Once more on the robberies, and on “keeping traditions” within the Nazi scene.

The first witness today was a courageous teller working in a Zwickau bank which was robbed by Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos on 23 September 2003. Even though one of the two hit her in the face with his gun and loudly asked the other “should I shoot her dead?”, she did not open the safe. Her colleague confirmed her statement; she too was attacked in order to force her to hand over money, but was able to flee the bank after a short while.

The two perpetrators escaped with a little under € 500. According to the indictment, they fled the scene via bike and mobile home – again very similar to the modus operandi concerning other bank robberies and the murders.

A police detective reported on the investigations after 4 November 2011: Guns and clothes found in the NSU apartment in the Frühlingsstraße corresponded to those seen on the surveillance camera footage from the bank. Also found in the apartment were shoes corresponding to footprints left in the bank and a map on which the bank was marked. The mobile home was rented in the name of André Eminger, according to the indictment by Eminger himself.

The last witness was Edda Schmidt, longtime Nazi activist and currently inter alia member of the executive council of the Nazi party NPD in the federal Land of Baden-Württemberg. She was speaker at an NPD-organized training section in Thuringia. Both Tino Brandt and the brother of André Kapke had reported, with some variation in the details, that sometime during the weekend, a “Blood & Honour” activist from Saxony had reported that “the Three” were doing okay. Kapke stated that Edda Schmidt had organized this conversation.

Schmidt herself claimed today that this conversation had never happened. She clearly tried not to clear up anything in her testimony, stated in response to a question “I am not a traitor.” Kapke’s testimony that Schmidt had organized the conversation concerning the NSU members in the underground is thus not called into question by Schmidt’s denial.

Her testimony also showed quite clearly how young people are influenced within the Nazi scene: she stated that over two days, she had given a lecture on “traditions” and Heathen religion, had tried to “bring some culture” to the young people. This was the way in which young people were indoctrinated in a proclaimed Heathen pseudo-religion based mostly on racist and anti-Semitic thought and the idea that the “Germanic people” was superior to all others. People like Edda Schmidt, whose father was a proud SS member, whose mother was active in the Nazi “Bund deutscher Mädel”, who was active in Nazi circles since her childhood, provided to young people the “cultural” background which they would later use as justification for their racist crimes of violence.