Germany’s Far-Right Surge Isn’t New 

One morning in November 2011, two men walked into a bank in the eastern German city of Eisenach, pistol-whipped the bank teller, and stole around $99,000. After local police traced the men to a camper van on the side of a nearby road, gunshots rang out, and the vehicle went up in flames. Police officers found two men dead inside; one had shot the other and then turned the gun on himself. Later that day, after hearing what had happened in Eisenach, a woman about 100 miles away poured gasoline around her apartment and set it on fire before fleeing the scene.

Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, Jacob Kushner, Grand Central Publishing, 336 pp., $30, May 2024

The two men, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, weren’t typical bank robbers: Along with the woman, Beate Zschäpe, they formed a trio of neo-Nazi terrorists intent on ridding Germany of immigrants and anyone else they believed would threaten the country’s white identity. And the police’s investigation uncovered far more than a string of bank robberies. Böhnhardt and Mundlos had stolen the money to fund the underground terrorist group they led, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), which had planned and committed a series of murders across Germany while escaping the notice of authorities.

When the revelations about the NSU first emerged, they shook Germany to its core, but the story remains relatively unknown outside the country. Journalist Jacob Kushner’s new book, Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, seeks to change that.

“A nation that liked to think it had atoned for its racist past would be forced to admit that violent prejudice was a thing of the present. That sixty years after [Adolf] Hitler’s Nazis led Jews and other minorities to their deaths during the Holocaust, German police were so blinded by bias that they couldn’t recognize the racist violence unfolding around them,” Kushner writes. “The case would compel Germans to acknowledge that terrorism isn’t always Islamist or foreign. More often, it’s homegrown and white. And that in an age of unparalleled mass migration, the targets of white terrorism are increasingly immigrants.”

Told primarily through the perspectives of the victims’ family members and others who proactively sought to root out right-wing extremist terrorism, Look Away is divided into three parts. First, Kushner describes how Böhnhardt, Mundlos, and Zschäpe radicalized in the eastern German city of Jena in the late 1990s. They didn’t come to their views alone: After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany saw a spike in the number of asylum-seekers arriving in the country. Those new arrivals were often met with protests and violence, including a handful of high-profile riots and attacks on refugee housing. Jena had a thriving right-wing extremist scene at the time. It was led by Tino Brandt, a kind of double agent: He served as a government informant who was supposed to report on the activities of neo-Nazis while funding his own groups promoting the same far-right ideology.

A view of the burnt-out remains of the apartment that was once the residence of Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos, and Beate Zschäpe in Zwickau, Germany, on Nov. 13, 2011. Marco Prosch/Getty Images

The second section of the book chronicles how the three extremists spent 13 years planning and executing the murders of 10 immigrants across Germany, all under the noses of German authorities. The murders were only connected and solved after the bank robbery in 2011. Kushner lays much of the blame for the NSU’s decade-long killing spree at the feet of the authorities, whose investigations were guided by harmful tropes—bolstered by the German media—about immigrants being involved in drugs or organized crime.

The firsthand accounts of victims’ families powerfully illustrate just how much police officers’ assumptions about the victims led them astray. For instance, Gamze Kubasik, whose father, Mehmet Kubasik, was murdered in their family kiosk in the city of Dortmund in 2006, explained that she and her mother were interrogated for hours about Mehmet’s supposed illicit activities. “I couldn’t listen to it anymore,” she said. “We felt like criminals.”

Some aspects of the investigations verge on the ridiculous. For instance, after Böhnhardt and Mundlos shot and killed Ismail Yasar at his kebab stand in Nuremberg in 2005, German police doggedly pursued the theory that Yasar had been dealing drugs from his stand. They spent a year and around $36,000 of taxpayer money selling kebabs and sodas undercover at a snack bar they had opened to help corroborate their theory, waiting for someone to come up and ask about buying drugs—“But nobody did, because Yasar wasn’t a drug dealer,” Kushner writes. Kerem, Yasar’s son, “couldn’t help feeling that if his father had been a native-born German, his murder would have quickly been solved.”

