Background
The National Socialist Underground (NSU) was a far-right terrorist group in Germany. Its core consisted of Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, who came from Jena in former East Germany. The three met in far-right circles in the 1990s, went underground from 1998 under false identities, and relied on a wider network of supporters for money, documents and weapons.
For years the public had no idea the trio existed, and the attacks were treated as unrelated crimes.
What happened
Between September 2000 and April 2006 nine men, most of them Turkish-origin small-business owners and one of Greek origin, were shot and killed with the same pistol. In 2007 a police officer, Michèle Kiesewetter, was killed in Heilbronn and her colleague was seriously wounded. The NSU was also linked to bombings in Nuremberg and Cologne between 1999 and 2004 and to a series of bank robberies.
For years the investigation focused on suspicions about the victims' own families and on an organised-crime theory, and the press and police used labels that referred to the victims' origins. For the bereaved, this treatment was an additional source of pain.
Investigation and trial
In November 2011, after a bank robbery in Eisenach, Mundlos and Böhnhardt were found dead in a motorhome, and the trio's flat in Zwickau burned the same day. Zschäpe turned herself in. Kiesewetter's service pistol and the weapon used in the killings were recovered, exposing how far the original investigation had gone in the wrong direction.
The trial in Munich lasted years. On 11 July 2018 Zschäpe was convicted of ten murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ralf Wohlleben received ten years, Carsten Schultze three years of juvenile detention, André Eminger two and a half years and Holger Gerlach three years. Parliamentary inquiries were set up at federal and state level, and after intelligence files were shredded, the head of the federal domestic intelligence agency resigned in 2012.
Legacy
Many victims' families and supporters found the verdict incomplete, arguing that the full support network was never uncovered. The case continues to shape debate in Germany about institutional racism and the role of the intelligence services, and the victims are remembered through memorial events.