RedHanded - Episode 376 - White Terror

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Through the 2000s, three neo-Nazi terrorists and serial killers rampaged across Germany – bombing and shooting immigrants in broad daylight, with total impunity. And despite plenty of evidence, investigators failed to join the dots time and time again. Worse still, the German government was, unknowingly, actively funding the bloodshed.To find out why – a half century after the Holocaust – German authorities refused to believe there was any white supremacist threat, we’re joined by investigative journalist Jacob Kushner, who moved to Germany while the five-year trial of the century played out.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti.

Und ich bin Hannah. Oh, surprise. Ich bin ein Berliner. When I first moved to Stoke Newington, I don't think I'd even moved in yet. I was walking around and my sister was like, look at that. And I was like, what? And it was a bin liner that someone had left outside and on it, it said, ich bin ein bin liner. Brilliant.

Fantastic. Excellent. Very good. Das ist gut. Excellent. Willkommen, bienvenue. I did German for like three years. Did you?

And all I can remember how to say is, Tut mir schbleit, das ist bad, como. Which means, sorry, I'm late. And I'm very rarely late, so it's completely useless. You are very rarely late. So there we go. That is the full German spectrum. I'm sure the accents will be coming out later because I don't know if you guys love it but

we sure fucking do. But yeah we're going to have to do something to lighten this fucking episode up because it's Obama. We sure sure are. So let's get started. Two men walk into a German bank. One is wearing a gorilla mask. And the others got on that open-mouthed ghost face mask from Scream.

Did you know, on Cameo, the actor who plays the Scream man will do, for I believe $70, the voice and wish you a happy birthday wearing the mask. Perfect. Excellent. What more could anybody want? Way to reinvent your income streams, my friend. You've got to keep moving. And couldn't it be anyone in the mask? You know?

I agree. Anyway, sorry, go on. So all this mask wearing bank shenanigans is going down on the 4th of November, 2011. It's a sunny, still day in Eisenbach, eastern Germany. After subduing the tellers, the two men wordlessly stuff bags full of euros, occasionally just shouting at staff to pick up the notes that they're dropping. When the bank manager tells them that he can't open the safe, the two men pistol whip him. Blood pours from his head onto the floor the next employee they ask opens the safe and look i don't know why that bank manager said that they couldn't open i would just be like my life isn't worth whatever's going on i'd just be like oh you're robbing me okay here's all of the things

i believe he didn't know that he could Oh, that he could. Yes. Okay. Because I'm just like me. It's not worth being a hero. I believe it was over his head, over his pay grade. But they find somebody whose pay grade it is not above and they manage to get inside. And once in this safe, they pilfer everything inside and they leave that bank with 72,000 euros worth of notes in shopping bags. They get on their bikes and they cycle to a van parked a few streets away. This is not their first rodeo. These two masked men, confusingly both called Uwe,

had been robbing banks across Germany for more than 13 years. But this time, they were out of luck. A witness saw them loading their bikes into the van and called the police, who were there in minutes. Officers cautiously approached, readying themselves for a standoff. But then, two shots rang out. And seconds later, the van full of bikes and money burst into flames. Later, when the fire had died down, officers found a submachine gun, a semi-automatic pistol, a black handgun, and two bodies, both with a bullet in the head.

On the other side of the city, a woman watched these scenes play out on her TV. She stood up, poured 10 litres of petrol around her apartment and then set it alight. She scooped up her cats, Lily and Heidi, and hurried downstairs. Pretty soon, three explosions tore through the building

and the ceiling collapsed. For more than ten years, these three young people, so the two in the bank with the masks on and the woman with the cats, who were called Beata Cepa, Uwe Mundloss and Uwe Bernhardt, had all been on the run.

And over the years, they had stolen more than a million dollars in today's money. But what police didn't know, as they stared at the unmasked bodies of the two men, was that bank robbing was the least of their crimes. Because they were also neo-Nazi terrorists and serial killers. The three had conducted a ten-year-long campaign of terror, aimed at Germany's immigrants, carrying out bombings and shootings in broad daylight with total impunity. How? Because it seems that half a century after the Holocaust, German authorities refused to believe

that there was any white supremacist threat in the nation. Worse still, they actively funded it. And this is a very special episode, not just because you're going to get to hear our German accents and pronunciations. It's actually because we have a rather special guest. Here he is. My name is Jacob Kushner. I'm an international journalist and I report on violence against refugees and the far right around the world. Jacob spent eight years digging into this case and the world of a German white supremacist organization called the National Socialist Union, or the NSU for short, which is what we'll keep calling it just because I've got enough words

in my mouth. Jacob even moved to Germany while the five-year-long trial played out. And here is how he got there. I was reporting in East Africa, LGBTQ refugees, people fleeing violence in their home countries at the time that the global migration crisis started. And I started seeing news reports that there was violence against refugees happening in Europe as well. And so I started traveling from Nairobi to Berlin and going around Germany, investigating different attacks. These were arsons, burning down shelters so that people couldn't live there, sometimes attacks against people themselves in the street. So I was shocked as someone who in different parts of the world has covered violence against refugees to be hearing about these different attacks happening in Germany and in Europe. And that's when I heard

of the NSU case. I actually interrupted my reporting and diverted to Munich to begin covering the trial. By the time my first big magazine story came out about the case, it was already out of date. There was so much more that had come out at the trial or come out in the press or was being discovered by investigators and researchers. With time, I kept waiting for someone to write a book about this in English. But after a few years of waiting for someone to write the book, I eventually decided that maybe I should do it. And so that's when I decided to dive back in. Jake's incredible book, White Terror, tells the story of how three rebellious teenagers grew