But Kushner also argues that German society writ large has been complacent in acknowledging the scope of anti-immigrant, white nationalist sentiment after World War II. White nationalism “had never gone away,” he writes. “Similar events that precipitated the Holocaust—pogroms, attacks against Jewish-owned businesses, the expulsion of Jews from their homes—were now happening to immigrants.” Especially in eastern Germany, the 1990s saw the proliferation of neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, to the point that, in reference to skinheads who committed acts of violence across the east, that period is sometimes called the “baseball bat years.”

The book’s third section covers the NSU trial, which culminated in 2018 with Zschäpe’s conviction on 10 counts of murder and charges for several of the trio’s accomplices. The verdict brought only cold comfort to the families of those killed. “The NSU murdered my father … but the investigators have ruined his honor—they murdered him a second time,” Gamze Kubasik said.

Zschäpe during her trial for murder in Munich on Dec. 9, 2015.Joerg Koch/Getty Images

Lest anyone believe that Germany has fully learned its lessons from the NSU affair, Kushner connects it with more recent instances of hate and violence against members of Germany’s immigrant community. The NSU scandal has never fully faded from German public discourse, but after the trial ended, it dropped out of headlines—and was most often mentioned in the wake of other incidents of right-wing extremist violence. In February 2020, a right-wing extremist killed nine people of immigrant background in the central German city of Hanau, targeting two shisha bars in his racist rampage. In November 2022, a 54-year-old man was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for sending threats to politicians, journalists, and other public figures, including Seda Basay-Yildiz, a lawyer of Turkish background in Frankfurt who represented the families of several NSU victims; the letters were signed “NSU 2.0.”

Part of the trouble with eradicating white terrorism in Germany is that anti-immigrant sentiment is alive and well in national politics, too. In January, the German investigative news outlet Correctiv published a bombshell report revealing that right-wing extremists had met in secret late last year to discuss their plans for deporting millions of people of immigrant background, including German citizens. Among those who attended the meeting in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, were high-level politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which holds 77 seats in Germany’s parliament and was polling at 22 percent nationwide at the time. (After the Correctiv report and a spate of other unrelated scandals since its release, the party’s support has now dropped to 16 percent, but it performed nearly five percentage points better in the recent European Parliament elections than it did in 2019.)

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These extremists’ plans for “remigration” of those with immigrant backgrounds shed light on the battle lines over who gets to belong in Germany and who doesn’t—and who ultimately decides. To many, they were also a reminder that German authorities have underestimated the threat posed by far-right ideology in a country that prides itself on how it has processed its Nazi history. The Correctiv report prompted widespread backlash among the German population, with millions of people taking to the streets to declare “Never Again.”

Still, the AfD is poised to make gains in three eastern German state elections this fall—including Thuringia, where Böhnhardt, Mundlos, and Zschäpe grew up, and Saxony, where they were based. AfD politicians remain the parliamentary voice of those who would prefer to rid the country of immigrants. “These new neo-Nazis feel emboldened by the rhetoric of a political party that believes Germany has become too fixated with remembering the terror of its past,” Kushner writes of the AfD.

Demonstrators struggle with riot police outside the entrance to the courtroom at the Oberlandesgericht München court building on the first day of the NSU murder trial in Munich on May 6, 2013. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Although Look Away is a German story, Kushner draws connections to illustrate that the failure to confront anti-immigrant, right-wing extremist violence is a problem across Western democracies. The examples are myriad: Whether it led to the slaughter of Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; or Mexican American and other shoppers in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, the core ideology that fueled the NSU trio—that of white supremacy—transcends national borders.

That makes the NSU story a warning to the United States as it grapples with its own problems with white terrorism. Terrorist attacks by right-wing extremists have been on the rise in recent years: According to the Anti-Defamation League, such attacks, primarily carried out by white supremacists, killed 58 people in the United States between 2017 and 2022. “The United States will not be spared Germany’s crisis, or its carnage, if we continue to look away,” Kushner concludes.