A report prepared by the German Parliament into the neo-Nazi terrorist murders committed by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2000 and 2007 has shown that no light has been shed on the murders despite promises from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Deutsche Welle reported on Friday.
The NSU is thought to be behind the murder of eight Turkish-Germans, one Greek and one police officer between 2000 and 2007. They are also accused of carrying out a series of nail-bomb attacks in immigrant neighborhoods.
The preparation of the 1,798-page report on the botched investigations into the NSU murders by a second Bundestag investigative committee took five years.
According to the report, Germany’s intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, systematically blocked investigations into the murders to protect their paid informants — all neo-Nazis who not only failed to provide information on the NSU, but used the taxpayers’ money they were being paid to finance neo-Nazi activities.
Different from what German prosecutors believe, the German parliamentarians have concluded that there were a number of failures in investigations both before and after the NSU group was uncovered in 2011.
Although German prosecutors still say the NSU was a trio — Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, both dead, and Beate Zschäpe, currently on trial in Munich — the parliamentary committee believes the group was much bigger: There was evidence of “several direct and indirect acquaintances of the NSU terror group in local, regional, and national neo-Nazi scenes.”
The report said that this support network was never properly investigated, even though it was very clear “which protagonists and networks had contact with Böhnhardt, Mundlos and Zschäpe at the individual scenes of their crimes.”
In 2012, Merkel vowed that all 10 murders would be thoroughly investigated, but as the committee’s report showed on Thursday, that promise seems to have been broken.