Right-wing terrorist series: Interior Ministry suddenly supports NSU documentation center

For years, federal politicians have been struggling to come up with plans for a national memorial that would commemorate the victims of the NSU terror. Implementation is now within reach: the taz has received a bill from the Federal Ministry of the Interior that is intended to set up a supporting foundation. This is intended to set up and operate the memorial and documentation center in Nuremberg.

The document, which is dated October 12th, is a so-called draft bill. Such early versions of proposed legislation are sent to other ministries and associations to collect feedback. The aim of the documentary center should therefore be to remember the victims, but also to strengthen the “critical examination of the NSU complex” with an exhibition and educational offers. Its terrorist series should be embedded in the larger context of “right-wing terrorism and right-wing extremist violence after 1945”.

However, the draft law does not explicitly mention the failure of the security authorities to investigate the NSU terror as an issue for the center. The actions of the authorities were a key reason why Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe were able to repeatedly carry out attacks until they exposed themselves in 2011. They murdered ten people, three of them in Nuremberg, and injured many more. The victims were almost exclusively people with a migrant background. Many questions about possible other members of the NSU, helpers and the involvement of the police and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution remain unanswered to this day.

The draft law does not explicitly specify how much money the foundation should receive to set up and operate the documentation center. In the explanations, the BMI writes of a foreseeable annual budget of 3.1 million euros, of which around 150,000 are planned for rent and the rest for personnel and material costs. That is significantly less than the around 6 million euros that the BMI once planned for the project. And the funds are subject to budgetary reservations, so the Bundestag should decide every year whether and how much money goes to the foundation. This does not allow for stable planning over the years.

The foundation is to be led by a council chaired by the BMI, but also including the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Education, the Minister of State for Culture, the Federal Agency for Civic Education and members of the Bundestag. Only two places are reserved for relatives and survivors of the NSU terror, so their direct influence is likely to remain very limited. The ombudswoman for the NSU victims and survivors, Barbara John, is expected to take part in the meetings in an advisory role.

Relatives of NSU victims and survivors should also be able to have at least some influence on the work of the foundation and thus on the documentation center through an advisory board. This committee should be able to advise the actual board of trustees and make recommendations to it.

The bill is particularly notable because it proves that the BMI, led by CSU man Alexander Dobrindt, is still working at the NSU documentation center. The Union obviously never attached much importance to the project; it was only included in the coalition agreement in 2025 due to pressure from the SPD. Nothing happened for a long time after that.

What's more: In the current budget negotiations for 2027 as well as those last year, the BMI initially did not budget any money for the development of the foundation and documentation center. Only a public outcry led to money being reserved for the documentary center in both years. Now things could make significant progress for the first time.

However, a few years ago it seemed as if the implementation of the NSU Documentation Center was imminent. After the then SPD Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had also put off the project for years, she presented a draft at the end of 2024 that provided for the construction of the center in Berlin. However, due to the break in the coalition and the subsequent new elections, the project was no longer introduced into the Bundestag.

Meanwhile, progress at the state level was much faster. A local documentary center has existed in Chemnitz, Saxony, since mid-2025, which commemorates the victims of the NSU terror. Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe lived in the city unrecognized for years after they went into hiding in 1998.