into white supremacist neo-Nazi terrorists. And what all of that says about far-right violence in Europe. Jacob is going to come along with us on the journey of this episode to give us some much needed context. I have read White Terror, although I do have to admit that my first attempt, I did have to stop because it's when the race riots were happening in the UK. And I was like, you know what, too close to home. I'm going to listen to something else. But speaking of context, before we dive into this particular story, we're going to kick off with a mini history lesson. And it's not like we haven't been here before. We're here all the time. But let's remind ourselves.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, Germans felt very hard done by. So they fought a world war and lost it. And then the world's biggest losers at the time got an absolute shit deal in the aftermath. Then, an animated little Austrian came along and got everybody excited about his new solution to all their problems. Eugenics, genocide, and some freaky folk magic. He got everybody so riled up, in fact, that they decided to go to war with the world again. For six years pretty much every German in Germany took part in trying to cover the world in Nazism and white supremacy and then they lost again. In the years after that second war the world had to answer the

unprecedented question of what to do with them. A whole government, army and population who'd spent six years actively and enthusiastically carrying out a genocide. If that does not make it into a GCSE history textbook, I will be very disappointed. Germany lost all of its territories again, and by modern estimates it's thought to have paid more than $300 billion in reparations. And that has got to hurt. In Nuremberg, international courts convicted 20,000 Nazis for war crimes. Some slippery senior Nazis fled down the rat line, an escape route lined with Nazi sympathisers leading all the way to South America.

And others went on to go and work at NASA, but you can go and look at MKUltra if you want to think about that. One in five Germans, by the time Nuremberg rolled around, had either died, fled, or had been deported after the war. But, and this is important, the remaining 80% were still in Germany. And it's thought that around 1 million people played a part in the Holocaust, and the majority of those fired-up anti-Semitic, make-humans-blonde-again Germans were still around. And we've written before about the moral wrangling Germany had to do after the war. You can check out our shorthand on the Kentner experiment for that one. There's even a very long German word for the struggle to overcome the past,

which before I say I'm going to have to do the tuning fork. Well, don't make me run, I'm too full of chocolate. I'm so glad this bit's in yours. Vergangenheit wird die Welt. Perfect. Thank you. Nailed it. And that word, which I probably pronounced perfectly,

and if I didn't, I don't want to hear about it, refers to the official German stance that the country would spend the next few decades having a good, hard look at itself. The national shame was expressed in monuments and education programs, and Nazi imagery and rhetoric was made illegal.

Yeah, I believe it's one of the only few countries, what am I saying, I believe, I know, but I'm saying only few because I can't remember if it's also illegal in France. I believe Germany may be one of the only few countries in the world where denying the Holocaust is illegal. I think you're right. Yeah. But not everyone was ashamed. The German police, Secret Service and government were chock full of people who, just a decade or so before, were fighting for Nazi supremacy. And there was no way to force them to change their

minds. And with immigrants flocking into the country to help with the massive amount of rebuilding they had to do after two world wars, those lingering Nazis found themselves a new target. Here's Jacob. So when writing this book, I found through conversations with friends and family members that people had one of two conceptions about Germany today. Either that Germany was still a sort of nation that it was back during World War II, a nation of Nazis, or that Germany had done so much to overcome its far right past that it was kind of a model example of how a nation should reckon with the horrors of its past. But what I found was that Germany didn't do much to reckon with the Holocaust right after it occurred. It wasn't really until the 1968 student movement, the so-called 68ers,

which was a generation of German students who started protesting to know more about what their parents and grandparents had done during the Holocaust. And so it really wasn't until decades after the end of the Second World War that there was really a more critical reflection on what Germany had done. There wasn't really a comprehensive education, re-education, if you will, about it. Even to the extent that schools teach about the Holocaust, even to the extent that Germany has given millions and millions of euros to victims of the Holocaust, and that there are memorials all over the country. So despite all of these things, I think there's a lot of people who felt that Germany didn't necessarily eradicate the ideas or the feelings or the resentment or the beliefs that led

to that. The other thing that happened when the war ended was that the various Allied powers raced to that. The other thing that happened when the war ended was that the various Allied powers raced to Berlin to claim Germany for themselves and attempt to get a head start on the new world order. In the end, the Soviet East and capitalist West divided Germany down the middle because remember, at this stage,

the Ruskies were our friends. Not for long but they were. Also many of the death camps liberated by the Soviets not the Americans look it up. Anyway the Soviet East and the capitalist West divvied up Berlin as well as the rest of the country which is a bit confusing because the whole of Berlin was located within the Soviet side of Germany so the capitalist West half of Berlin was surrounded by Soviet-owned land. Which is interesting, because that was very definitely the fun half. West Berlin was an entirely isolated haven of fun bars, good jobs, cool clothes, and eventually David Bowie.

So when those in the grey, poor communist half wandered over and saw what all that lovely democracy and capitalism can give you, they bailed on the promise of a socialist utopia a hundred years in the future. In the 15 years after the war ended, more than 2.7 million East Germans, that's one in five again, fled west. So East German authorities built a wall through Berlin to keep them in. Yeah, that'll nail it, Marina. We don't want to be here. This sucks. Can we go over there? Nein. Nein. Nicht. And when East Germans tried crawling under the wall to get west, they put up grills. When they tried to climb over the top, they were shot down like dogs.

The Berlin Wall was up for almost 40 years. Then, one day, in probably what ranks as one of the worst days somebody can have at the office, a German official mistakenly announced that the gates were open. People rushed down in their thousands. When they found it shut, they started tearing down the Berlin Wall brick by brick. Have you seen Goodbye Lenin? No.

It's a very sweet film of this kid who's in east berlin and his mum slips into a coma and while she's in a coma the wall comes down and he's told by the doctors that he absolutely cannot give her any big astonishing news or she'll go back into a coma so it's like him trying to recreate east berlin in his own apartment. And then there's an amazing scene where there's this big Coca-Cola advert out the window. And he's like, don't look at it. It's a very sweet film. Yeah.

When you said sweet and then it was like, so is this kid? His mom's in a coma. Sounds like the kind of film I don't want any part of. She comes out. And in the end, she's allowed Coca-Cola and jeans and stuff. Anyway. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,

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of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of the Cotton Club murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Separated families reunited in the streets. The war was finished. A downside of this was, well, one thing a communist government can guarantee is steady work. So when the wall came down, East German businesses collapsed or were privatised, and everyone was out of a job.

