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Thirty-eight-year-old Enver Şimşek ran a large flower distribution center in southern Germany. On one particular day in the late summer of 2000, he found himself working at a small flower shop on a busy street near the edge of Nuremberg, sitting in for a worker on vacation. After setting up the shop, the practicing Muslim paused to recite a morning prayer, withdrawing to the back of his white delivery van labelled “Blumen Şimşek” to do so. Suddenly, two men in bicycling outfits approach the van by foot, throw open its doors, and open fire on Enver, before slamming them shut and disappearing on bicycles stashed nearby. Eventually, waiting customers begin to wonder what happened to the flower shop’s attendant and call the police, who promptly discover Enver, still clinging to life in the back of the van, shot eight times in the head and torso. Enver Şimşek would die from his injuries two days later on September 11, 2000, leaving behind a wife and two children aged thirteen and fourteen. Şimşek was the first victim of a series of murders and bombing attacks that puzzled German authorities for eleven years, not least because potential racist or political motives were systematically ignored, despite the fact that nine of the ten murders were carried out with the same Česká 83 pistol and the first nine victims were all of Turkish or Kurdish backgrounds, with the exception of one Greek small businessman. On June 13, 2001, forty-nine-year-old Nuremberg tailor Abdurrahim Özüdoğru would meet a similar fate, as would grocer Süleyman Taşköprü (thirty-one years old) in Hamburg on June 27 and Munich shop owner Habil Kılıç (thirty-eight years old) on August 29. All three were murdered, shot in the head with a Česká 83. Following a noticeable two-and-a-half-year pause, the Česká 83 reemerged in the coastal city of Rostock on February 25, 2004, implicated in the murder of twenty-five-year-old döner kebab seller Mehmet Turgut. The same pistol would go on to kill İsmail Yaşar (fifty years old) on June 9, 2005 — Nuremberg’s third victim. Only six days later, forty-one-year-old locksmith co-owner Theodoros Boulgarides would die in Munich. On April 4, 2006, thirty-nine-year old Mehmet Kubaşık would be shot in Dortmund, and only two days later a twenty-one-year-old internet café proprietor named Halit Yozgat would be gunned down in Kassel. For the victims’ families, the shock of their murders was followed by years of gut-wrenching investigations as suspects in their loved ones’ deaths by German police. The list of clichés and ethnic stereotypes deployed by authorities in their investigation spoke volumes about the attitudes harbored by police towards Turkish immigrants in Germany. Police suspected the murderers were related to Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) protection rackets, the Turkish mafia, private debts, gambling addictions, tax dodging and, most often, jealousy and marital disagreements. Enver Şimşek’s wife Adile was shown a picture of a “blonde German woman” by police, telling her it was her murdered husband’s secret lover with whom he had conceived two children. By doing so, the police hoped to compel Adile, whom they suspected of killing her husband in a fit of jealousy, to admit to the crime. Only much later would the family learn that the story had been a fabrication. None of the officials tasked with the investigation considered racist motives as a potential factor, although multiple individuals interviewed by authorities expressed concerns that a violent racist was on the loose, hunting immigrants. Witness statements from more than one of the murders described two men on bicycles, but police largely ignored this fact as well. When asked why police neglected to pursue links to Nazism or the bicyclists, then-chief investigator of the Munich murder commission and popular author Josef Wilfling responded, “Have you ever seen a Nazi on a bike?” Police in Nuremberg went so far as to open up a fake döner kebab shop to lure the Turkish mafia into collecting protection money. In one instance, police even flew in a psychic from Iran who claimed to be in contact with the victims. Authorities were determined to investigate every possible lead, or at least every lead that confirmed their prejudices about the Turkish and Kurdish immigrant communities. The media, supposedly a democratic society’s fourth estate responsible for holding the government to account, accepted the police’s racist assumptions uncritically and began referring to the series of killings as the “Döner Murders”. This stereotypical narrative dominated public perception of the case. Despite pleas for help from victims like Envir Şimşek’s nineteen-year-old daughter Semiya, few outside of the Turkish and Kurdish communities listened. The two-thousand-strong demonstrations held in Kassel and Dortmund a month after the deaths of Mehmet Kubaşık and Halit Yozgat under the slogan “No Tenth Victim” remained almost exclusively Turkish events. Indicative of the state’s attitude at the time, a