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German neo-Nazi Beate Zschäpe gets life for NSU murders German neo-Nazi Beate Zschäpe gets life for NSU murders
(about 3 hours later)
A German court has found the main defendant in a high-profile neo-Nazi trial guilty of killing 10 people – most of them migrants – who were gunned down between 2000 and 2007 in a case that has shocked Germany and prompted accusations of institutional racism in the country’s security agencies. One of the longest and most expensive trials in German postwar history has ended with a life sentence for the sole survivor of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell, but failed to answer questions raised by victims’ relatives.
The judges sentenced Beate Zschäpe to life in prison for murder, membership of a terrorist organisation, bomb attacks that injured dozens, and several lesser crimes including a string of robberies. Four men were found guilty of supporting the group in various ways and sentenced to prison terms of between two and a half to 10 years. Beate Zschäpe, a former member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) group, was on Wednesday sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 10 people, two bombings and several crimes of attempted murder and robbery between 2000-2007. Nine of the NSU’s 10 murder victims were immigrants.
The presiding judge, Manfred Götzl, told a packed Munich courtroom that Zschäpe’s guilt weighed particularly heavily, meaning she is likely to serve at least a 15-year sentence. Munich’s state court judge Manfred Götzl attributed Zschäpe, 43, with serious culpability, meaning that while still legally possible, it was highly unlikely she would be released after 15 years.
The 43-year-old showed no emotion as Götzl read out her sentence. A number of far-right activists attending the trial clapped when one of the co-accused, André Eminger, received a lower sentence than expected. The sentence was largely as a result of the state prosecutor’s opinion that even though the court could not prove Zschäpe had been present at any of the crime scenes, she “had been aware of, contributed to, and in her own way co-piloted” the neo-Nazi cell’s killings.
Zschäpe was arrested in 2011, shortly after her two accomplices, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. Together with the two men she had formed the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a group that pursued an ideology of white racial supremacy by targeting migrants, mostly of Turkish origin. The two other known members of the NSU, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide after a failed bank robbery on 4 November 2011, shedding light on underground terrorist activity that had gone undetected for 13 years. Many experts question how the trio could have gone undetected for so long without a sizeable support network across Germany.
The NSU evaded arrest for almost 14 years, thanks to a network of supporters and repeated mistakes by German security agencies. The defence lawyer Mathias Grasel, who took over after Zschäpe sacked her legal team in 2014, said on Wednesday he would lodge an appeal against the verdict. “Instead of punishing Zschäpe as a representative, a constitutional democracy has to be able to bear it when the true culprits can no longer be prosecuted for their cruel crimes.”
Anti-migrant sentiment that underpinned the group’s ideology was particularly strong in eastern Germany during the early 1990s, when Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe were in their late teens and early 20s. The period saw a string of attacks against migrants and the rise of far-right parties. The court had on Tuesday handed sentences to four other people connected to the group. Ralf Wohlleben, who was found to have supplied the group the gun with which the murders were carried out, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Anti-racism campaigners have drawn parallels between that period and the violence directed toward asylum-seekers in Germany in recent years, which has seen the emergence of the far-right Alternative for Germany party. André Eminger, who turned up in court wearing a jumper with the logo of a far-right heavy metal band and was found to have assisted the cell in hiring apartments and vehicles, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
The case against Zschäpe hinged heavily on the question of whether judges would hold her equally culpable for the killings as her two dead accomplices, even though there was no evidence she had been physically present during the attacks. Many observers of the trial voiced surprise at the leniency of the sentences. “If you look at the sentences for Zschäpe’s co-conspirators, this is an unbelievably soft verdict,” said Dirk Laabs, the co-author of a book about the NSU. “It’s hard to image people accused of supplying weapons and logistics for terrorist activity would have got off so lightly if this had been a trial about an Islamist cell.”
Her lawyers sought to portray Zschäpe as a naive woman who played no active role in the killings, bomb attacks and bank robberies committed by Mundlos and Böhnhardt. Zschäpe rarely spoke during the five-year trial, refusing to answer questions from lawyers representing the victims’ families. Toward the end, she expressed regret for the families’ loss and described herself as “morally guilty” but urged the court not to convict her “for something that I neither wanted nor did”. Relatives, friends and supporters of the NSU’s victims also say the five-year trial, which involved questioning more than 600 witnesses, had failed to shed light on the extent to which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), was aware of the group’s murderous activities.
The NSU case has already become a firm part of German popular culture, serving as the basis for books, a Golden Globe-winning film, and a Netflix series NSU German History X. Police had for years ruled out a racist motives to the killings, assuming they were related to gang warfare among the country’s German-Turkish population.
Still, Barbara John, the government’s ombudswoman for the victims’ families, said many in Germany don’t want to know the details of the case. “That’s true, too, for immigrants who want to protect themselves psychologically from the knowledge that they live in a country which couldn’t protect them,” she told the Associated Press. Yet over the course of the trial it emerged the terrorism cell had repeatedly crossed paths with the intelligence service’s paid informants within the neo-Nazi scene.
Speaking ahead of the verdict, John said the trial could help send a signal not just to far-right extremists but also to the country’s security agencies, which for years failed to consider a possible far-right motive in the 10 killings and two bomb attacks that took place across the country. Instead, police focused on whether the victims had ties to organised crime a line of investigation for which there was never any evidence. During the April 2006 murder of Halit Yozgat, 21, an intelligence agent employed by the central German state of Hesse had even been present inside the cafe where the murder took place, but neglected to report the incident.
Families of the victims said on Tuesday that the suspicion directed toward their loved-ones shook their faith in the German justice system. “The investigation went in the wrong direction, not due to the failure of individuals but due to institutional racism,” said Alexander Hoffmann, a lawyer representing victims of a 2004 bomb attack in Cologne. When the judge read out his verdict on Wednesday, Yozgat’s father, Ismail, repeatedly cried out.
He urged federal prosecutors to continue investigating the NSU’s wider network of supporters, believed to be much broader than the four men on trial with Zschäpe. Lawyers representing the victims’ families have accused the domestic intelligence agencies of actively sabotaging the prosecution’s investigation in order to protect its informants. During the trial, one employee at the BfV’s headquarters admitted to destroying files on seven informants only days after the existence of the NSU cell came to light in 2011.
John said there were encouraging signs that police and intelligence agencies were beginning to listen to minorities and make an effort to recruit them, ending the long-maintained illusion that Germany was not a country of immigrants. Parliamentary fact-finding commissions covering the failings of the intelligence agencies are taking place in five German states.
“One big question remains: do we in Germany really want to know why and how the NSU murders occurred?” John said. “If that were the case, the work of politicians and civil society needs to continue.” This week, activists in 20 German cities renamed about 200 streets to honour the victims of the NSU murders.
The Turkish foreign ministry in Ankara expressed its dissatisfaction with the outcome of the trial, noting that no light had been shed on the role of the “deep state”. It said: “In this respect we consider the verdict non-satisfying.”
The daughter of the NSU victim Mehmet Kubaşık, welcomed the verdict against Zschäpe but said it should only be the first step in a longer process. “My hope now is that all of the other helpers of the NSU can be found and sentenced,”, Gamze Kubaşık said.
“If the court is honest, it must admit that some gaps remain. As long as these gaps remain, my family and I cannot close this chapter.”
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