So East Germans were pretty pissed off, needless to say. Especially when they saw loads of jobs going to non-Germans. Because remember, immigrants had been flooding in for years to help with the big rebuilding effort. What's more, the same year the wall came down, the EU introduced the free movement of people. Everyone fleeing political persecution in their home country could now apply for asylum. And many East Germans who were still out of work didn't like it. When listeners think of the fall of the Berlin Wall, what they might remember are images of men and women hugging in the streets, reunification.

But what they won't remember, because the TV cameras didn't show it, is the other half of the story, which is within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some Germans decided to celebrate their new nation by trying to rid it of immigrants. In East Germany before the fall of the wall, many workers lived in factories. You didn't see them. They were in the shipyards and the dockyards. But then after the fall of the wall, these people needed to find their own jobs. I mean, a lot of these companies collapsed in East Germany, especially. And so they moved into normal neighborhoods and buildings and opened restaurants and shops and these sorts of things. And they became visible in a way that they hadn't

been before. Within days, you have attacks against immigrants on the streets in both the former East and West, and they really come to a head in Rostock in 1992. So this is a city on the Baltic Sea. You have this building, the Sunflower Building, it's called. It has a giant mosaic of a sunflower going all the way up to the top. This building had become home to many immigrants from Vietnam. So in the summer of 1992 in Rostock, you had this visible presence of foreigners, locals began to take notice, and word got out, and essentially hundreds and hundreds of far-right protesters ended up descending upon this building from not just Rostock, but from far away in Germany, which one politician later referred

to as riot tourism, because for basically a few days, there were these massive riots outside this building, and people were bobbing Molotov cocktails at it. They were trying to burn the place down. This anger just kind of simmered over. And so these Rostock riots, as they became known, really made an impression in two ways. They made an impression upon Germans who were surprised to see such xenophobia among their countrymen, but they also made an impression because prosecutors didn't charge the rioters for the attacks. They didn't charge anyone until years later with violence against the immigrants themselves. And that really sent a message to Germans of the far right around the country that if you decide to attack

immigrants, if you decide to let your thoughts become speech or become violence, that there aren't going to be any repercussions for that. And the result was that in the weeks and months that followed Rostock, violent attacks against immigrants proliferated all across the nation. In town after town, time after time, immigrant families were burned alive. This kind of really is the 1990s post-reunification Germany that you don't often hear about when you read the history books. In fact, the German government only responded to Rostock by restricting the rights of asylum seekers. In the two years from 1992, immigration plummeted. The far right declared a victory. According to them, their violence had worked and they were

going to keep going. Over the next three years, there were 1,500 arson attacks conducted by the far right. Anti-immigrant rioters were literally getting away with murder time and again. And for three teenagers in Jena, Eastern Germany, it was electrifying. So let's rewind from the 90s back to the 2nd of January 1975, when Anna Rosa Arpul walked into a hospital in Jena. She had been having stomach pains and was told it was probably kidney stones. But a few hours later, she had given birth to a baby girl.

Can you imagine? Nope. Oh, thank you. Didn't know I was pregnant. You should have, is what I think every single time I watch that show. Yes. So Anna Rosa was studying in Bucharest. So when this

extremely unexpected bundle of joy arrived, she left it with her mother and went back to study. And that sadly inconvenient little baby girl would grow up to be our woman with the cats. Beate Chepper. The most hated woman in Germany. How? Well,

it has quite a lot to do with the company that she kept. So let's meet the Uvers. Uwe Mundlos was the son of a computer science professor growing up in Jena in the late 80s and early 90s. And he was a smart kid. He did well in school. He would take devices apart, put them back together. He learned to really challenge authority and kind of show off his intelligence in that way. And he began reading books on World War II, but from the perspective of the Nazis themselves.

Muntz was someone who felt that modern-day Germany wasn't fair to the perspective of the Nazis themselves. Muntz was someone who felt that modern day Germany wasn't fair to the Germany of the past. He felt that Germany had been a great nation, an empire, going back to the Prussian kings. And to someone who wants to be a contrarian growing up in early 1990s Germany, there's no better way to rebel than to become a Nazi. There's no more serious way to be provocative. You, we hope, don't know any white supremacists, but you probably went to school with an uber-mundloss. Uber-political, idealistic and moralising

and prone to going off on impassioned rants at a moment's notice i certainly did some of them still do it ubermund loss had grown up surrounded by monuments to atrocity and was reminded everywhere he looked about how ashamed he should feel to be German. So he decided to be proud instead. Which I think is, obviously, no one's arguing that he's taking a ideological step in the right direction. But it's this rebellion thing, isn't it? Of like, I will be the opposite of what you are telling me to be. And I think it's the risk that some countries play right of, yes, be introspective and be reflective of the bad things in the past. But if they get lumped together with any sort of patriotism and you're told, oh, we must be ashamed. I can't speak for Germans, but I think

they have typically been very like unflaggy, like very like, let's not, let's not get very patriotic because that's not gone well for us in the past and you know people are going to look at us in a bad way I'm not obviously making excuses for the oovers at all but you can see like you said where that teenage rebellion of like fuck you don't tell me how to feel and don't lump everything together and I'm going to kick back in the most counter culture way I can think it's worth repeating before we continue that we are dealing with teenagers here and being a Nazi in post-war Germany was absolutely the most rebellious thing you could be. So Uwe Mundloss shaved his head, started wearing big black boots and military jackets. He was angry and he was restless and he was egged on by graffitied

swastikas that started popping up in his hometown in his early teens. Soon he started organising rallies and writing essays for far-right pamphlets. Uwe started hanging out at the local Winzer Club. Now these were basically youth clubs that were opened all around Germany in the early 90s to try and keep kids off the streets. They were actually the pet project of a young Angela Merkel, back before she became chancellor. Now, the idea was that instead of going out and getting into trouble on those mean, mean streets, young people would gather together, supervised by local social workers, and maybe even learn a skill or two to get them into work. Unfortunately, however, gathering up all the politically disillusioned teenagers in the area slightly backfired.

