The court ups the pressure to finish the trial. And: motion for evidence on the “attack after the attack” in the Keupstraße in Cologne.

Today the court first introduced into evidence some documents: on the one hand, based on a motion by the Wohlleben defense, it read out a Nazi party press release penned by Wohlleben containing ethnopluralist rhetoric. On the other hand, and more relevant for the judgment, the court considered a list of “clips” to be extracted from the “Pink Panther” TV series and thorough instructions for doing so. Everything points to these “clips” being the one Zschäpe offered to cut in a bet and therefore to Zschäpe being involved in the production of the video with which the NSU claimed responsibility for its crimes.

The court then rejected further motions for evidence – in fact, all such motions which had not yet been decided. Some of the decisions showed quite clearly that the court is simply trying to finish this trial, never mind the reasoning: inter alia, the court refused to ask the secret service in Hamburg for information on a Nazi event organized by neo-Nazi and attorney Jürgen Rieger in Hetendorf in 1997 – an event which, according to witness testimony, Zschäpe had visited without Mundlos or Böhnhardt. The court claimed that this event was irrelevant for its judgment – mere weeks after it had tried to find out more about the event from a former officer of the secret service in Thuringia (see the report of 16 February 2017).

The court also rejected – with more respectable reasoning – the last remaining motions for evidence brought by the Wohlleben defense. It than fixed a time limit of one week for any further motions for evidence. This very strict time limit came as something of a surprise, particularly given the way the court has conducted the trial in the last few months, which can hardly be described as particularly speedy.

The defense teams asked for a three hour break for internal consultations, which resulted in the statement that they need further time for consultations – the trial will continue tomorrow at 1 pm, likely with a challenge for alleged bias brought by the Wohlleben defense.

Today, several attorneys representing victims of the nail bomb attack in the Keupstraße in Cologne brought a motion for evidence concerning the “attack after the attack”, i.e. the years of investigations directed against the victims and accompanied by accusations leveled against them in the press – all this despite a modus operandi clearly pointing towards a racist motivation of this attack. The motion ends with the statement that “This “attack after the attack” was the work not of the NSU, but solely of the state.” It can be downloaded (in the German language) here.