Today Zsch\u00e4pe defense counsel Grasel continued the defense closing statement. He announced that he would turn to the legal characterization of facts, but in fact often returned to the consideration of evidence, thus repeating nearly all of the arguments which had already been brought by his colleague Borchert. According to Grasel, his client\u2019s acts did not make her a co-perpetrator of the murders and attempted murders committed by the NSU. Above all, he stated, the only reason she had helped camouflage the underground life of herself, B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos was to avoid arrest, not to facilitate other crimes. Grasel referred to several of Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s acts in the years between 1998 and 2011, as proven by the evidence in court, and tried to show why none of them had necessarily \u201cenabled\u201d individual acts of murder. According to him, Zsch\u00e4pe had simply wanted to live together with B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos, avoid police detection and finance their lives with the robberies committed by the two men.<\/p>\n
Grasel thus eluded a consideration of the facts considered in total \u2013 a consideration, however, which is mandatory here. Zsch\u00e4pe was an active part of the \u201cSection Jena\u201d of the \u201cThuringia Home Guard\u201d, she participated in violent activities of that group, she rented the garage in which were found not only a bomb workshop, but also an archive of zines showing a detailed consideration of of violent political actions committed from \u201cunderground\u201d. Zsch\u00e4pe moved to Chemnitz with B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos, took part in discussions about \u201carmed struggle\u201d with members of Blood and Honour, and it was due to her decision that B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos aborted their plans to go abroad. Zsch\u00e4pe did not simply share apartments with them: several NSU documents were found on her computer; city maps, notes on potential targets, weapons, the NSU newspaper archive and more pieces of evidence were found in the apartments. By staying behind and securing the group headquarters while the man committed murders, she fulfilled the exact role which blue prints for the NSU such as the \u201cTurner diaries\u201d had foreseen for female members of Nazi terror cells.<\/p>\n
Grasel\u2019s arguments were not only inconsistent with the evidence, but they were not even internally consistent: according to Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s written statement prepared by Grasel and Borchert, B\u00f6hnhardt and Mundlos had usually told Zsch\u00e4pe of their murders shortly after having committed them. Accordingly, after her claimed initial attempts to dissuade them had proven unsuccessful, she must have known \u2013 even according to her own statement \u2013 that her further conduct would allow the men to commit further crimes. The defense did not consider questions such as this one at all.<\/p>\n
Instead, Grasel put forth nonsensical arguments such as the claim that Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s wager in a bet of \u201ccutting 200 video clips\u201d had referred to the deletion of ads from recordings of the TV series \u201cHouse MD\u201d \u2013 a series which was first broadcast in Germany a year after the bet in question. Just as absurd was Grasel\u2019s claim that Zsch\u00e4pe did not have \u201cright wing views\u201d anymore, as he could assure the court after \u201cseveral discussions\u201d. Even if Zsch\u00e4pe has realized in six years of provisional detention that it will not be personally advantageous for her to continue the fight against the \u201cZionist occupied government\u201d, what is relevant for the judgment is of course her ideology in the years from 1998 to 2011. And besides everything that is known from the times spent in Jena and Chemnitz, her very close friendship with Susann and Andr\u00e9 Eminger, who clearly shows his ideology even on his body given his large \u201cDie Jew Die\u201d tattoo and several other National Socialist markings, is much more relevant than any \u201cconviction\u201d of her defense attorney.<\/p>\n
As to the claims of alcoholism brought forward in the written statement, or the claims that Zsch\u00e4pe had been drunk when she set fire to the house in Zwickau, or the claims that Zsch\u00e4pe was beaten and suffered from \u201cdependent personality disorder\u201d \u2013 none of those were considered in any detail by Grasel, only in passing to argue that Zsch\u00e4pe had set fire to the house and sent out the NSU videos only to fulfill the \u201clast wish\u201d of the two Uwes, following a dependency which lasted beyond their death, and not, as would seem plausible, in order to further the political goals of the NSU. Nonetheless, Grasel once more painted a picture in which Zsch\u00e4pe appears as a victim rather than a perpetrator: having gone underground out of love and fear of the police, sitting at home alone and in fear while the two Uwes were out murdering people, coerced and beaten by B\u00f6hnhardt, pre-judged and insulted by the press and victims and their counsel.<\/p>\n
Counsel Borchert brought this closing statement to its logical conclusion in his statements on sentencing. Even here, he did not even refer to Zsch\u00e4pe\u2019s alleged alcoholism as a mitigating circumstance \u2013 and thus in effect admitted that this had been simply made up by the defense, another in a long list of lies calling into question the believability of the written statement.<\/p>\n