On September 1—the eighty-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II—Germans went to the polls in two states in the former East Germany, Thuringia and Saxony, to elect members of the state parliaments. Local elections are often regarded as a bellwether of political trends across Germany, and many greeted the results with something close to panic. For the first time since the war, a far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), came out a winner, obtaining a plurality of nearly 33 percent in Thuringia. (The AfD finished second in Saxony, behind the Christian Democratic Union, the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel; three weeks later it finished second in Brandenburg, with nearly 30 percent of the vote, 6 percent more than in 2019.) Its victory raised the prospect that a German state could soon be governed by a movement that has called for the forced “remigration” of hundreds of thousands of refugees, expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin, and embraced some of the slogans and symbols of white nationalism. Though Germany’s traditional parties vowed to maintain a “firewall” against the AfD—presumably by forming a coalition to prevent it from gaining a governing majority—the election signaled that the German radical right is, like the National Rally in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, moving closer to the country’s political mainstream.
The AfD came into being twelve years ago during the Eurozone crisis, when it opposed Merkel’s bailout of the insolvent Greek government and called for an end to the euro as a common currency. But it has remade its identity around opposition to immigration, particularly from Muslim countries. In 2015, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to a million refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and other war-torn and economically devastated nations, AfD leaders called for a ban on burkas, minarets, and calls to prayer, and they adopted the slogan “Islam is not a part of Germany.” The party’s popularity surged. In the 2017 federal election, it received 12.6 percent of the vote and won ninety-four seats in the Bundestag, the 733-seat national parliament. It didn’t fare as well in the 2021 election, but it still won eighty-three seats—and made gains in several eastern states.
Although the AfD has made Muslims its primary target, some of its leaders have also embraced antisemitism. The AfD chairman in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has criticized the Holocaust memorial near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, calling Germans “the only people in the world who planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.” Höcke has twice been fined for using Nazi slogans—including a phrase etched on the daggers of Hitler’s storm troopers: “Everything for Germany!” (He claimed he was unaware of its prior use.) Matthias Helferich, elected to the Bundestag in 2021, once was caught on tape describing himself as the “friendly face” of National Socialism and as a “democratic Freisler”—a reference to Roland Freisler, the World War II–era judge and ideologue who sentenced thousands of opponents of the Nazis to death. Another leading AfD politician, Peter Steinborn, is the former head of training, according to Der Spiegel, of the youth wing of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). The country’s domestic intelligence agency has labeled the AfD’s branches in Thuringia and Saxony “right-wing extremist” groups, a designation that allows it to keep track of the party’s activities through the use of wiretaps and informants.
The AfD has found a receptive audience in the depressed backwaters of the former German Democratic Republic, which are beset by high unemployment, low incomes, and the flight of many young people to the west in search of greater opportunities. There is a conviction among easterners that German politicians forced on them a raw deal after reunification in 1990, and Höcke’s party has appealed to them with Trump-style populist rhetoric aimed at stirring up anger toward the elites of the affluent west. But the AfD’s messages, like Trump’s, have also resonated among a violent fringe, driven in this case by nostalgia for the lost days of German “greatness” in the 1930s and early 1940s—and by a hatred of the nonwhite intruders in their midst.
As Jacob Kushner writes in Look Away: A True Story of Murder, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, a chilling dive into the culture of right-wing extremism in Germany, Thuringia has long been one of the country’s primary incubators of neo-Nazi ideology and anti-immigrant violence. Kushner tells the story of one of the most horrific crime sprees of the post-Communist era: between 2000 and 2007, eight ethnic Turks and one Greek were shot dead in mysterious circumstances across Germany, in each case by a killer using the same weapon, a 7.65mm CZ 83 semiautomatic pistol made in the Czech Republic. The victims were working-class men in their twenties, thirties, and forties, owners of newsstands, groceries, kebab shops, and other small businesses. But the police, falling back on racist stereotypes, assumed that the men had been involved in drug trafficking or other illegal activities and had somehow run afoul of a so-called Turkish mafia or another organized crime group. For nearly a decade investigators followed false leads, spread lies, and cast suspicions on the murdered men’s families. Many in the German media played along, disseminating the police misinformation and demeaning the dead, in one case labeling the murders “the Kebab Killings.” It was only through external pressures and lucky breaks that investigators stumbled onto the terrible truth.
