Members of the far-right terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered 10 people, carried out bombings and robbed banks in several German states between 2000 and 2007.
In 2018, Beate Zschäpe, the sole surviving NSU member, was sentenced by the Higher Regional Court in Munich to life in prison, with the court determining a particularly severe degree of guilt.
The trial was one of the biggest in Germany’s postwar history. Four NSU supporters who were charged along with Zschäpe received prison sentences ranging from two and a half to 10 years.
A good seven years after the end of the first NSU trial, the case against another alleged NSU accomplice, Susann E., began on Thursday at the Higher Regional Court in Dresden (Saxony).
An accomplice to a terrorist
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office charged Susann E., the wife of Andre E., an NSU supporter who was convicted in 2018, with knowing about the murders and assisting Zschäpe by letting her use her identification documents on several occasions.
The defendant is alleged to have provided Zschäpe, who was in hiding, with train tickets and her own health insurance card, to enable her to see a doctor. Susann E. is also accused of helping to rent a motorhome that Zschäpe’s accomplices, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, used in November 2011 for their last bank robbery in Eisenach in the state of Thuringia, and in which the two men were found dead shortly afterwards.
After Zschäpe learned of this, she set fire to her apartment in Zwickau (Saxony), which she had shared with her accomplices, to destroy evidence. During her trial, Zschäpe testified to meeting with Susann E. after the fire, upon which E. allegedly brought her a fresh set of clothes “because my clothes stank of gasoline.”
A few days later, Zschäpe turned herself in to the police.
Zschäpe’s testimony revealed a close relationship between the two women who had been meeting regularly since 2006. Sometimes Susann E. brought her children, which Zschäpe said she enjoyed “because I didn’t have any of my own.”
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The last NSU trial?
The Dresden Higher Regional Court has scheduled 44 trial days until the end of June 2026 for the criminal proceedings against Susann E. The defendant could face several years in prison if convicted.
This trial could also be the last in connection with the NSU terrorist group. The victims have expressed their disappointment with the cases to date. They have accused the police and judiciary of not doing enough to get to the bottom of the case.
Their suspicions are directed primarily at the German security authorities. As details of the NSU’s crimes came to light, numerous intelligence failures were revealed.
Although there were numerous indications that the NSU murders had a right-wing extremist background, the police did not seriously investigate these leads and instead focused investigations on the murder victims’ family members, who were suspected of having ties to the Mafia or drug trafficking.
Shredded documents destroy trust in authorities
Parliamentary investigative committees concluded that authorities had utterly failed in their handling of the series of murders. Among other issues, it emerged that employees of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, shredded documents related to the NSU.
The victims’ relatives’ distrust of authorities intensified during the first NSU trial because intelligence agency files were not entered into public evidence on the grounds of protecting informants.
This is likely to also affect the criminal proceedings against Susann E. if similar evidentiary motions are filed and accepted.
*Editor’s note: DW follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and urges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.
This article was originally written in German.
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