Germany: Where police overlook neo-Nazi murderers

Germany has come “face to face with our shame,” said Ernst Elitz in the Berlin Bild. Last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel held a state memorial service for the victims of the Zwickau cell, a group of neo-Nazi terrorists who killed one Greek and eight Turkish shopkeepers, and one policewoman, over the course of more than seven years. Police never even considered a far-right motive until the case broke wide open last fall, when two cell members committed suicide following a botched bank robbery. Materials proving their guilt were found in their apartment. At the memorial, Merkel apologized to the families and to the Turkish community in Germany for the authorities’ failure to identify and stop the xenophobic killers.

The worst part about the whole affair was the blaming of the victims, said David Crossland in the Hamburg Der Spiegel. When the murders began, the police referred to them as the “döner killings,” an “insensitive” designation that referred to the Turkish meat sold by most of the victims. Authorities immediately assumed the victims must have been involved in some kind of criminal activity, like gambling or drugs. Relatives and friends of victims were investigated and in some cases accused. The Interior Ministry now says it will set up a registry of known neo-Nazis, patterned after its list of radical Islamists. That’s at least a start. Because there are sure to be “more potential terrorists lurking in the far-right scene.”

It’s not enough, said Stefan Reinecke in the Berlin Die Tageszeitung. The investigations into the murders amounted to the persecution of grieving families. Only institutional racism could account for such a “disastrous failure” of policing. “Why did the investigators look everywhere but in the neo-Nazi milieu?” We can’t simply shrug and say we’ll do better without finding out exactly why we did so badly—and who made the decisions. “The answers are not yet forthcoming. We owe them to the victims.”

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The extremists are still active, said Helen Pidd in the London Guardian. In the four months since the Zwickau cell was uncovered, “Germany’s far Right has been celebrating rather than condemning the killing spree.” Soccer hooligans have been chanting “terror cell Zwickau” at games, and the Pink Panther’s theme song plays at fascist rallies, a nod to the bizarre videos the group produced featuring that cartoon character. The extreme-right National Democratic Party, or NPD, proudly hangs in its office a Germanic rune that was the symbol for the Nazis’ breeding program to produce Aryan children. “Ger­many’s far Right no longer hides in the shadows but is swaggering into clearer view.”