The surviving member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group the National Socialist Underground (NSU), Beate Zschäpe, has been found guilty of ten counts of murder. The trial was one of the biggest in post-war German history.
Beate Zschäpe, member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group the National Socialist Underground (NSU), was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for her part in the murder of ten people between 2000 and 2007, as well as two bombings and 15 bank robberies.
The trial in the Munich state court, one of the most important in Germany’s post-war history, took five years, more than 430 trial days, and the testimonies of several hundred witnesses.
The proceedings took place amid suspicion about the failures of German security forces to capture the NSU while it was active. Several lawyers representing the families’ victims have accused Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV), of destroying files and protecting informants in the neo-Nazi scene.
Lawyers have also expressed disappointment that state prosecutors failed to fully investigate the network supporting the three known members.
Many people have also accused the police who investigated the murders of racism for ruling out neo-Nazi motives to the killings, even though nine of the victims were of immigrant background. For several years, detectives worked on the assumption that the killings were related to Turkish organized crime.
Ahead of Wednesday’s verdict, the Turkish community organization TGD said that the community’s trust in the security forces was “deeply shaken.” TGD chairman Gökay Sofuoglu told the DPA news agency that this trust could only be won back through “more prosecutions of named Nazis and informants in the NSU complex.” He accused state prosecutors of sticking rigidly to the theory that the three members of the NSU had worked in isolation.
The NSU was only discovered on November 4, 2011, after the bodies of its two other members, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, were found in a burned-out motorhome following a failed bank robbery in Eisenach, having committed suicide. Zschäpe turned herself in to police four days later.
Prosecutors had demanded a life sentence for Zschäpe and prison terms of three to 12 years for the four people accused of helping the group. Her own attorneys had called for her release, arguing that she had not been an accessory to the crimes, and had not committed any of the killings herself.
bk/rc (dpa, AFP)