Beate Zschäpe has been convicted as an accomplice of the neo-Nazi terror cell “National Socialist Underground” (NSU). The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) rejected their appeal in writing and only deleted a single penalty, as the Karlsruhe court announced. “The total life imprisonment and the determined severity of guilt have remained unaffected by this.” The revisions by the two co-defendants Ralf Wohlleben and Holger G. were also rejected.
In the decision the court found that Zschäpe “already had a decisive influence on the planning of the offenses as well as on the joint decision to commit and the further will of their two accomplices to commit the offense”. You have made “beyond the participation in the planning of the crime – an important objective contribution to this”. “Without the behavior she promised, the aims of the deeds pursued according to the unification concept could not have been achieved,” said the BGH.
In the case of André Eminger, who was also convicted in 2018, the BGH allows both Eminger’s lawyers and the Federal Public Prosecutor to be appealed. While Eminger objects to his conviction, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s revision is directed against the partial acquittal. Because in this case the Federal Prosecutor’s Office also applied for a well-founded revision, the BGH set a main hearing. This is to take place on December 2nd, just under two weeks later the BGH wants to announce a decision. In the case of the co-defendants, only their defense counsel had appealed, but not the prosecution.
Five year long process
The NSU trial took place at the Munich Higher Regional Court from 2013 to 2018. The historical trial was about the terrorist cell from Zschäpe and their companions Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, who called themselves NSU – National Socialist Underground. There were ten murders, 15 robberies and three bombings with dozens of people injured. Mundlos and Böhnhardt had killed themselves after a bank robbery for fear of arrest.
Beate Zschäpe is the only one of the five defendants in the NSU trial who is still in custody. She has lived in the women’s prison in Chemnitz since 2018. The Munich Higher Regional Court had sentenced her as an equal accomplice to Mundlos and Böhnhardt, to life imprisonment with a particularly serious guilt – although she was not present at any crime scene. The complicity theory of the Munich Higher Regional Court contradicts the longstanding case law of the BGH, which only assumes complicity if an own, indispensable act was committed.
Ralf Wohlleben, Carsten S., Holger G. and André Eminger, who were also accused, were sentenced to imprisonment between two and a half and ten years in 2018 for various acts of aiding and abetting.