NSU member Beate Zschäpe receives life imprisonment

The trial relating to a series of murders committed by right-wing extremists comes to an end

Between 2000 and 2007, the terrorist group “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) murdered eight Turkish and one Greek migrant as well as a German policewoman. The group was also responsible for dozens of attempted murders, three bomb attacks and a string of robberies. For years, various police teams dealt with the crimes as separate cases, remaining oblivious to the existence of a right-wing terror cell. Indeed, they treated the victims as criminals who had fallen prey to underworld feuding. It was only after the two killers, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, took their own lives following a failed bank robbery in 2011 that the police stumbled on the existence of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), to which the two men and a woman – their friend Beate Zschäpe – belonged. The three had shared a flat in Zwickau, in which Zschäpe set off a bomb in order to cover their tracks.

Following a trial that lasted more than five years, a Munich court sentenced Zschäpe to life imprisonment for her role as an accomplice in the murder of ten people, as well as for a series of other offences. Although the prosecution was unable to prove her direct involvement in the crimes of the NSU, it was able to establish her guilt as an accomplice. It was demonstrated that Zschäpe had provided the terrorists Böhnhardt and Mundlos with the “appearance of normality and legality”, secured the shared apartment that was used as the headquarters for a campaign of violence, managed the group’s logistics, and rented vehicles that were used in the commission of crimes. Several other individuals were also convicted and handed prison sentences for aiding and abetting what amounted to a campaign of clandestine terror.