Beate Zschäpe tells Munich court she was not involved in attacks by the National Socialist Underground but she regretted failing to prevent them

A woman accused of being the only surviving member of a murderous German neo-Nazi cell that remained undetected for over a decade, has broken her silence for the first time telling a court she was not involved in the planning or carrying out of the attacks but that she regretted failing to prevent them.



Beate Zschäpe, who is on trial for 10 murders, two bomb attacks and several robberies, claimed she was unaware of the motive for the killings, which she insisted had been carried out by her two former lovers, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt.

In a statement read out by her lawyer, Zschäpe painted an image of herself as a victim and passive bystander, insisting she only found out about the killings after they had taken place.

She said she had not been able to muster the courage to turn her back on the men or to go to the police, because they had threatened to kill themselves if she did so. She also denied being part of the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

Families of the NSU’s victims – eight men of Turkish origin who either owned or worked in restaurants or shops, a Greek man and a German police officer – listened intently as Zschäpe’s lawyer, Mathias Grasel, read out the 53-page statement over a period of 90 minutes.

The 40-year-old defendant looked on passively during the most dramatic day yet of her two-and-a-half-year trial, which is taking place in the same cramped court room – Room 101 of Munich’s central court – where the former Nazi extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk stood trial in 2011 and tennis champion Boris Becker was convicted of tax evasion in 2002.

Lawyers of the victims said ahead of the statement they hoped Zschäpe would throw some light on details as to how the victims were selected and how the NSU was led to their targets.

But while considerable detail was given about her childhood – including a difficult relationship with her mother – and her complicated relationship with the two men, Zschäpe revealed little about the killings. She did, however, say that the group had killed the policewoman, Michèle Kiesewetter, and seriously injured her colleague in 2007, in order to steal their weapons.

She said she felt remorse for failing to stop the slayings, saying: “I apologise sincerely to all the victims and all the relatives of the victims of the crimes carried out by Mundlos and Böhnhardt . I feel morally responsible for not being able to have prevented 10 murders and two bomb attacks.”

She described meeting and falling in love with Mundlos in the late 1980s, and how she had become part of the far-right scene that grew after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then on her 19th birthday she met and fell in love with Mundlos’s friend, Böhnhardt, who was even more integrated in far-right circles.

Zschäpe was arrested in November 2011, after the bodies of Mundlos and Böhnhardt were found in a burnt out caravan in Eisenach, following a bank robbery that went badly wrong, after which the men apparently killed each other in a suicide pact. Zschape handed herself into police and chose to remain silent until Wednesday.

Families of the victims later described the statement as a “slap in the face”.

Gamze Kubaşik, the daughter of Mehmet Kubaşik, a kiosk owner who was shot in Dortmund in 2006, said outside the courtroom: “I don’t believe a word of it. The meagre hopes I had from the outset that this explanation would clarify the precise circumstances of my father’s murder have been dashed.” She added: “It’s pure tactics and appears completely contrived. Neither do I accept her apology.”

The reason Zschäpe decided to speak out followed a medical assessment after she had complained of suffering from exhaustion. A psychologist who examined her said the mental burden of remaining silent was making her ill, and urged her to persuade her lawyers to change their defence strategy to let her speak.

Following 248 days of trial in which the court has heard hundreds of statements, including often unflattering descriptions of Zschäpe by former friends and boyfriends, it is possibly the only chance she now has to influence the outcome of the trial, which could result in her receiving a lifelong prison sentence.

How Zschäpe’s statement might cause the court to alter its judgment of her remains to be seen, but those who have followed the trial throughout have said that Zschäpe has hitherto emerged as a highly confident, dye-in-the-wool Nazi, who has shown no remorse for the NSU’s victims.

Annette Ramelsberger of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, who has attended every trial day so far, told German broadcaster DLF that she had been struck in particular by how unmoved Zschäpe was by the accounts given by the parents of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat, the owner of an internet cafe who was gunned down in broad daylight in Kassell on 6 April 2006.

“The father found him lying in his blood, and he threw himself on the floor of the court in front of Beate Zschäpe to show her how he had found him, shouting: ‘My little lamb, my little lamb’. The mother then appealed to her as a woman, saying she hadn’t been able to sleep ... to tell her the truth.”

Zschäpe, said Ramelsberger, remained expressionless throughout. “If someone’s able to keep such a stony-faced expression, it’s either high theatrics or they have no sympathy,” she added.

The NSU cell went undetected for over a decade, leading to accusations that the police and security services had made grave mistakes. The police admit failing to consider that the killings might have been racially motivated, and for a long time they were viewed as individual incidents, the consequence of internecine strife within Germany’s Turkish community.

The trial has also caused considerable embarrassment for Germany’s domestic spy agency, the BfV, after it was revealed that the agency had shredded documents following the NSU’s exposure in a possible attempt to cover up aspects of its investigative role. The BfV’s head, Heinz Fromm, was forced to resigned over the revelations.

Wednesday’s showdown was also timely coming in a week in which Germany has once again begun debating whether it should ban the far right party, the National Democrats (NPD), particularly following the recent success of the Front National in neighbouring France.

The trial is expected to last until the middle of next year.