU environment. The neo-Nazi worked as undercover agent “Otto” for the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 1994 to 2001 and was paid around 200,000 German marks. Brandt himself stated that he had mainly used the money to finance political activities. At the beginning he founded the "Anti-Antifa Ostthüringen", from which the "Thüringer Heimatschutz" emerged in 1996, which Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe also joined and which was largely responsible for the political socialization of the trio. In the NSU trial in 2014, Brandt said that he had collected and passed on money for those in hiding, including payments from the state office. In 2018, he told the Stuttgart investigative committee that the office knew that he had donated part of the money he received as an informant to the NSU. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution thus helped to build the structures that it was actually supposed to monitor.

The NSU complex stands for much more than the crimes of three right-wing terrorists. It reveals a neo-Nazi support network, institutional racism in security authorities and the media in dealing with those affected by the attacks, serious failures by the security authorities and the active prevention of a more in-depth investigation by them. Through its undercover agent practice, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has demonstrably not only financed right-wing extremist structures that the NSU trio had politically socialized, but also partially financed the terrorist cell itself.

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