Vorps, that's my impression of Angela Merkel. Because a lot of these kids were unconvinced by the new world order. And it was at the Winzer Club in Jena that Uwe Mundloss met Beate Zscherper. After a bunch of flirting over card games and presumably a lot of patient listening and nodding on Beate's part, she and Uwe Mundloss became an item. Beate had moved back into her mother's apartment

by this point, the mother who left her, and since her mother was still never really around, Uwe Mundloss soon moved in. Uwe took Beate to visit his middle-class family, who all hoped that this nice girl could talk him out of all of this nasty fascism lark. The couple would go out to nightclubs together, though Uwe was not exactly your ideal getting-on-the-lash pal. He was all panic and very, very little disco. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink, he considered both of those things to be immoral vices that distracted him from his cause. He'd spend most of the night laying into his friends about their lack of ambition or ranting about the plight of the white german plus occasionally his very obviously nazi outfits

would get him beaten up by leftist punks there's a really good chapter in white terror about like the punks versus the neo-nazis and how is this whole thing and like like the skinhead movement here you're identified by your clothes oh yes so we So we have Beata and Uwe Mundloss. And to complete our little trifecta, we need the last piece of the puzzle, Uwe Bernhardt. And if Mundloss was into politics, Bernhardt was the rage. Bernhardt's brother had died at the age of 17, falling from the top of an old castle that he had been exploring with his friends. And his body was actually left outside his family's front door. And the police just ruled it an accident.

Now, a younger Uwe Bernhardt was not exactly convinced and never recovered from this tragedy. That's rough. Yeah. Opening your front door and your brother's just fucking dead. Yeah, very much so. So Bernhardt's young life was defined by school suspensions and expulsions, followed by thefts and carjackings aplenty. In July 1992, when Bernhardt was just 14,

he was arrested for viciously attacking a boy who he claimed owed him money. The day after his hearing, Bernhardt tracked the boy down once again and kicked him in the head with his big black boots. This boy spent five days in hospital with a concussion and a laceration to his head. At 15, Bernhardt was convicted for driving a stolen car without a licence and ramming it into a police car, which is fucking bold. For that crime, well, the trio of crimes, he spent seven months in juvenile detention.

And while inside, he met all sorts of colourful characters. Some of them were Nazis. Once, he helped his new friends torture a fellow prisoner by dousing him with corrosive chemicals and then using a lighter to melt a plastic bag onto this poor man's back. Horrifying. That's horrific. Bernhardt learned how to make a pipe bomb in Juvie as well.

They taught him how to do it using metal poles from the prison beds and in 1993 when Bernhardt detonated one of his bed pipe bombs he was moved to grown-up prison after his release from there he drifted for a bit his ever optimistic mum got him an apprenticeship at a construction company but he was never far away from scrapes with the law. His mum is a fucking saint. She buys him a car, she is so supportive, and she is very much like... She does everything she can. But it doesn't really do the trick.

When Bernhardt met Beate and the other Uwe, Uwe Mundlos, his violence was given a purpose. The three of them, so the two Uwe's and Beate, became friends for life. According to Mundlos, Bernhardt was right to be angry. East Germany had been left to rot, immigrants had taken their jobs, and white Germans were losing out. The three of them would pass out cassettes of illicit neo-Nazi music, smirking away at lyrics like, Jew off to the oven. Fuck.

They thought that immigration posed an existential threat to the white nation, and that immigration was a tool used by Jews to dilute and destroy the white race. With these three individuals and what this scene at the time, in Jena at least, believed in, wasn't Holocaust denial. It was Holocaust praise. They looked around and believed in these conspiracies that Jews in Germany still somehow had lots of power and control. And of course, there's hardly any Jews in Germany anymore at this point. So really, I think when it comes to the victims or the targets of their hate, immigrants really became the new Jews. Because who do you have who's a minority who's visible now?

They had to shift their hate toward the sorts of victims who were available to hate. As time goes on, their hate kind of mixes. I mean, they hate Jews, they hate immigrants, and they decide that they need to convince Germans to agree with them and to do something about it, to do something about what's happening in their cities and their towns, which frankly, again, is not quite as dramatic as people might think. Yeah, there was at one point, even a third unemployment in parts of Eastern Germany, but that reduced. And again, these particular individuals with the exception of Chepa's family didn't really suffer from that unemployment. Bernhardt's parents both worked. Munoz's parents both worked. Munoz's dad was a professor. Neither of the boys lacked for job opportunities. And all three of them had different internships, apprenticeships, and that sort of thing. And Moonless, of course, even went on to college and had many opportunities. And so this narrative that, oh, well, this sort of resentment is the result of circumstances, it's not fully borne out in the case of these three. Again, in their first attempt to rebel, I think what began

with that teenage rebellion escalated into a larger sort of informed mission in life, which was to, at first, in small ways, tease and eventually really target immigrants. The three friends were kicked out of the Windsor Club eventually when Mundloss turned up dressed head-to-toe in an SS uniform. So instead, they spent their evenings driving around Jena with a baseball bat, looking for people to beat the shit out of. It gets very Clockwork Orange very quickly. Oh, 100%. That's exactly the right analogy.

Even down to, like, the costumes and whatnot. And like Jacob said, the three of them slowly started ramping up their hate in public, throwing food at Roma people or stealing cigarettes from Vietnamese-owned kiosks. So, so far, we have three rebellious delinquents going around starting brawls with punks and beating up immigrants. Bad guys for sure, but not yet terrorist bad. But as we said before, Nazi sentiment was bubbling in Jena. So it's time to take a quick sidebar and meet Tino Brand,

a neo-Nazi and white supremacist who would go on to become the world's least reliable spy. You'll love to see it. Tino Brandt is a far-right extremist from a small town not far from Vienna, and he kind of earns his claim to fame in the far-right scene for organizing this big march on the anniversary of Rudolf Huss's death. He gets on the radar of the state intelligence agency by organizing this rally in the early 1990s. And the intelligence agency actually approaches him and thinking he's very deep within the scene, they ask him to become an informant.

