BEATE ZSCHÄPE has just been charged in a Munich court as the surviving member of a neo-Nazi trio that, between 2000 and 2007, murdered eight Turks, one Greek and a policewoman, besides planting nail bombs and robbing banks. She is accused of helping two male accomplices, who shot their victims in the head with the same Ceska 83 pistol, with the aim of getting Turks and other foreigners to flee Germany in terror.

The crimes of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), as the group styled itself, have held Germany in thrall ever since November 2011, when the group botched a bank robbery. The police closed in, and the two men killed themselves. Before turning herself in, Ms Zschäpe set fire to the flat where they had been living under false identities and sent out gory videos they had made, in the style of a Pink Panther cartoon, of their dead murder victims.

Germany is now consumed with soul-searching. How could the NSU, in hiding since 1998, have stayed undetected for so long? For years the police searched for clues not among neo-Nazis but in the Turkish population, even suspecting the victims’ own families. If German intelligence services had worked better together, they might have stopped the NSU earlier.

Instead, in a country that is highly sensitive to neo-Nazi threats, the bureaucracies failed utterly. Sebastian Edathy, chairman of an investigating parliamentary committee, counts 36 of them: the police forces of the 16 states and the federal government, the same number of state and federal constitutional-protection offices (similar to America’s FBI), the army’s intelligence branch and the federal spy agency. Some shredded pertinent documents, though probably from incompetence rather than complicity. All failed to share information. Five officials have so far resigned.

The bigger question is how to stop Germany’s neo-Nazi fringe committing more violence. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a research outfit linked to the Social Democratic Party, has found that, although the number of people holding extreme right-wing views in the former West Germany has fallen, it still amounts to 7.3% of the population. In the former East the number has grown to 15.8%. East Germany is where the NSU originated and hid.

Early next month the German states will decide whether to ask for a ban on the National-Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a far-right group with links to the NSU. But it is not certain that the case for a ban—which requires evidence of the NPD trying to undermine Germany’s democracy—can withstand a constitutional-court challenge. A previous attempt to ban the NPD failed in 2003, after the court ruled that moles inside the party had compromised the evidence.

Another failure in court might perversely bestow a “knighthood” on the NPD in the eyes of its followers, worries Hans-Georg Maassen, president of the federal constitutional-protection office. Even a legal success may not solve the underlying problem, says Mr Edathy, because it could accelerate an exodus from formal associations such as the NPD to looser groupings like the NSU. The NPD is already using this prospect as propaganda. This month it petitioned the court to be certified as compliant with the constitution, and said it would if need be go to the European Court of Human Rights.

As Ms Zschäpe’s case proceeds and various investigative committees report next year, some reforms will begin. The crime-fighting and surveillance bureaucracies need to co-operate and share information. A new counter-terrorism centre opened in Cologne this month. Barbara John, the ombudsman for families of the NSU victims, also suggests that, when a crime involves a victim from an ethnic minority, investigators should look into possible neo-Nazi motives. Beyond that, the best policy will be to drain the neo-Nazi swamps with education and good arguments.