{"id":1512,"date":"2018-01-07T18:31:59","date_gmt":"2018-01-07T17:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/?p=1512"},"modified":"2018-01-07T18:31:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-07T17:31:59","slug":"13-december-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/2018\/01\/07\/13-december-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"13 December 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Further closing statements on the Keupstra\u00dfe and on the murder in Heilbronn<\/h4>\n

Today the court heard further closing statements by victims\u2019 counsel on the murder of Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter and the attempted murder of her colleague Martin A. in Heilbronn.<\/p>\n

Prior to those statement, Alexander Hoffmann concluded his statement begun last week<\/a> on the ideology of the NSU and its network of supporters.<\/p>\n

Hoffman showed that the many different political organizations, from the Jena division of the \u201cThuringia Homeguard\u201d, whose members wore SA-like uniforms, to the prissy-seaming Nazi Party NPD, whose members were often called \u201cside partings\u201d based on their haircuts, and to Blood and Honours, whose members wore tattoes and considered themselves part of a subculture, were all united by a common ideology:<\/p>\n

\u201cAn ideology based on an imagined white Race or German Volk, which is characterized either by blood, genes or skin color and which is claimed to be in a permanent state of self-defense against an imagined danger of the \u2018death of the Volk\u2019, a never-ending \u2018Racial Holy War\u2019 in which the defense of one\u2019s own collective necessitates getting rid of or killing the alleged danger.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Among the Blood and Honour publications found in the group\u2019s garage in Jena were papers detailing the strategy of \u201cleaderless resistance\u201d, a strategy developed in the US and calling for armed actions by independent cells with the twin aims of destabilizing the state and provoking conflicts between \u201cWhites\u201d and African Americans. These conflicts were then to be escalated to the point where they ended in the civil war the Nazi groups and Militias were preparing for \u2013 the \u201cRacial Holy War\u201d.<\/p>\n

These booklets show that the strategy discussions of the Jena group described by accused Gerlach concerned \u201carmed struggle\u201d and \u201cleaderless resistance\u201d. The members of Blood and Honour Saxony, which according to witness Antje Probst had discussed \u201cactions\u201d with Mundlos, Zsch\u00e4pe and B\u00f6hnhardt, must also have known this strategy \u2013 not only the publications, but also the music spread by Blood and Honour contained explicit calls to join the \u201carmed struggle\u201d, contained glorifications of the \u201cRacial Holy War\u201d and the fight for the future of \u201cWhite children\u201d.\u00a0 The activities of the NSU, commission of murders without claiming responsibility for them, follow the strategy of \u201cleaderless resistance\u201d almost to a t. The zine of accused Eminger, \u201cAryan Law and Order\u201d, portrays the same ideology in an almost religiously admiring fashion.<\/p>\n

Hoffmann next turned to the Nazi party NPD and accused Wohlleben, who had claimed to have always distanced himself from violent acts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe \u2018death of the Volk\u2019 campaign which has been discussed here multiple times, which accused Wohlleben and his defense have presented once more in his statement, is based on the basic idea of an ethnically-based Volk, of v\u00f6lkisch racism and of the paranoid idea of a world-wide conspiracy of capital and\/or Jewry aiming at the destruction of the German, the White race.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cLike the others, the accused Wohlleben had internalized the ideology of the Thuringia Home Guard, the ideology of Blood and Honour, as expressed in the slogan \u201914 words\u2019. An ideology of v\u00f6lkisch racism whose protagonists see themselves in a state of permanent self-defense against the imagined death of the Volk, a permanent \u2018Racial Holy War\u2019 in which the defense of one\u2019s own collective necessitates getting rid of or killing the alleged danger. Even if it cannot be proven that Wohlleben has ever dirties his own hands, that he was personally involved in individual murders or attacks, he has done everything he can on an ideological level so that his comrades could commit their acts under the label of the NSU with a clean conscience. And his comrades in turn could be sure of his ideological consent to their crimes.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

We would like to refer readers to the summary of the statement<\/a> (in German).<\/p>\n

The next statement was held by counsel Sabine Singer. She represents Hasan Y., who worked in his brother\u2019s barber shop in the Keupstra\u00dfe in Cologne and who was injured in the explosion of the nail bomb. Even though he was comparatively \u201clucky\u201d to have been in the back of the shop when the bomb exploded, he is suffering from psychological and physical injuries until this day.<\/p>\n

Mr. Y. had seen of the perpetrators, had described him to the police as a light-skinned type with blond sideburns. The police did not believe him, asked whether it could not have been a dark-skinned man instead. The investigative methods of the police, which have been detailed many times, also affected the Y. family, whose members were set against each other by the police by planting suspicions against each other in their minds.<\/p>\n

But counsel Singer also stated that the Y. family, with the moral and material support of others in the Keupstra\u00dfe, had managed to reopen the barber shop. They had had high hopes for the criminal trial. In the end, the family members were happy that accused Zsch\u00e4pe will be convicted for the bombing attack and that it it clear once and for all that the brothers Y. were victims, not suspects.<\/p>\n

