Court continues taking evidence very slowly

The court continued the trial today – like in the last weeks, it only dealt with a very limited program. One cannot shake the impression that the court is simply trying to somehow fill the time until the statement by Zschäpe – which has now been announced for the week of 7 December 2015.

Two federal criminal police detectives testified on further notes resulting from the NSU spying out potential victims, this time in Nuremberg and in several cities in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Again, they found markings for potential victims of racist and anti-Semitic attacks, as well offices of the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties, members of parliament and, again, gun shops. (see the report of 21 October 2015).

Another detective had found fingerprints of Zschäpe on two newspaper articles in the NSU archive detailing its crimes. He testified as to the precise location of these prints – the articles were on pages somewhere in the middle of the newspapers, thus Zschäpe having touched them accidentally seems impossible.

A decision on the challenge for alleged bias brought by the Wohlleben defense is to be expected before the next trial week – the challenge will be rejected. One interesting aspect of this challenge lies in several statements by Wohlleben’s defense attorneys: they had stated that they had only told Wohlleben himself of the announcement that Zschäpe was considering a statement last week (see the report of 10 November 2015). However, they had told the court already in September that Wohlleben was also considering making a statement, but that he first wished to hear Zschäpe’s statement. There are two ways to clear up this contradiction: either last week’s statement by Schneiders, Klemke and Nahrath was untrue, or they severely violated their duties towards their client by not only neglecting to tell him of Zschäpe’s plans, but by also announcing a possible statement by Wohlleben without talking to him about it first.