And Tina Brunt says yes. And so what a lot of his friends in the far-right movement don't know, or most likely don't know, we don't know for sure, is that he was on the payroll of the intelligence agency. And that becomes a problem because Tino Brandt starts to build this far-right network. He starts to hold trainings for neo-Nazis from all around the state, weapons trainings, ideology trainings, bringing guest speakers in to talk about far-right beliefs. He works at a far-right publishing house. And what ends up happening is Tino Brandt becomes accused of something like 35 crimes that he has either participated in or encouraged his network to commit. Crimes like vandalizing Holocaust memorials and that sort of thing. He would organize far-right members of his network to go to leftist

rallies and break bones. And then he would remind them to clean out their cars afterwards, get the weapons out. That way, if they were ever stopped or searched by police leaving the area of these rallies, they wouldn't be discovered. And at every stage, the police were trying to investigate him for his crimes and the crimes that he was committing with the three friends before they formed the terrorist group, you know, at every step of the way, during his intelligence agency, stepped in to prevent police and prosecutors from pursuing Brandt in order to save their mole, save their spy. And a few of the people who become drawn to Tino Brandt are these three members of the NSU, the trio, Uwe, Munchaus, Uwe Bernhardt, and Beate Zschepa. And they and a couple other of their friends in Jena begin attending these meetings and talks and kind of become part of a movement. So beforehand,

these three were sort of just individuals, teenagers hanging out with maybe their friends in Jena. And soon now, because of Tino Brandt, they're part of this larger far-right movement. So thanks to Tino Brandt, our swastika-loving trio were now a part of a scene. Outsiders no more. Across their home state, Turingia, there were more than a thousand of them. And our trio travelled around, too, to neo-Nazi holiday hotspots like Usedom, the northern island where Nazis test-launched their rockets. On the beaches, presumably in between tanning their pasty area and bods by the grey Baltic Sea, they chat with all of their other white supremacist friends.

The three of them travel to far-right concerts and rallies all across Europe. The police had started to cotton on to Mundloss' growing enthusiasm for Nazis. But before they could bring him in, Uwe Mundloss joined the army. Which, before anyone gets upset, we say army. At the time, Germany wasn't technically allowed an army. However, both the East and the West sides got their own National Defence Forces, and thousands of former Nazi officers re-upped, including quite a few who had been accused of committing war crimes. So it might not surprise you to learn that soldiers were caught hanging Third Reich flags, having little parties for Hitler's birthday, which is 420. What was he smoking? Am I right? Oh, I hate that I know that now. What? Yeah, sorry. You've hushed my vibe. Entirely hushed it. Fuck you, Hitler. I can't imagine him being a stoner.

Was he a stoner? No, he was a meth addict. Exactly. So maybe they were smoking some weed on Hitler's birthday, but we certainly know they were singing Nazi anthems. And Uwe Mundloss was absolutely loving it. He even occasionally turned up to his duty in Nazi era uniforms. But not only was Uwe's fragrant Nazi-ing during service never punished, he was actually promoted. Twice.

He completed his service in 1995 and left the armed forces with a positive record. That and a very decent working knowledge of firearms. new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness,

and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. by the time he got back though his girlfriend had shacked up with his best friend this is mad i had a dream about this last night about these three well it was it these three just about the situation i'm still quite jet lagged and when i'm jet lagged my dreams are super vivid and it was just this weird thing like oh well the one who has gone i'll just hook up with the other one and that is exactly what happened it's very telenovela style beata and bernhardt were now

apparently in love to be fair to her sure he's violent but at least he doesn't just talk at her. And when the other uva, Mundlos, got back and found this out, rather than scream, Dios mio, and throw a drink in their faces, he was surprisingly cool with it. And the threesome stayed thick as thieves for the next 20 years. And soon they got back to their old tricks, like throwing eggs at Jewish memorials. Bernhardt was also arrested by police for wearing a swastika belt buckle in public, and due to his previous litany of crimes,

he was sentenced to two years and three months in prison. But when he appealed, a judge dismissed all charges. Why? No one really knows. Later, the three of them had a little field trip to Buchenwald concentration camp, dressed in full Nazi SA stormtrooper uniforms. They were, of course, refused entry, but never arrested. Later, with a group of fellow neo-Nazis, the three

of them went out of town and burned a giant cross a la KKK. And there's a super interesting part of the book White Terror about this kind of pen pal bromance between German neo-Nazis and KKK leaders. But basically, they took a lot of cues from their white-robed buddies across the pond. And this huge fiery cross in the woods just outside Jena was so shocking the news couldn't help but report it. Photos

even emerged of our trio doing Nazi salutes in front of it. But a judge later ruled that because it was done in the middle of the forest it wasn't in public and therefore it wasn't illegal. So nothing was done. Beata and the Uvas had a lot of run-ins with the law during this period, but we give you those examples to show you

how they kept pushing at the boundary of what they could get away with, and how every time time all that happened was they learned they could push it further. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I'm a surprise that in Germany they didn't face repercussions for this, to be honest with you. But also it's the thing of them doing things like wearing this Nazi belt buckle, burning a cross. Obviously, stuff like running around with bats and beating people up, they should go to prison for that. But this stuff, if they had done something, if the authorities had done something and punished them for this stuff, I don't think it would have deterred them. I don't think it would

have taught them that we can't do this. I think they would have just come out and escalated anyway. I think it would have just made them feel like, oh, look, we're being persecuted and we're even more punk and we're even more rebellious because we're going to keep coming back and doing it, if you see what I mean. I think you're right. I think it's an interesting point that maybe that's what they're trying to get to happen. Yeah. It's interesting because it's like, are they trying to be like, look, we're just going to ignore you and hope you get bored of this? Or if they had come down on this behaviour, would it have changed the trajectory? I'm not entirely convinced it would have.

