Alternatives for Germany

By Michael Lipkin

On the resurgence of far-right politics in Germany, where the five-year trial of a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground touched every live wire in public life.

ON NOVEMBER 8, 2011, in Winzerla, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Jena, a city in the former East Germany, a thirty-six-year-old woman named Beate Zschäpe borrowed a cell phone from a student on a tram and called the police. “Good day,” she said in German, “this is Beate Zschäpe.” When the operator didn’t recognize the name, Zschäpe explained that she was the target of a nationwide manhunt. Still the operator didn’t recognize her. Zschäpe hung up, returned the phone, and walked off.

For eleven years, Zschäpe had carried out a murderous campaign of right-wing terrorism with Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, two friends from Winzerla. They’d killed eight Turkish immigrants and one Greek, as well as a German policewoman. Calling themselves the National Socialist Underground, the trio had subsisted with donations raised by neo-Nazi networks across the former East, with tax money funneled into the group by Tino Brandt, an informant on the government’s payroll, and by robbing banks, like the Red Army Faction had in the 1970s. Since 2000, the murders had gone unconnected. The police seemingly refused to consider the possibility that they were politically motivated. Despite the fact that the NSU had distributed video manifestos bragging about the killings through the right-wing extremist world, where German security services maintained a network of paid informants, the various police departments investigating the crimes worked from the dubious presupposition that the murders had been carried out by the Turkish mafia. Detectives leaked this theory to the press, which dubbed the killings “the döner murders,” using the word for a Turkish kebab.

“The police seemingly refused to consider the possibility that they were politically motivated.”

Four days before Zschäpe called the police, the two Uwes walked into a bank in Eisenach, the city where Martin Luther had translated the New Testament into German. They pistol-whipped the manager, stole €72,000, and pedaled away on their bicycles. A witness spotted them in a nearby parking lot as they loaded their bikes into a white RV. Police found the camper on a road heading toward Chemnitz. As they approached, three shots rang out, and the vehicle went up in flames. Inside, police found both men, their corpses charred, each with a bullet wound in his head—apparently one had shot the other and then himself. They also found more than twenty guns, including a submachine gun and two Heckler & Koch P2000 pistols, a service handgun used by the German police.

The police soon identified Mundlos and Böhnhardt. Both had been arrested numerous times for various offenses in their adult lives, including for right-wing extremism. In 1999, together with Zschäpe, they’d been wanted in Jena for placing a bomb with no detonator at the grave of a communist resister of fascism. After the deaths of the two Uwes, a search was undertaken for Zschäpe. She would give up on calling the police, instead walking into a station to turn herself in, accompanied by an attorney whose office was nearby. Zschäpe expressed neither concern nor remorse, her main worry whether or not her cats had survived the fire she’d set at the trio’s Zwickau apartment to dispose of the hideout’s evidence after hearing a radio bulletin about the murder-suicide at the camper van.

Several days later, newspapers, TV stations, and Muslim community centers across Germany received copies of a DVD that Zschäpe had dropped into the mail before she turned herself in.

Continue reading “Alternatives for Germany,” an essay by Michael Lipkin, on our site.

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