The neo[fascist] terrorist organization, the [so-called] National Socialist Underground (NSU) committed ten murders, three bomb attacks, and 15 bank robberies in the years between 1998 and 2011. They did not claim responsibility for their crimes and were not discovered by law enforcement until November 4, 2011.

The so-called NSU case has been called one of the biggest “failures” of the German law enforcement and the secret services, by politicians and the mainstream media. These failures, were allegedly caused by individual “mistakes” and a lack of coordination and competition between the responsible authorities [2].

From a progressive perspective, the NSU case is an unprecedented example of the close connection [3] between the secret services and the neo[fascist] movement as well as the structural racism within the law enforcement authorities.

The case raises three main questions:

• Why was it that until 2011, the year in which the NSU brought about its own detection, even progressive parts of German society widely underestimated the extent of right wing/neo[fascist] terror? And why did they think that something like the NSU would not be possible given Germany’s history of right wing terrorism since the 1950s and pogrom-like mob violence against refugees since the 1990s?
• What was and is the overall rôle of the police and the secret services[4] in building the neo[fascist] scene, especially through its informants, who held and hold high-ranking positions in neo[fascist] organizations? And what did the secret services know about the existence of the NSU, its crimes and the whereabouts of its members and supporters?
• What is the extent of structural and institutional racism in Germany? What mechanisms does it use? And how did it allow law enforcement agencies to attribute the crimes of the NSU to the “Turkish mafia” and organized crime rather than to neo[fascists]? What is the state’s ability and willingness to protect immigrant communities from racially motivated terrorism?

[…]

According to the indictment of the federal prosecutor in the case against Zschäpe and others the NSU is responsible for murders, bomb attacks, and robberies.

• The NSU committed ten murders between 2000 and 2007. The victims were eight men of Turkish and Kurdish origin, one man of Greek origin and one police woman of German origin: Enver Şimşek[9] (killed in 2000), Abdurrahim Özüdoğru (2001), Süleyman Taşköprü (2001), Habil Kılıç (2001), Mehmet Turgut (2004), İsmail Yaşar (2005), Theodoros Boulgarides (2005), Mehmet Kubaşık (2006), Halit Yozgat (2006) and Michèle Kiesewetter (2007). All nine of the victims of non-German origin were shot execution-style with the same weapon, a Ceska 83 pistol with a silencer. This quickly enabled the police to consider these murders as part of a series. The victims were apparently chosen randomly, the only criteria being that they were of Turkish origin (or thought to be of Turkish origin, as in the case of the Greek victim). They lived in different German cities and were all proprietors of small shops and businesses. The last murder took place in 2007. A police woman was shot and killed and her colleague was shot in the head and severely injured. This crime is determined by a different and still unclear motive. The indictment sees it as an attack on representatives of the German state. The police officers were not shot with the Ceska 83 pistol, but with two other weapons. Therefore this murder was not considered as part of the series until 2011. The modus operandi of all ten murders was always identical; the victims were shot in their shops or in the case of the police officers in their car and the offenders fled on bikes. The bikes were later loaded into a parked caravan and hidden there or left behind in the city.
• The NSU committed three (nail) bomb attacks aimed at migrants.

(Emphasis original.)

The observation that nearly all of the victims were small business owners is a fact that all reporters gloss over when mentioning it. On the contrary, it explains a great deal: the murderers, who were either small capitalists or sympathetic to the White petty bourgeoisie, no doubt saw these small business owners as unworthy competitors who should have lived in poverty so that White small capitalists would not have to. (These competitors were also much easier to target than big capitalists.)

As in the Hungarian cases of the late 2000s, the bourgeois state’s negligence here is clear: not only did the authorities take a painfully long time to apprehend the perpetrators, they originally placed the blame on the ‘Turkish mafia’ (a faux pas wherefor Chancellor Angela Merkel asked for forgiveness). As punishment for being humans of colour, both the bourgeois state and the capitalist media pestered the victims’ families:

Most of the victim’s families, having suffered the murder of their loved ones and not knowing who the murderer was, now found themselves attacked by police investigations and the media. Furthermore, the reputations of the dead men and their families were put into disrepute as they were henceforth associated with organized crime. Even when the victim’s families asked the police to consider the possibility of a right wing motive for the crime, this was to no avail.

Additionally, the police authorities ignored a Criminal Investigative Analysis, which had been conducted by the FBI at the request of the German police. This analysis came to the conclusion that the victims were killed “because they are of Turkish ethnic origin”. However, these findings failed to trigger any serious investigation into the validity of those claims [17].

We also have some evidence that the authorities knowingly helped the perpetrators:

Between 1998 and 2011, while committing the crimes the three members of the organization, Mundlos, Böhnhardt, and Zschäpe, lived in the cities of Chemnitz (January 1998 until June 2000) and Zwickau (July 2000 until November 2011), both in Saxony and not far from Jena, from where they had initially gone underground. They were aided and abetted by a large number of neo[fascists] and by the neo[fascist] network Blood and Honour [12], who provided accommodation, passports, medical aid and even tried, and in some cases successfully so, to procure them with weapons.

Some of the neo[fascists] in this support network were police or intelligence service informants and many more informants existed in their wider networks as associates or friends of friends. The most important informants were Tino Brandt, who worked for the domestic secret service of Thuringia [13], and Carsten Szczepanski, who worked for the same organization in the state of Brandenburg [14]. The services claim that neither they nor other informants provided information which was sufficient to arrest Zschäpe, Böhnhardt and Mundlos.

[…]

Very little information existed about the terrorist organization until 2011. The intelligence services and law enforcement deny ever having heard of the existence of such an organization before November 2011. However, there are strong indications that this is not true and that they had access to information concerning an organization called the NSU.

While an optimist could suggest that the informants were nothing more than spies for the authorities, we really have no good reason to believe that. It would most certainly not be the first time that the bourgeois state willingly collaborated with outlaws either.

Beate Zschäpe received a life sentence that shall be subject for review during or after 2033. On the other hand, the short sentences passed by Chief Justice Götzl against the defendants André Eminger, Ralf Wohlleben and Holger Gerlach were far below the demands of the Federal Prosecution.

Further reading: ‘Lessons from Germany’s NSU case’

‘Far-Right Violence and Terrorism Rises in Germany: National Socialist Underground (NSU) Terrorist Group and the Murders of Eight Turkish-German Citizens’

‘Right-wing Political Violence Or Terrorism? An Exemplary Analysis of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) In Germany’

‘A Disturbing New Dimension of Far-Right Terror’

‘How could German neo-Nazi killers have evaded police for 13 years?’