And like Jacob said earlier, all of this started with teasing immigrants. And as they kept on going unpunished, it escalated into targeting immigrants instead. In 1995, in front of an office building in Saalfeld, police found a homemade bomb. See, that does feel like a pretty big escalation. Sure. Sure does. Yeah. Bernhardt, Mundloss and Scheper had rented a small storage unit near a sewage treatment plant. I said plan because I was thinking about whether storage units, we should just not have them.

So many bad things happen in there. I was going to say, I'm just about to hire one. I know. Imminently. My only experience with storage, well, two, but the one that's interesting and not boring. When I had a normal job job i had to go to a storage unit and go through the archives of the theater that i worked in it was enormous so boring

and the units next to me was a sex doll business in a storage locker yep oh come on i just feel like you're trolling like and the guy would just sit there all day and i was like are you telling me that man has not killed before because you're lying i'm like i would be lying if i told you that but if you are going to run a business it's quite affordable because i'm about to set one up because i've been buying all this fucking furniture that the house needs for like the kitchen and stuff and they keep being like you bought this furniture i need to deliver it and i'm like please can you just hold on to it for a little bit longer and I bought this shelf like eBay I'm like please don't run away with all my money I do need that piece of furniture but there's no floor in my house

right now so please don't bring it to my house but a couple of them were like you're taking the piss now it's been like four months I need to deliver it and I'm like okay so I'm gonna have to hire a storage locker because I can't put it anywhere else well I think less of you but I'm scared I'm never ever going to be in that storage locker place on my own. Yeah, no, do not do that at all. Never, ever, ever. Anyway, in this storage unit, the three Nazis brought metal pipes, home insulation, which was left over from Mundloss's parents' kitchen renovation, explosive powder and wires.

And they spent hours making bombs. The one in Saalfeld was a dud. It was filled with explosives, but it didn't have a detonator. Later, another dummy bomb was found by employees at a department store with 70 grams of TNT inside it.

And that's enough to seriously injure everyone in that shop and probably some people outside as well. The following spring, a mannequin was hung from a motorway overpass with a noose around its neck. A star of David and the word Jew was spray-painted on its chest

and a name tag attached to it said the name Ignaz Bubis, a prominent Jewish leader in Germany at the time. He had been scheduled to drive to a ceremony at a concentration camp that day, and the sign around the mannequin's neck said, careful, bomb, and there were two cardboard boxes there with protruding cables. Police waited three and a half hours to cut it down. This was just a decoy. But on the boxes, they found Bernhardt's fingerprints. So, in one small city of about half a million people,

multiple fake bombs were found covered in swastikas, and one of them bore the fingerprints of a well-known neo-Nazi who had been in juvie and grown-up prison before. Surely the police must have had enough to go on. And, well, Sonneart, which is kind of in German. They did arrest and charge Bernhardt. He was still on the system from his dozens of previous crimes.

And the 90s computer that ran them probably exploded with how hard of a match they had found. And a judge sentenced Bernhardt to three years in prison. But Bernhardt appealed, using statements by Beata, the otherwe, and a few far-right friends. And somehow, someway, that worked. And the charge for the bomb was dismissed. And Bernhardt's sentence for previous crimes was reduced as well to two years. See, now I don't understand what's going on. No, me either.

I'm like, look, this should be punished. Why are they looking the other way? I don't understand what's going on. No, me either. I'm like, look, this should be punished. Why are they looking the other way? I don't get it. Well, all of the people in the dock also wearing Nazi paraphernalia being, but he's so nice. That's enough, apparently. And that wasn't all. Before arresting Bernhard, police had followed him to the garage and even saw him taking in bomb supplies. This information wasn't passed on for six weeks.

Also during this time, police had searched the two Uwe's rooms. They found guns, more bomb supplies and thousands of grams of TNT. But they were too slow to act. Because by the time the arrest warrant was issued, Bernhardt and his friends were nowhere to be found. The following year, a group of children, and this is so horrific, I hate this so much, a group of children found a red wooden box wedged between foam mats at a football ground. It was covered in black swastikas with the word bomb written on it. Inside were 20 litres of granite chippings inside a metal pipe.

The trio had used their network to flee their home city and eventually moved in with a neo-Nazi friend in a place called Chemnitz. And they had a pretty relaxed time there, apparently. They designed skinhead t-shirts and they listened to all of their shit Nazi music. And they made their own board game. Oh my god, this is the worst. Called Pogromly. A neo-Nazi themed version of Monopoly. It sounds so fun.

Monopoly already. Makes me want to jump off a bridge. neo-nazi themed version of monopoly it sounds so fun monopoly already makes me want to jump off a bridge let's have the most boring game in the world monopoly but like add on a layer of race hate and yeah it's a fun evening for all the family and it has to last as long as world war ii did which in my my house at Christmas is what it causes. The key difference though between this game and the original, instead of buying up New Jersey real estate, the players of Pogromly

acquire German cities and then purge them of Jews. Wait, the American version of Monopoly, you just buy up New Jersey real estate? Sure do. What? Why New Jersey? I'm'm asking if you should know the answer can i phone a friend as some sort of monopoly expert that's weird the money it was not dollar dues it was reichmarks and the railroads were named after

concentration camps auschwitz buchenwald Dachau and Ravensbrück. And the cards said things like, the Fuhrer thanks you for your loyalty to the fatherland. Collect 3000 rank marks. Oh my God, you losers. Yeah. Fucking losers. Real, real loser territory. This is the thing that frustrates me about this case. Lots of cases, right?

