[The case sent shudders through German society, which has
struggled for decades to put the country’s Nazi era behind it. The scope of
violence ascribed to the neo-Nazis drew comparisons with the left-wing
terrorists of the former Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof
Gang.]
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Jan Woitas/DPA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The police say a gutted apartment in Zwickau yielded evidence
linking an extremist group to murders of at least 10 people.
|
ZWICKAU, Germany — Neo-Nazi terrorists are responsible for a crime wave reaching
back more than a decade that includes the murders of at least 10 people,
including immigrant shopkeepers and a police officer, German government
officials said Sunday. The group is also suspected in more than a dozen bank
robberies and a bombing in Cologne, they said.
Two main suspects in the
crimes are dead, apparently suicides. Another surrendered to the police, and a
fourth person was arrested Sunday.
Much of the evidence on
the group came from the wreckage of an apartment here in eastern Germany where
several of the suspects had been living. In a scene that seemed torn from a
suspense thriller, an explosion and fire on Nov. 4 gutted the apartment,
apparently an effort by the suspects to cover their tracks. But the police were
able to recover a likely murder weapon, along with a gruesome 15-minute
propaganda video and other evidence.
The newsmagazine Der
Spiegel published still images from the video, including of the bloody bodies
of several victims of what became known as the döner murders — a reference to
the fact that some of the victims were foreign-born food vendors who worked at
döner kebab stands.
The case sent shudders
through German society, which has struggled for decades to put the country’s
Nazi era behind it. The scope of violence ascribed to the neo-Nazis drew
comparisons with the left-wing terrorists of the former Red Army Faction, also
known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
The killings are signs
of “a new form of right-wing-extremist terrorism,” the country’s interior
minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, said at a news conference in Berlin on Sunday.
Speaking to reporters in Leipzig on Sunday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said the
crimes revealed “structures that we never imagined.”
Allegations surfaced
Sunday that one or more members of the group, which called itself the National
Socialist Underground, may have worked as confidential informants for Germany’s
domestic intelligence service. Opposition politicians called for a special
meeting of the Parliament’s intelligence oversight committee to address the
matter.
Reports in the newspaper
Bild and elsewhere said that the police had found identification papers with
false names, similar to documents that had been given to informants and
undercover agents. Officials in the German state of Thuringia said there would
be an official investigation.
The two principal
suspects — Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, identified by the police as militant
far-right extremists — apparently killed themselves on Nov. 4 in a recreational
vehicle in Eisenach, about 110 miles west of Zwickau. At the scene, the police
said they found Heckler & Koch semiautomatic pistols belonging to two
officers who were shot in Heilbronn in 2007; one was killed and the other
critically wounded.
The authorities say the
group’s crimes went far beyond that attack. The men are suspected of committing
at least 14 bank robberies, including one in Eisenach the day they died. The
group is also suspected of detonating a bomb outside a hairdresser’s shop in an
immigrant neighborhood of Cologne in 2004, wounding 22 people. The propaganda
video includes a photograph of a bomb packed with nails, similar to the one
used in Cologne.
Investigators said
Sunday that they were looking at other crimes that might be the work of the
group, including a bombing in Saarbrücken in March 1999 during an exhibition
about the German military during World War II, and another at a Jewish cemetery
in Berlin in March 2002. The police are also looking into whether the group may
have been behind the killing earlier this month of a man in Döbeln who was
selling kebabs.
The authorities were
scrambling to determine whether the known members of the group had connections
to other undiscovered criminals, as officials from across the political
spectrum demanded to know how the group could have operated undetected for so
long.
“This is a devastating
failure,” said Hajo Funke, an expert on rightist extremism at the Free
University in Berlin. “There is still a lack of public will to go after
National Socialistic groupings in a sufficient manner.”
The federal prosecutor’s
office announced that the police had arrested one suspect in the group near
Hanover on Sunday. Prosecutors identified the man only as Holger G., and said
that he had been in contact with Mr. Mundlos and Mr. Böhnhardt, the two central
suspects, since the late 1990s. They said he lent his passport to the group and
rented camper vans for them several times, including one used in the shootings
of the police officers in Heilbronn.
Violent far-right
extremism came under renewed scrutiny throughout Europe after the mass murder
in Norway in July by a man with connections to extremist groups. The German
government has worked to contain even the slightest resurgence of such
extremism, but far-right political groups like the National Democratic Party
continue to find some support, especially in the states of the former East
Germany. Extremists operate in loose networks, especially in Saxony,
Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, Mr. Funke said.
Mr. Mundlos, Mr.
Böhnhardt and another suspect, Beate Zschäpe, have been on the run from the
police since 1998, when the police uncovered a makeshift pipe-bomb factory in a
garage rented by Ms. Zschäpe.
On Nov. 4, the same day
that Mr. Mundlos and Mr. Böhnhardt set their recreational vehicle on fire and
shot themselves in Eisenach as the police were closing in, neighbors in Zwickau
said they saw Ms. Zschäpe hurrying out of the building in Frühlingsstrasse
moments before the apartment blew up, according to the local police. She
surrendered several days later.
In the ruins, the police
said they found a Ceska handgun of the same model used with a silencer in the
döner murders.
Of the nine men killed
between 2000 and 2006 in those cases, only two actually sold döner kebabs for a
living; others sold flowers or vegetables or newspapers, one owned an Internet
cafe, and another a locksmith shop. The killings took place all over Germany,
from Munich and Nuremberg in Bavaria to Rostock on the Baltic Sea and Dortmund
in the west.
The propaganda video
made light of those murders in morbid fashion. In one image published in Der
Spiegel, the Pink Panther cartoon character is seen standing next to a poster
that reads “Germany Tour, 9th Turk Shot to Death,” with a photo that apparently
shows one of the victims.
“It’s frightening,” said
Christin Giller, 28, a local resident who stopped in Frühlingsstrasse to survey
the damage on Sunday. “You know that they gather now and then, express their
anger and so on, but I wouldn’t have thought they were capable of this.”
A middle-aged man
muttered under his breath, “It’s hiding everywhere beneath the surface,” and
then walked on without giving his name.
