On the notes showing the NSU scouting out potential victims: an insight into their strategic plans?

The first witness today was a police officer who had questioned Juliane Walther. Walther herself had testified in court on 26 March 2014 and 27 March 2014 and had answered evasively, claimed memory gaps and even tried to deny some of the statements she had made in her police interview. Today’s witness confirmed that she had indeed made these statements to the police.

Wohlleben defence attorney Klemke asked the witness a number of questions concerning his earlier career in the “state security division” of the Jena criminal police. The witness proved unable to correctly answer even rather basic questions correctly. However, this does not mean that Klemke achieved anything for his client Wohlleben: it became quite clear that and why the Nazi scene in the 1990s was able to conduct its activities largely without police intervention – but that of course has nothing to do with the questioning of Juliane Walther in the year 2012.
The next witness was a federal criminal police detective who had evaluated several maps of cities in Thuringia found in the mobile home in Eisenach. These consisted of notes showing the scouting out of targets for bank robberies, including sketches of the interior of several banks which must have been the result of quite intensive personal reconnaissance. One bank sketched was indeed later robbed.

The last witness, another detective with the federal criminal police, had evaluated maps and list of addresses concerning several cities. A city map of Zwickau showed no marks for potential targets. The city maps and lists for Munich and Nuremberg/Erlangen/Fürth, on the other hand, contained several such notes. A list for Nuremberg contained the address where İsmail Yaşar was shot and killed in June 2005, added by hand. Next to it were several Turkish and Muslim organizations, accommodations for asylum seekers, political parties from the socialist PDS to conservative CSU as well as several gun shops. Some entries again testify to quite intensive personal reconnaissance (“door opens without key, basement is open”).

These notes, all of which come from late 2004/2005, allow a view into the NSU’s future goals and plans: until then, they had murdered small business owners with Turkish roots and committed bombing attacks against “foreigners”, now new groups of potential victims – refuges on the one hand and officials of the state or “the system” on the other hand – enter the picture. The presence of several gun shops is also interesting, after all the NSU had more than enough guns for its purposes and, for all that is known, none of these had been bought, stolen or robbed from gun stores.

All this allows the conclusion that they were trying to plan the next step after the series of Ceska murders. The variety of potential targets in various cities as well as the marking of gun shops makes it seem very likely that in the future, the NSU saw itself in the role of a “super cell” giving instructions to other cells – similar to the “Turner Diaries” by William Pierce, where a secret command structure (“The Order”) gave the individual cells instructions on targets and coordinated common actions.