Kushner’s story begins in the early 1990s in Jena, Thuringia’s second-largest city, long the headquarters of Carl Zeiss, a producer of rifle scopes and bombsights for the Nazis that shifted to the manufacture of microscopes and industrial lenses during the Communist era. After the Wall fell, Zeiss struggled to survive in the face of international competition. In 1991 the firm fired one third of its employees—about 17,000 people—across eastern Germany. One of those laid off was a struggling single mother, Anne-rose Apel, who was raising her teenage daughter, Beate Zschäpe, in a sixth-floor apartment in a grim Jena neighborhood called Winzerla. Apel turned to drinking and drugs. Zschäpe left school after the tenth grade, failed to find a permanent job, got in trouble for shoplifting, and gravitated to the Winzerclub, one of 144 social institutions set up by Merkel, then serving as the minister of women and youth under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Merkel and her colleagues envisioned these clubs, writes Kushner,
as places where teenagers—unsettled or disgruntled by the sweeping changes taking place around them—could hang out under the watch of social workers who would keep them on track, introducing life and career skills that might feed them into the workforce. To lure teens away from trouble, they needed to welcome everyone—even those with radical, far-right ideas. Some…like Winzerclub, became hangouts for hoodlums, where eastern German teens could cut loose as they rebelled against their new, capitalist world.
At the Winzerclub, Zschäpe met Uwe Mundlos, the blond, bright son of a computer science professor at the University of Applied Science in Jena. Mundlos was a good student, but he also displayed a fondness for black boots and military jackets and a penchant for provocation. During an eighth-grade field trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Kushner writes, he shocked his classmates by declaring, while standing in front of the crematorium, that the ovens must have kept the Jews “nice and warm.”
Genocide jokes soon gave way to a full-fledged embrace of white supremacist ideology. Mundlos was one of thousands of eastern youths in the 1990s who gained a sense of empowerment from the symbols and language of the Third Reich. “The old Nazis were not murderers but war heroes,” Kushner writes, “and the Holocaust was…a legitimate battle against an existential threat.” Mundlos and Zschäpe became romantically involved and soon became friendly with Uwe Böhnhardt, a high school dropout with piercing blue eyes, a buzz cut, and a proclivity for violence. When he was fourteen, Böhnhardt had shattered a sixteen-year-old’s eye socket with his boot because he was late paying back a loan. Böhnhardt bounced among reformatories and picked fights with antifascist activists and the police. Mundlos, four years older than Böhnhardt, became a role model, pulling the young hoodlum into the world of neo-Nazism.
Kushner draws a disturbing portrait of the white supremacist subculture that took hold across the east during this period. The two Uwes adopted the skinhead look (shaved heads, bomber jackets, black combat boots, and black T-shirts) and, with Zschäpe, often spent their evenings in the clubhouse dancing to cassettes of music by neo-Nazi rockers such as Frank Rennicke from Saxony, who described Polish people as “contaminators of German soil.” They attended cross-burning ceremonies inspired by the Ku Klux Klan, vandalized Jewish memorials, and barbecued with other far-rightists on the banks of the Danube and at Usedom, an island in the Baltic Sea where the Nazis had test-launched the first V2 rockets that were fired at English cities late in the war.
These rituals took place against a backdrop of organized mass attacks against immigrants involving hundreds of right-wing extremists. Among the most notorious incidents were a 1991 mob assault on a home for asylum seekers in Hoyerswerda and the 1992 Rostock Riots, in which one thousand neo-Nazis tried to burn down an eleven-story building housing, among others, former guest workers from Vietnam. (These racist rampages were not confined to the east: in 1991 a white mob firebombed a shelter for asylum seekers in the western town of Saarlouis, burning a Ghanaian refugee to death.) In the mid-1990s the trio from Jena began dabbling in violence themselves:
Beate and the Uwes spent their evenings driving around Jena armed with a baseball bat. While the other two watched, Böhnhardt would jump out of the car, attack a left-looking passerby—a hippie or a punk—jump back in, and the three would race away. Sometimes Mundlos and Beate joined in the beating…. One night, Beate and the Uwes got into a fistfight with a bouncer at a local club called Modul. It’s not clear how it started, but rumor has it that it ended after Beate broke a bottle over the bouncer’s head.
