Jailed for life, the Nazi sympathiser whose terror cell killed ten
A NAZI bride has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of ten racially- motivated murders in Germany.
Beate Zschape is the only surviving member of the National Socialist Underground terror cell which targeted immigrants in a campaign designed to force hundreds of thousands of foreigners out of the country.
She was on trial over the murder of eight ethnic Turks, a Greek citizen and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.
The gang hoped that by randomly murdering immigrants they would force people to leave Germany and return to their homelands in droves.
Zschape was the lover of two gangsters – Uwe Boehnhardt, 34, and Uwe Mundlos, 38 – who formed the NSU cell with her.
During the trial, which lasted five years, the court heard how the trio invented a perverted board game based on Monopoly where Jews got sent to death camps and the winner was the player who deported the most to the gas chambers.
The gang called the game ‘ Pogromly’ – from the word pogrom, meaning a violent riot of the type often organised against Jews in Russian and eastern Europe over several centuries – and featured swastikas and a skull wearing a German helmet in the centre of the board.
The gang made several copies which they sold to far-Right fanatics across Germany, with the proceeds going towards financing their life underground as they carried out the murders. The sick game became a major exhibit of the court proceedings in what was the biggest neo-Nazi trial ever heard in post-war Germany.
Boehnhardt and Mundlos committed suicide in 2012 after a botched bank raid, leaving Zschape to torch their hideout in the east German town of Zwickau before turning herself in.
Zschape had tried to portray herself as a vulnerable victim of the manipulative male members of the gang. But judge Manfred Goetzl said her contribution to the group was ‘essential’ for the murders to be carried out.
Eight ethnic Turks and a Greek man were assassinated by the gang in a seven-year long reign of terror. Michelle Kieswetter, a police officer killed while sitting in her patrol car in 2007, was the gang’s last victim.
The police came under severe criticism when details of the cell became known. Authorities never suspected a violent neo-Nazi gang was behind the killings.