Contacts between German secret service and the direct NSU support network already in 2000

The further questioning of accused Carsten Schultze was a rather labored process. Schultze claims to remember hardly anything. He insists on never having been biased against Turks – a claim which becomes absurd when he also reports on an incident in which he and some others had destroyed a kebap stand and now claims not to know the ethnicity of the owner. As far as his political activities in the “Thuringia home guard”, the nazi party NPD and its youth organisation “Young National Democrats” are concerned, Schultze downplays everything.

However, there is one aspect of his testimony that is quite interesting: He reports that already in 2000, he had told the leader of the “Thuringia home guard”, Tino Brandt, about his contact to the three Nazis who had gone underground. Accordingly, Brandt had known of these contacts in 2000 at the latest. Tino Brandt was an informer for the “office for the protection of the constitution”, the German secret service, during the entire time in question.

Schultze also reports that in 2000, another former Nazi who had contacts to the secret service had asked him directly about “the Three”, but that he had denied any knowledge.

Schultze claims that when it became clear shortly thereafter that Brandt was an informer for the secret service, he had not given any thoughts to the issue – and this in spite of the fact that Brandt knew of his actions in support of Böhnhardt, Mundlos and Zschäpe.

It has thus become clear that the three Nazis who had gone underground and their supporters were in the focus of the German secret service already at this early moment in time.