What drove their transformation from small-time right-wing thugs into serial killers? Kushner struggles for explanations. What does seem clear is that after years of impulsive violence, Böhnhardt finally found a purpose in Mundlos’s hate-filled ideology. And Zschäpe, a blank-faced cipher searching for an identity, became the two men’s eager accomplice. In 1995 the skinheads began assembling crude pipe bombs in a Jena garage, which they planted in a kindergarten temporarily housing Bosnian refugees, a theater, a sports field, and a department store. The bombs lacked detonators and appear to have been left by the gang as test runs for what was to come.
The Jena police, meanwhile, had been keeping watch on Böhnhardt, one of the city’s most notorious hoodlums. They described him as a “simpleminded…sadist with psychopathic tendencies.” In January 1998, after the fourth bomb was discovered, they raided his garage and seized weapons and bomb-making materials. Böhnhardt and his co-conspirators skipped town and began drifting across Germany, robbing grocery stores and banks, sustained by a network that fed them, found them safe houses, and procured weapons—or, as the neo-Nazis called them, “the bangs.”
Some of these supporters played a double role, as both enablers of the gang and informants. Kushner brilliantly unpacks the sordid dealings between German intelligence and the neo-Nazi underground—a compromised relationship that seems to have exacerbated the problem the security officials were trying to eradicate. Worried about losing their prized sources, investigators often turned a blind eye to their assaults, robberies, and other crimes, and they withheld information from other law enforcement agencies. One prominent neo-Nazi who abetted the Uwes and Zschäpe while acting as an informant was Tino Brandt, also from Thuringia. A chubby worshipper of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, he fed the police mostly useless tidbits while funding the fugitives with the proceeds from a grotesque version of Monopoly called “Pogromly,” marketed to fellow neo-Nazis. Instead of acquiring properties and building houses and hotels, players bought cities and purged them of Jews.
Another informant with ties to the Uwes and Zschäpe was Carsten Szczepanski, “a decisive, dangerous, right-wing extremist,” according to the police, from the Neukölln district of Berlin. Szczepanski formed a transatlantic alliance with Dennis Mahon, a Ku Klux Klan leader in Oklahoma; founded a KKK-themed magazine in Germany called Feuerkreuz (Fiery Cross); and called on white supremacists around the world to join forces to kill Jews and people of color. For the 1992 attempted murder of a Nigerian immigrant, Szczepanski was sentenced to eight years in prison, where he offered his services to Brandenburg state intelligence. Agents showered him with gifts, funded his racist publication, and even presented him with a T-shirt that read “Adolf Hitler Fighting Force.” They also destroyed evidence on his SIM card that linked him to illegal weapons dealing and could have led police to the fugitives.
The official support of neo-Nazi networks went so deep, Kushner writes, that in 2003 a court was forced to reject a proposed ban on the ultranationalist NPD, whose members included Brandt. German intelligence agencies had recruited so many NPD members as moles—thirty out of two hundred leaders—that it was impossible to tell whether the party’s radical ideas were homegrown or planted by the government. Yet for Gordian Meyer-Plath, a young intelligence officer based in Brandenburg, who was crucial in monitoring violent white supremacists and spoke extensively to Kushner, “Germany needed these informants to protect the public from extremist threats.”
It was a dubious argument, and Kushner counters persuasively that it may have led to the worst murder spree in Germany’s postwar history. On September 9, 2000, Böhnhardt and Mundlos, calling themselves the Nationalist Socialist Underground, approached a flower shop in Nuremberg owned by Enver Şimşek, a Turkish immigrant. They shot him in the head and shoulder with their Czech-made pistol, purchased for them by an intermediary in Jena, then escaped on their bicycles. Other victims quickly followed: Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, a forty-nine-year-old Turk shot in his Nuremberg tailor shop; Süleyman Taşköprü, a thirty-one-year-old Istanbul-born grocer in Hamburg, gunned down fourteen days after Özüdoğru; Habil Kılıç, thirty-eight, shot in his produce shop in Munich’s busy Ramersdorf district; Mehmet Turgut, a young Kurdish immigrant murdered at a kebab stand. Four years later, seeking to expand their body count with a spectacular act of terror, the Uwes attached a twenty-pound, remote-controlled bomb filled with seven hundred carpenter’s nails to a bicycle and left it outside a barbershop in a Turkish and Kurdish neighborhood in Cologne. When it blew up, twenty-two people were injured and several severely maimed. Their ten murder victims also included a young German policewoman, who was shot at point-blank range in her police car by the Uwes, who then stole her weapon.
