Female neo-nazi terrorist jailed for life for murder of immigrants
BEATE ZSCHÄPE, the sole survivor of postwar Germany’s deadliest neo-nazi terror cell, was yesterday jailed for life for the murders of 10 people in a sevenyear campaign of shootings and nail bombings.
The verdict brought an end to a five- year trial over the crimes of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) that raised serious questions about the police’s failure to realise it was dealing with a home-grown terror cell, and over how much German intelligence knew about the group’s activities.
Zschäpe, 43, was found guilty of the racially motivated murders of nine immigrants shot dead between 2000 and 2006, and the killing of a woman police officer shot with the same gun in 2007. She was also convicted of a series of nail bombings targeting immigrant communities, including one in Cologne in 2004 which injured 22 people.
Zschäpe was found to be an active member of the NSU, a three-person terror cell whose existence was only discovered after its two other members, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, died in a suspected suicide pact in 2011.
Lawyers for Zschäpe argued she was not involved in the murders. After refusing to speak for the first two and a half years of her trial, she admitted helping the two men and claimed it was because she was in love with Böhnhardt. She claimed she knew nothing of the killings. The court rejected her claims and found she was fully complicit in the shootings and bombings.
The attacks could only have been carried out with the assistance of Zschäpe, and she was an accomplice of “essential importance”, Judge Manfred Götzl found. He added that the killings had “Nazi racist motives” and were designed to spread “fear and insecurity” among immigrant communities.
Four others were found guilty of lesser offences of aiding the terror cell.
Ralf Wohlleben was jailed for 10 years for providing a gun used as a murder weapon. A defendant, named only as Carsten S under German privacy laws, was jailed for three years for helping provide the gun.
Holger Gerlach was jailed for three years and Andre Eminger for two and half years for helping the group.
Critics argued the trial had left unanswered questions over how much German intelligence knew about the NSU, after it emerged in hearings that several intelligence informants were in contact with the group, and an intelligence officer was close to the scene of one of the killings.