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To her neighbours in the quiet German town of Zwickau, she was the “friendly, sociable and generous” young woman who liked to drop by for a glass of prosecco. To her comrades on the German far Right, she was a smart, assertive and violent member of their secret terrorist militia.

Revealed in a Munich court, the hidden life of Beate Zschaepe, a mousy, bespectacled 38-year-old with the looks of a librarian, has given Germany a chilling insight into its neo-Nazi movement.

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In the biggest home-grown terrorist scandal since the days of the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s, her group is accused of carrying out ten murders, two bombings and 15 bank robberies during a 13-year campaign.

Worse still, Germany’s police and spy agencies thought the killings, dubbed the “kebab murders” because they targeted mainly Turkish immigrants, were part of a feud within the Turkish mafia.

On Thursday, a parliamentary report into how Miss Zschaepe’s gang went undetected branded the affair “a humiliating defeat” for the security services, saying they had “dramatically underestimated” the neo-Nazi threat.