Terrorist Beate Zschäpe of the
"National Socialist Underground"
(Source: STERN)

HAVE YOU EVER STOPPED to wonder whether the hundreds of billions we have been investing in “security” over the past decades have actually made us any safer against terrorism? People in Germany started pondering this question last week as news broke that a murderous right-wing terrorist gang has been spilling blood across the country for nearly fourteen years, with the nation’s “security” forces none the wiser.

Justice is supposed to be blind, but it is obvious that governments put more effort into protecting what they regard as their own people than victims from other constituencies. For years, local police and the federal Bundeskriminalamt had been attributing a string of attacks on immigrant small business owners to individual criminals and “the Turkish mafia.” Between 2000 and 2006 eight Turks and one Greek fell victim to the assaults, which came to be known as the “döner murders” since several of the fatalities operated kebab stands. The fact that each of the dead men had been shot in the head with the same pistol somehow failed to raise any red flags at federal police headquarters.

However, an abortive bank robbery in the Thuringian town of Eisenach on November 4 of this year suddenly placed these seemingly unconnected crimes in a terrifying new light. After fleeing to a camping van on the edge of town, the two robbers – Uwe Mundlos (38) and Uwe Böhnhardt (34) – set fire to their vehicle and shot themselves dead as the police closed in on them. Just hours later, a house exploded in the Saxon town of Zwickau. Beate Zschäpe (36), who had been living there together with the two men, turned herself in to the police on November 8.

 
Bombed house in Zwickau, Saxony
(Source: STERN)

Zschäpe clearly bombed her own apartment to destroy evidence, but her home-made device turned out to be not half as devastating as the material left behind in the rubble. This included the pistol used to shoot the victims in the head, a complete arsenal of other weapons, photos of the nine victims immediately after the murders, the addresses of Muslim-owned businesses and institutions, neo-Nazi propaganda materials, DVDs, and a wealth of proof that the “National Socialist Underground” (NSU), as the trio called itself, had been responsible for much more than the random racist killings.

The evidence also included a pistol belonging to twenty-two year-old policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter, who was shot in the head along with her colleague while they were sitting in their squad car in the southwestern town of Heilbronn in 2007. Mundlos and Böhnhardt had apparently sneaked up from behind and executed them. Kiesewetter died instantly while her colleague barely survived.

 
Executed police officer Michèle Kiesewetter
(Source: STERN)

Now dozens of other attempted murders and bombing attacks across the country are being re-examined in the light of these revelations concerning what the German media are calling “the Brown Army Faction,” in reference to the bloody Red Army Faction (RAF), a leftist group that killed some thirty persons between the 1970s and 1990s. The NSU’s possible crimes include the bombing of the grave of Jewish Council chairman Heinz Galinski in 1998 (Auschwitz-survivor Galinski, who claimed to have received death threats nearly every day of his life, had been the target of a failed leftist terror attack in 1969, as I wrote about HERE), a bomb attack on the controversial Wehrmacht exhibition in Saarbrücken in 1999, a bombing in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 2002, and possibly even the unsolved assassination of the police chief of the Bavarian town of Passau in 2008. Federal investigators also suspect the NSU was behind a nail-bombing in an immigrant neighborhood of Cologne in 2001 that seriously injured a nineteen year-old German-Iranian woman. Evidence also points to a further bombing in Cologne in 2004. The group is also being blamed for at least fourteen bank robberies.

What drove these young people, a sort of right-wing Baader-Meinhof Gang, to commit such violent and desperate acts? Aside from their extremism, they appear to be fairly typical products of the East German neo-Nazi scene that mushroomed beginning in 1989 after its long dormancy during communist rule. As teenagers, Mundlos, Böhnhardt, and Zschäpe were socialized in the “Jena Comradeship,” a tiny radical right-wing group in their hometown of Jena in Thuringia. There, as in the rest of former East Germany, the economic and psychological dislocation reunification brought with it made Nazi ideas, particularly radical xenophobia and the ideal of unconditional “comradeship,” nearly irresistible to alienated young people who were learning about such “ideals” for the first time.

 
Dead NSU terrorists Uwe Böhnhardt (l) and Uwe Mundlos (r)

As their comrades gradually left the movement or were arrested, the three moved closer together and advanced from mere conspirational meetings and neo-Nazi marches to start planning direct action on their own. It appears that Mundlos, the son of a professor, was the planner and intellectual of the group. An admirer of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess from childhood on, he was known as an excellent student and “a polite young man.” Böhnhardt, by contrast, was the more violent of the two and may have served as the group’s executioner – even though the two police officers were apparently shot in the head simultaneously. Zschäpe appears to have performed a supporting role and was romantically involved with both men. The NSU appears to have been a sort of Bonnie and Clyde ménage à trois.

It is also unclear to what extent the three-member NSU acted alone. Over the weekend another neo-Nazi, identified only as Holger G., a former member of the “Jena Comradeship,” was arrested in Lower Saxony. He is charged with providing the group with camping vans and identity documents. Further arrests are likely as the authorities begin gluing the story’s fragments into a coherent picture.

Why didn’t the police figure out that a neo-Nazi terror organization was behind all of these crimes – particularly considering that the “döner murders” were all committed with the same Ceska 83? The main reason seems to be that the group not only left behind no notes, but never even mentioned its own name. Unlike the RAF, which used its attacks as a publicity stunt to sell its mind-numbingly didactic manifestos, the NSU chose to remain completely anonymous – possibly in order to remain in action as long as possible. But the bombed house in Zwickau revealed not only evidence of crimes past, but also the contours of a political future: a bizarrely cynical, ready-to-mail DVD telling the entire story of their racist murder spree, featuring an animated “Pink Panther” and the strains of Henry Mancini famous musical theme. It appears that the group’s previous activities were mere foreplay and, like Norway's Anders Breivik, the NSU was ginning up for prime time.

 
Simply bizarre - and cynical:
The NSU was about to release its animated DVD
of "The NSU Germany Tour," here announcing
the shooting death of a ninth Turk
(Source: Spiegel Online)

The scandal caused by this lapse of “security” is swamping the country. Chancellor Merkel has called for a complete investigation and the federal police authorities have a lot of explaining to do. Until they can explain how they could let such an appalling breach of national security slip past without notice, Europe’s true “Muslim threat” will likely remain a threat to Muslims, and not from them. But as Anders Breivik’s double assault in Norway earlier this year showed, right-wing terror can strike anywhere. Terror, after all, is a tactic, and nobody is safe from blowback.

Der Tagesspiegel
Der Spiegel and Spiegel Online
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
ARD
NTV
Deutschlandfunk