The three of them, they're young. Obviously, Bernhardt is quite full of rage but like they're not incapable of like being creative even if it's in a horribly morbid disgusting foul way they're obviously trying to do lots of things they're doing their t-shirt printing they're building bombs like you're not completely stupid imagine if they just put their time into something that just wasn't filled with so much hatred like it's just so sad so sad yeah and even they got bored of pogromly eventually things did not stay quiet for long in the year 2000 the three of them set out on a very real mission to rid Germany of immigrants for good. And they had the funds to keep them going.

Firstly, Bernhardt's parents were wiring him money, hoping that it would keep him out of trouble. Yeah, this is where Bernhardt's mum loses it for me. Yeah. And they'd also started selling copies of the board game, Programmly, to like-minded souls, for a hundred Deutschmarks apiece. Look, I'm no economics master's graduate, but I believe that if you know that not many people are going to buy it,

but they really want it, you can charge that. Apparently so. But they weren't selling that many boxes of Pogromly because they had some serious support in the form of Tino Brandt. Who was paying Tino Brandt, though? The fucking taxpayer.

The fundamental flaw of using and relying on informants is that they have financial incentives to tell you things, but they also have life incentives not to. In Tino Brandt's case, he was the wrong person for this job. He had built this far-right scene himself, in large part, in Thuringian. So he's not a reliable person to take it apart and subvert it, right? Intelligence agents would ask him easy questions. Who is attending your rallies? How many people? Who are they? They're just keeping track. Most likely he would provide basic information like that. But he never, as far as we know, revealed to his handlers anything of use in terms of actual threats of violence by his own network, because these were his network, and he was sometimes most

likely behind those acts of violence. So of course, he wasn't going to. But really, it was Brandt who was using them. And that's something that's happened again and again in Germany and around the world when it comes to using informants. You could say they go rogue, but really what they're doing is exactly what they always intended to do. And so Brandt really intended to take the state's money and ended up at least using that money to build the scene. He admits putting all that money right into the scene to, you know, print stuff, posters for rallies and do different things to grow the scene. And then as we later find out, he was actually funneling that money to these three friends who had formed the NSU. The trio started off what would become a rampage, robbing immigrant-owned supermarkets and post offices.

They'd park a rented van a few streets away from the place they planned to rob. They'd put on masks, take a couple of bikes out the back, cycle to the shop, and then rob it at gunpoint. Then they would cycle back to their van and hide out in it for a few hours. They'd later employ this exact same routine, not to rob, but to kill. At one scene, police found a hair, but didn't analyse it for weeks. When they finally did, they lost the results. So, unchallenged, the trio moved from Chemnitz to Zwickau,

into an apartment that they shared until the end of the two Uwe's lives. The trio were always pleasant enough to their neighbours and even the family of Afghan migrants that lived downstairs. But all the while, they were honing their heist skills. And soon, they built their first real bomb. A few days before Christmas 2000, at 5.30pm, Uwe Bernhardt went into an Iranian-owned grocery store in the old town of Cologne. He went round the store, picking things out and filling up a basket.

The cashier and his family had arrived years before from Iran, a country they had fled to escape political persecution. They'd recently just been made German citizens. Bernhardt put his basket down on the counter. It contained loads of snacks and whiskey and a festive biscuit tin tied with a blue ribbon. Bernhardt then told the cashier that he'd forgotten his wallet and that he'd be right back. But when he didn't return, the cashier took the basket through to the back room. He told his family to leave it in case the man returned in the next few days. But that basket stayed there in the back room of the shop, for almost a month. At 7am on January 19th, the cashier's eldest daughter, Marsha, swung by the shop.

She was 19 and had only a few months left of school. It was a Friday morning and she'd already picked out her outfit to go dancing later on that evening. In the back room, she saw the abandoned basket, and figuring that its contents were fair game by now, she reached for the biscuit tin and opened it. Inside was a gas canister and a tangle of wires. The explosion shredded the metal tin and tore through Marsha's face. It burned across her head, arms and legs and fractured a bone in her eye socket. In the aftermath, the police came to the scene and interviewed her father,

who gave a description of the mystery shopper, saying he was white, mid-twenties, slim, with a blonde mullet. Now, that wasn't Uwe's usual look, so I think we can safely assume it was probably a wig. he was white, mid-twenties, slim, with a blonde mullet. Now that wasn't Uwe's usual look, so I think we can safely assume it was probably a wig. But authorities chose to file that description under totally ignore, and they cracked on with some other theories. Marsha spent weeks in a coma and endured months of surgery.

And she wasn't even out of her coma before the police started to dig into her family's finances, looking for anything suspicious, which incidentally they didn't find. Police also interrogated Marsha's family about whether they'd engaged in any dodgy political activities, which could have potentially gotten them in trouble with the Iranian secret service. They even tapped the family's phones. And look, we know the Iranian government does not give a single fuck about going after people they don't like, who happen to be on foreign soil. So I don't blame the German police for looking into this possibility. I do feel, though, there are other things that should have been explored

before you jump right to the Iranian Secret Service. Yeah, I think, you know, the fact that they come there escaping political persecution, like, look into it. We've seen this before. But as we will see time and time again, the police never look at any other possibilities, like which is first and which is next. Like, they don't look at any other possibilities. And this incident was never connected to all of the dummy bombs that had appeared over the previous few years. And after a year and a half of looking at no other possibilities and getting nowhere with their own theory, investigators concluded that it must have just been a mentally ill lone perpetrator and closed the case. Even though a mentally ill lone perpetrator, it's very unlikely that they're just gonna like set

off a bomb like if you to come in there and like stabbed them sure but it just feels like the profile the crime and nothing really fits and like we said they just don't look at any other possibility no a few months before that explosion, the Ubers had shot and killed someone called Enver Simsek, a Turkish flower seller who had been just minding his business in his shop in Nuremberg. The police

there had decided that Enver's death must have been the work of the Turkish mafia. Nuremberg police interrogated the grieving family for months, trying to discover any link between them and organised crime. Again, the family's phones were tapped, this time for 10 months. And when a Turkish tailor, Abdurrahim Ozdoroglu, was shot in his shop in Nuremberg again, with the same gun, a year later, the police played exactly the same game.