Singer was followed by counsel Walter Martinek. He represents police officer Martin A., who was severely wounded during the attempted murder in Heilbronn. It was only due to luck bordering on a miracle that his client had not only survived the attack, but was even able to lead a mostly normal life. Nonetheless, he still suffered from psychological and physical injuries, not least the loss of the basic trust inherent in every human being.<\/p>\n

Martinek too had no doubts that B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos had fired the shots which killed Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter and severely injured Martin A. \u2013 after all, their mobile home had been seen close to the murder scene and the murder weapons as well as the victims\u2019 police weapons had been found with the NSU, as had a pair of pants worn by Uwe Mundlos drenched in Martin A.\u2019s blood. Martinek also had no doubts that Beate Zsch\u00e4pe was responsible for these murders as a co-perpetrator.<\/p>\n

But he could not understand why the statements of several witnesses who had seen several other suspicious persons near the crime scene were being totally ignored. These statements and their treatment raised questions, \u201cnot only for conspiracy theorists\u201d, and it seemed that the basic idea was that \u201cwhere there are no investigations now, there will be no need to destroy case files later\u201d.<\/p>\n

This was also true with respect to the motive for the murders: if the attack had been based on hatred against the state, why had the perpetrators used a different gun than for the Ceska series, thus hiding the connection between the murders and failing to provoke the state as intended? Neither was he convinced that the motive had been to gain access to police weapons \u2013 not least because the Theresienwiese, a wide open park, would have been a very badly chosen location for such a crime. One possibility he presented was that the perpetrators had been at the Theresienwiese for other reasons, preparing for some other crime, had been disturbed by the police officers and had decided to kill them.<\/p>\n

The next statement was presented by counsel G\u00e4rtner, who represents the mother of Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter. Among other issues, he dealt in detail with Beate Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s statements and showed why these are unbelievable. He referred to the pictures of holidays the three spend together: \u201cOne does not go hand in hand, without any care in the world, with a racist and unpredictable killer like Uwe B\u00f6hnhardt, if one does not want exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He, too, raised doubts concerning the motives for the killing proposed by the federal prosecution, but added that all statements on this issue would remain speculative as long as Zsch\u00e4pe remained silent on the issue. However, it was clear that Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter and Michael A. had been random victims, that there had been no personal motive based on any sort of connection formed in Thuringia, which was also Kiesewetter\u2019s home state.<\/p>\n

He then turned to Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter\u2019s life: \u201eShe would be 33 years old today. She would certainly have made her way in her career, would have started a family. All that has been denied her. Instead, what remains is a desolate family. Ms. Zsch\u00e4pe, maybe you should think about that fact some time.\u201d<\/p>\n

He opposed \u201cremote diagnostics\u201d according to which people from the former GDR were particularly susceptible to nationalist ideas \u2013 \u201cRadical right-wing ideology is not an East German problem, but one facing all of Germany\u201d. The trial had shown that the right-wing scenes from the East and the West had quickly merged and developed as a whole. Accordingly, not Zsch\u00e4pe, B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos represented the image of Thuringia, but Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter. We fully agree with that statement, maybe minus the local patriotism presented by counsel G\u00e4rtner, who also hails from Thuringia.<\/p>\n

G\u00e4rtner also opposed attempts to make racist investigations or a \u201cgeneral suspicion of racism\u201d against the police or a \u201cgeneral reckoning with the state\u201d one of the topics of the proceedings. He referred to articles printed in early 2011 in the weekly \u201cDer Spiegel\u201d \u2013 hardly suspected of harboring right-wing tendencies \u2013 concerning the \u201ckebap killings\u201d. Again, we too find it important to consider such articles in the Spiegel \u2013 not in order to show that the police should not be blamed for their investigations, but because the Spiegel and the rest of the German mainstream press also need to be blamed for their reports prior to 2011.<\/p>\n

The final closing statement of the day was held by Reinhard Sch\u00f6n. Together with Eberhard Reinecke, he represents several victims of the Keupstra\u00dfe bombing attack. He once again painted a very vivid picture of the consequences for the victims of both the attack itself and the racist investigations which turned them into suspects. Others had already dealt with covert investigative measures such as undercover detectives, Reinhard Sch\u00f6n now reported on measures conducted openly, which were felt by the victims as deep injuries, such as body searches and being forced to give blood and DNA samples.<\/p>\n

Sch\u00f6n, too, tore apart Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s statements, referring inter alia to the fact that Beate Zsch\u00e4pe had already lied to a court in the 1990s in order to spare Uwe Uwe B\u00f6hnhardt from being convicted for hanging a puppet adorned with the star of David from a highway bridge. Why, Sch\u00f6n asked, should the court believe her now that much more was at stake for her than had been for B\u00f6hnhardt back then?<\/p>\n

The closing statement of the two Keupstra\u00dfe counsel will be continued tomorrow by Eberhard Reinecke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Further closing statements on the Keupstra\u00dfe and on the murder in Heilbronn Today the court heard further closing statements by victims\u2019 counsel on the murder of Mich\u00e8le Kiesewetter and the attempted murder of her colleague Martin A. in Heilbronn. Prior to those statement, Alexander Hoffmann concluded his statement begun last week on the ideology of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1513,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions\/1513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsu-nebenklage.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}