As Kushner writes with a restrained sense of outrage, the police were quick to believe the worst about the men who were killed. They interrogated the wife and children of one Turkish victim—the owner of a flower shop—about his repeated trips to Amsterdam, a center of the European drug trade, refusing to accept the explanation that he was simply doing business, as he had for years, at the city’s wholesale flower market. They harshly questioned the same family about the victim’s trip to Mecca for the hajj, groundlessly assuming he was a radical Islamist. They insinuated to neighbors, coworkers, and friends that the men had been gunned down because they were criminals, savaging their reputations and subjecting their families to harassment. They ignored obvious clues, including detailed physical descriptions of the two killers.
The German media, with rare exceptions, bought into the official theories. “TURKISH MAFIA STRIKES AGAIN,” declared a headline in a Munich newspaper after the 2005 murder of Theodoros Boulgarides, a locksmith who happened to be Greek. Some of these “investigations” would have been comical had they not devastated the victims’ families and allowed the real killers to continue their spree. After the shooting of Ismail Yaşar, a fifty-year-old Turkish Kurdish refugee who ran a kebab stand in Nuremberg, police pressed the victim’s son and his classmates to admit that Ismail had sold them drugs:
But Ismail hadn’t, and the kids didn’t believe the officers’ lies. The police were not deterred. They decided to lay a trap, opening a snack bar of their own where Yasar’s had been in the hopes of luring his theoretical drug dealers back. For an entire year, undercover cops sold kebabs and sodas at a cost of 30,000 euros to taxpayers, hoping someone would approach them to buy or sell drugs. But nobody did, because Yaşar wasn’t a drug dealer. At long last, police shut down the stand.
Eventually family members of several Turkish victims took their outrage public. They organized demonstrations and marches, shaming investigators into taking a fresh look at the cases. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation became involved. And luck finally ran out for the Nationalist Socialist Underground. In November 2011, Böhnhardt and Mundlos robbed another bank in Thuringia. This time the police gave chase. Mundlos shot his fellow neo-Nazi to death, then turned the gun on himself. Zschäpe burned down their apartment building to destroy evidence; she surrendered days later. Police raided another safe house and found hit lists, a Hitler portrait, videos of the murders, and the Czech semiautomatic—exposing the true nature of the crimes to which police had turned a blind eye for a decade.
At her trial, which began in 2013 and dragged on for five years, Zschäpe blamed the killings on her comrades and insisted that they had kept her in the dark. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. Four other neo-Nazis accused of abetting the robbery-and-murder spree drew shorter sentences. In Germany the revelations that emerged during the proceedings prompted apologies from Merkel, a reckoning with police racism, and a shake-up of the intelligence services. The far right reacted with expressions of defiance. From his prison cell in Norway, the neo-Nazi mass murderer Anders Breivik wrote a fan letter to Zschäpe, praising her as “a martyr.”
Six years after Zschäpe was sent to prison, there are few signs that the far right in Germany has been tamed. Like the white nationalist movement in the United States, the extremists have gained a degree of political legitimacy that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. The New York Times reported that German military intelligence is investigating six hundred far-right extremists said to have infiltrated the ranks of the country’s military. Last May the trial began in Frankfurt of the so-called Reichsbürger movement, a band of nine far-right conspirators, led by an eccentric aristocrat named Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, who planned to force their way into the Reichstag with an arsenal of weapons and seize control of the government. And at a hotel near Potsdam in November 2023, AfD politicians met clandestinely with neo-Nazis to draw up a blueprint for the mass deportation of migrants, asylum seekers, and other foreign residents they considered undesirable. (This time the German public responded with outrage: when the investigative outlet Correctiv exposed the meeting in January, tens of thousands poured into the streets in protest.)
Just a day after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, the fragile three-party coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz collapsed. This opened the way for snap elections in February, an opportunity for the AfD, now polling second nationally, to increase its presence in the Bundestag. As Kushner makes clear in his gripping book, Germany would be foolish to underestimate the white supremacist plotters in its midst.
—November 19, 2024
English (US) · 