position paper drafted by the Baden-Württemberg State Office of Criminal Investigations in January 2007 stated: “Given that killing human beings is considered highly taboo within our cultural space, we can safely assume that the perpetrator is, in terms of his behavioral system, located far outside our local system of values and norms.” This treatment went on for years. The friends and family of the victims would finally learn the true identity of their murderers in 2011, albeit not as a result of effective police work, but through the self-incrimination of the murderers themselves. A motor home in the Thuringian city of Eisenach burst into flames on November 4, 2011. Inside, the charred remains of two bodies were found, both of which had clearly suffered violent deaths before the fire. Hours later, two hundred kilometers away in Zwickau, Saxony, another apartment exploded and burned to the ground. Over the following days, Germany would be rocked by a series of scandals and revelations. Four days later, a woman named Beate Zschäpe turned herself in for the apartment explosion. Police announced that the corpses inside — Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt — were her onetime comrades in a neo-Nazi terrorist cell named the National Socialist Underground. The NSU was responsible for nine racially motivated murders, the killing of one police officer, and the severe injury of another between 1998 and 2011. The group also committed at least three bombing attacks, including detonating a nail bomb on a busy street in Cologne on June 9, 2004, and robbed at least fifteen banks and businesses. Before turning herself in, Zschäpe distributed a series of bizarre and disturbing propaganda videos claiming responsibility for the killings to media, government institutions, and even leftist and antifascist organizations on November 4.

The White Supremacist Web The life stories of Beate Zschäpe (now forty years old) and the deceased Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt have been pored over in the course of the investigation. Adolescents when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the three grew up in the East German city of Jena at a time when the old German Democratic Republic (GDR) authorities were compromised and powerless, but no new authority had emerged to fill the vacuum. This fed into a wave of racist violence across Germany, albeit primarily in the former East, in the early 1990s, culminating in racist pogroms in Hoyerswerda (Saxony) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) for which few participants were ever punished. The government would ultimately respond to the racist street mob by rewriting the constitution to significantly curtail asylum and immigration rights, giving many participants the impression that their violence had helped to enforce the “will of the people.” The young Nazis from Jena would radicalize over the coming decade, taking inspiration from American far-right groups and keenly reading the classic American Nazi tract The Turner Diaries, which almost everyone implicated in the trial had a PDF copy of on their computer. Like Timothy McVeigh and The Order before them, these German Nazis were drawn to the book’s call for “leaderless resistance,” random violence against perceived racial enemies, and an underground, outlaw existence. British neo-Nazi David Copeland, responsible for a devastating nail bomb attack in London in 1999, had likewise been inspired by the Diaries; the NSU’s own nail bombing in 2004 may quite possibly have been inspired by Copeland. Another American import, the Ku Klux Klan, also played a role in the development of neo-Nazi structures in post-reunification Germany. In the early 1990s, KKK hardliner Dennis W. Mahon went on a speaking tour across Germany to recruit young Germans for his “race war,” and would meet Ian Stuart Donaldsen, the founder of Blood & Honour, in Saarland. Suspiciously, several key witnesses of the KKK’s influence on far-right terror networks in Germany have died under mysterious circumstances, such as KKK police informant Thomas Richter, aka “Corelli,” whose death in April 2014 from “hyperglycemia” remains shrouded in suspicion to this day. The role of KKK members within the Baden-Württemberg police also remains unclear. For example, the commander on duty at the time of the attempted assassination of police officers Michèlle Keisewetter and Martin Arnold was, as it turns out, a KKK member. Additionally, incontrovertible evidence shows that FBI agents were in immediate proximity to the scene of the crime. We know this information because the trial has focused extensively on the five defendants — Beate Zschäpe and four men accused of “aiding and abetting a murder” and “supporting a terrorist association” — and their history. But the NSU was not confined to these individuals; they had hundreds of behind-the-scenes supporters and enjoyed a high level of contact with the state. This contact has meanwhile become the biggest scandal in the history of the postwar German intelligence services.