Neo-Nazi murders
November 19, 2011
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for a full investigation into a string of murders allegedly carried out by a neo-Nazi group for more than a decade, describing the events as "a disgrace to our country."
In her weekly video message on Saturday, Merkel called for greater cooperation between Germany's security services. "Authorities must of course keep each other informed. We must look carefully and see whether we can learn something from what has happened," she said.
Merkel also called for an elimination of hatred, racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, and expressed her sympathy and regret to the relatives and friends of the victims.
Her comments come as Germany continues to reel from revelations that a group of far-right extremists calling themselves the National Social Underground (NSU) allegedly carried out at least 10 murders over the past decade, targeting mostly victims with immigrant backgrounds.
The murders, carried out mainly in western Germany, claimed the lives of eight ethnic Turks, one ethnic Greek and a German policewoman.
Trivialized right-wing threat?
The fact that a group could have carried out its crimes undetected for so long has raised many questions about the efficiency of Germany's intelligence and security agencies.
But German security services are not being accused just of a lack of cooperation. They are also facing growing accusations of having trivialized the threat from right-wing extremists in the country.
Some critics have said the threat from the right has been largely ignored owing to a focus on leftist and Islamist terrorism.
"The danger was not taken seriously by many of the top politicians who carry the responsibility in this country, and partially denied," said Hajo Funke, a professor at Freie Universität Berlin and a leading expert on the far-right scene.
A home affairs committee in the German parliament, the Bundestag, is to hold a special meeting on Monday to discuss the consequences of the case and possible errors made by German authorities. A special Bundestag debate on the topic is scheduled for Tuesday.
Reopened cases
In the wake of the revelations, police have reopened a number of unsolved cases not originally thought to have been linked to far-right extremists. These include a firebomb attack on Russian Jewish immigrants in Dusseldorf in 2000, a 2004 nail bomb attack in a Cologne immigrant neighborhood and a fire in an apartment building in Ludwigshafen that killed nine Turkish immigrants.
Authorities also now believe the three-person group allegedly behind the murders may have had a much wider support network.
They are investigating more suspects in addition to the two people already in custody: 37-year-old Holger G., who is charged with supporting terrorist organization, and 36-year-old Beate Zschäpe, who is alleged to have belonged to the NSU.
Zschäpe's two alleged accomplices, Uwe Böhnhardt, 34, and Uwe Mundlos, 38, were found dead in the eastern city of Eisenach on November 4 after apparently committing suicide to avoid arrest following a bank robbery. Their bodies were found in a burnt-out mobile home.
Zschäpe later turned herself in to police.
Calls to ban NPD
The chief public prosecutor in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, Erardo C. Rautenberg, on Saturday joined the chorus of voices calling for a ban of the far right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
In an interview with the dpa news agency, he said it would not be necessary to remove all informers from the party's ranks to achieve this goal.
An earlier attempt to have the party banned failed in 2003 after the Federal Constitutional Court ruled there were too many paid informers at the highest level of the party.
Meanwhile, Munich authorities on Saturday cancelled a planned demonstration by right-wing extremists that was to have taken place near the site where a Greek shop owner was murdered in 2005. A council official said the demonstration would have been a mockery of the victims and an inacceptable provocation.
Also Saturday, in the western city of Remagen, 650 police officers were deployed to supervise a far-right demonstration held in memory of the Germans who died in Allied prisoner of war camps in the region in 1945.
Author: Timothy Jones (AP, dpa)
Editor: Martin Kuebler
Editor's note: Deutsche Welle is bound by German law and the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and obliges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.