Germany’s mammoth neo-Nazi terror trial enters final phase

A defense lawyer for Beate Zschaepe, the only surviving member of a German neo-Nazi trio, Tuesday launched final arguments, signaling the end phase of a mammoth murder and terrorism trial.

Five years after Zschaepe, 43, first entered the dock, her lawyer Hermann Borchert calls the case against her “inadequate” and insists she was not involved in a string of racist murders, bombings, and bank robberies committed by the clandestine cell.

Prosecutors accuse Zschaepe of complicity in the bloody crimes carried out by Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, the two gunmen of the self-styled National Socialist Underground (NSU) who died in an apparent 2011 murder-suicide.

Borchert placed the sole blame on the two men, who had been in a love triangle with Zschaepe since their teenage years and who between 2000 and 2007 shot dead eight men with Turkish roots, a Greek migrant, and a German policewoman. Zschaepe, who faces a maximum term of life in jail, has claimed she was an unwilling and horrified bystander to the crimes, not a strong-willed and active participant as charged by prosecutors in the Munich trial.

The NSU case deeply shocked Germany, where security services had previously only associated terrorism with far-left and Islamist militants and believed far-right thugs mainly committed random acts of street violence and arson.

It was only after the two men’s deaths in 2011 that Germany awoke to the news that the killings, long blamed on migrant crime gangs and dubbed the “doner [kebab] murders” by police and media, were in fact committed by organized fascists.

— AFP