10 years of self-exposure of the NSU: The rule of law suffers

The right-wing terrorist series of murders by the NSU ended ten years ago. To this day, many questions remain unanswered. Observers do not believe that investigators will still achieve the breakthrough.

November 4, 2011 marks the end of a brutal series of murders that has shaken Germany to this day and – as bitter as it sounds – made many of those affected question the rule of law. In no less than eleven years, right-wing terrorists raged undisturbed and undetected across Germany. Your horror balance: ten murders, mostly of immigrant people, several bomb attacks with dozens of injuries and 15 robberies.

After a failed bank robbery, the neo-Nazis Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos killed themselves in a caravan in Eisenach, Thuringia. Shortly afterwards, her accomplice Beate Zschäpe set fire to their hiding place, an apartment in Zwickau.

Many questions still remain unanswered

The NSU confessed to the crimes in a homemade video. One of the data carriers was found near the exploded house in Zwickau. But the hope that the many inconsistencies could be cleared up and the many agonizing questions answered by the bereaved of the victims was not fulfilled. Not until today.

Semiya Simsek, daughter of the first NSU murder victim Enver Simsek, says that she has not been able to finish the murder in 2000 because she does not know why the right-wing terrorists chose her father. After the NSU was unmasked ten years ago, the investigators found numerous objects in the fire ruins that were supposed to help them investigate. Including sweatpants by Uwe Mundlos with traces of blood.

Inconsistencies in murder in Heilbronn

A DNA comparison proves that Michèle Kiesewetter’s blood, the police officer who was shot in Heilbronn on April 25, 2007, is stuck to the item of clothing. But even this case cannot be completely cleared up to this day. On the contrary, it remains downright mysterious. Witnesses in Heilbronn testified in 2007 that they had seen blood-smeared men run away at the crime scene. And they suggested that more than two men ran away.

But at the time when the federal prosecutor was able to attribute the Kiesetter case to the NSU series of murders, they didn’t want to know anything more than two male perpetrators. The federal prosecutor’s office had committed itself to the thesis: The NSU was a murder trio, with Mundlos and Bönhardt being the ones who fired the shots at the crime scenes.

Were there any other perpetrators and sympathizers?

The investigative committees of the Bundestag repeatedly criticized this early definition of only three perpetrators. To this day it is unclear whether it was really only Mundlos and Bönhardt who shot or whether there were other perpetrators who also took up arms in addition to the known sympathizers and supporters. This suspicion is also corroborated by the fact that the investigators did not find the DNA traces of Mundlos and Bönhardt at any of the NSU’s 27 crime scenes.

However, they were able to find two anonymous DNA traces in Heilbronn that they still cannot assign to any person at all: There are traces on the back of the colleague von Kiesewetter, who survived the attack but can no longer remember the attack. After November 4, 2011, the investigators had no choice but to laboriously reconstruct what must have happened at the crime scenes.

Endless inconsistencies

The number of open questions and inconsistencies – almost endless. Why did the NSU suddenly have a German police officer in its sights in 2007 and not, as in the many years before, people with an immigrant background? Possibly to get weapons, according to the investigators. Why did they initially rent a caravan for their murder plans in Heilbronn for only four days, from April 16 to 19, 2007, and extend the rental period?

Perhaps because they chose their victim at random and didn’t find what they were looking for so quickly? How could Mundlos and Böhnhardt approach the company car unnoticed? Crawling on all fours? Why didn’t Kiesewetter and her colleague notice anything? Why didn’t the two policemen take up arms when the two perpetrators appeared on the side of the doors and opened fire? Was there really no time for the learned police reflex?

Procedure does not bring any significant new knowledge

A case so strange that it almost leads to speculation: Was there a perpetrator among them who knew the victims, who made Kiesewetter and her colleagues feel safe? The report of a forensic doctor also raises questions to this day: The blood splatters on the sweatpants did not prove beyond any doubt that Mundlos was the shooter. He could also have stood further away.

The Federal Prosecutor’s office later moved away from the trio thesis, at least also considered that there could have been other NSU death shooters in addition to Mundlos and Bönhardt. The Federal Prosecutor’s office therefore opened an investigation against unknown persons around nine years ago. But this process has not brought any significant new findings to date. Just as little as the preliminary proceedings against nine other suspects: No sufficient suspicion that would be necessary for an indictment, it is said from Karlsruhe.

The investigators are now unlikely to make any progress

So whether more NSU perpetrators can ever be found and brought to justice? Clemens Binninger, committee chairman of two committees of inquiry in the Bundestag, can hardly imagine that. To do this, the investigators would have to go through all the data again, for example information from radio cells and DNA traces, and they would have to examine them using the latest technical possibilities.

Binninger also considers the likelihood that an insider from the right-wing extremist scene could still unpack after such a long time to be rather low. Sobering for the bereaved. They still have hope.

Have not all files been disclosed?

A new federal government could bring momentum to the investigation. Because even after the introduction of the victim’s lawyer Seda Basay-Yildiz, data material is still slumbering in the authorities. To be more precise, at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for example in Hesse. Files are still held there – for reasons of source and method protection, as it is said. Whether all the files have been submitted to the committees of inquiry in recent years or whether some have been withheld?

In fact, the FDP interior expert Benjamin Strasser is considering how the NSU complex could continue to be illuminated. In any case, Strasser can hardly imagine that 40 informants from various security authorities, i.e. right-wing extremists who were supposed to provide the state with information from the NSU’s environment, did not notice anything about the crime. Especially since a right-wing magazine even sent greetings to the right-wing terrorist NSU fighters underground.

The protection of the constitution was turned inside out

When Halit Yozgat was murdered in Kassel in 2006, an employee of the Hessian Office for the Protection of the Constitution was at the scene. He claimed not to have seen the bleeding victim. In recent years, the protection of the constitution has been turned inside out, said CDU man Binninger.

For example, the V-Mann system has been reformed and the cooperation between the domestic service, the police and the judiciary has been improved. And yet the cooperation with informants from the extremist scene remains a fine line. The information from the scene should be treated with the utmost caution. It must be crucial that one can never rely on their statements alone, as was apparently the case in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Many survivors of the victims have lost confidence in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Only the most complete possible clarification of the incidents could give them back their trust in the rule of law and help them finally end their mourning work.