The two cases, despite their similarities, were considered to be isolated incidents and they were dropped. The same summer, in June 2001, Suleiman Tashribku sent his father away from the fruit and veg shop that they owned to buy olives. His father returned to see Suleiman, lying in a pool of blood. The press beat the police to the scene by quite some time because no officers had arrived for

more than an hour and a half. And when they did their questions to the family were along the same old lines. Was this an honour killing? Is it to do with your code of honour? Is there a code of silence that's preventing you from talking? And look, again, I'm going to say the police looking into this, like retrospectively, we can be like, what the fuck are they doing? But I think, you know, we have seen in cases what happens when the police pussyfoot around cultural issues, when it comes to different groups that they have to police. It doesn't serve those communities well if the police are like, oh, this looks like an honor killing. I don't want to get involved. They're asking the question. But again, they did not keep an open mind that these killings could have been anything else. And that is just as dangerous. And these questions that the police were asking started

rumors in the Turkish community. Even Suleyman's own family started to wonder whether there was some truth to the Turkish mafia having been involved, because the authorities themselves were so convinced. their own racial biases and their own biases about immigrants led them astray. Time and again, in different cities and different jurisdictions across Germany, police departments immediately responded to the murders and the bombings by assuming that the perpetrators had to be immigrants themselves. Gamza Kubisic, who I interviewed for the book, describes showing up at her family's kiosk to take a shift working, but to find it surrounded by police and ambulances. And as she approaches, an officer stops her and eventually reveals to her that her father is dead. And within hours of the shock, police start interrogating her and her mother and her brothers about this attack. And if something terrible happens

in your life and you have to deal with police, normally you would be looking for answers. But instead, the police were assuming that the family members had the answers. Gamza and her two younger kids, police officers lied to Gamza and her mother, telling them they had evidence that they didn't, that suggested Gamza's father and that McCubasek had been up to nefarious activities. In a couple of these cases of family members I interviewed for this, police pretended that the murdered man had actually had a second family or had been traveling to another city to liaise with a lover. The police had these total trash TV drama project upon these families and make things up and even

showed at one point one of the families a photo of a woman who supposedly the murder victim had been going off to see in another city to show, oh, see, he wasn't being honest to you. So what else might he have been keeping from you to try to incite that sort of thinking? Police use all these tricks and tactics and lies. So imagine your loved one has just been killed, your father, your husband has just been killed, and then police are just lying to you, to your face about about that person, and not providing you any answers. And you can imagine sort of the trauma that results. Meanwhile, the Ubers, possibly astonished that nothing was happening to them, had their own plan if it all did go south. When the doorbell rang,

the Uvas would hide and Beata would answer the door. If it was the police, the Uvas would shoot themselves on the spot. Beata also was in charge of the money, which was later used as evidence that she had means to leave if she wanted to. While the Uvas went out on their missions,

Beata would stay in their flat, keeping an eye on the news. Firstly, so if the Uvas were ever caught, she could destroy any evidence linking them to their network, which, by this point, had a name, the NSU. And secondly, so Beata could take any footage of the crimes for their own records.

From the videos she recorded, Beata made any footage of the crimes for their own records. From the videos she recorded, Beate made montages of the terror that the trio had carried out so far, and she sent them to newspapers. The Uwe's motto was victory or death, and in these videos they repeatedly referred to themselves as both a national organisation and a network of comrades. But even this wasn't enough to convince the intelligence agencies that they were dealing with a whole organised politically charged movement. But regardless, they soon stopped looking for the trio. For good.

In Germany, the statute of limitations for any crime apart from murder is five years that's bonkers that is absolutely cocoa bananas especially for what is clearly like i know they're not labeling it as terrorism at this point but building bombs and leaving them around the city i I'm shocked. Absolutely. And in addition to that, because our trio were only wanted for their Nazi-dabbling escapades back in Jena, the three Nazis suddenly weren't being hunted at all anywhere. So, emboldened, the NSU tried something even bigger. On the 9th of June 2004, the Uwe's went to Cologne and drove a rented black van around, looking for an immigrant neighborhood. And they found it in Keopstrasse, a quiet street in the Mulheim district, lined with Turkish and Kurdish cafes, shops, jewelers, food stalls and apartments.

They parked a few streets away, took out three mountain bikes and wheeled one of them down Keopsstratzer, leaving it resting against a barber shop. A hard, heavy case on the back of this bike contained an empty gas cylinder filled with more than

710 centimetre long nails. Also in the canister was 5.5 kilograms of gunpowder and a 9-volt battery. The three of them walked to a safe distance in view of the barbershop. There they pressed a remote detonator.

Before cycling away, they stood for a minute to watch the devastation unfold. The explosion sent the bike flying into the air, instantly shattering more than 30 windows and raining broken glass down onto the street. Hundreds of nails burst in every direction across Kirpstrasse, at almost 500 miles an hour, sinking into buildings and bodies. Jets of flame shot in all directions,

burning people's clothes and skin, but incredibly, and I really, really do not know how, no one was killed. I have no idea. Such a gas cylinder. That is absolutely massive. Having said that, though, dozens of victims were maimed for life within

seconds. One person had to have more than a hundred bits of shrapnel removed from his face, one by one with a needle. A police fax went out calling attention to a violent terrorist crime, finally, but 40 minutes later, the reference to terrorism was removed. The only thing police had learnt in that time, in that 40 minutes, was that this explosion had happened in an immigrant area. From then on, the investigation centred only around organised crime. A year after the bombing, one of the two Uvas shot 41-year-old Greek locksmith Theodoros Bulgaridis in the head. And yet again, the newspaper, likely informed by the police, ran the headline, Turkish Mafia Strikes Again.

And this same story happened again and again across Germany. A white German would come into a Turkish or Greek-owned business, shoot them with a Cheska 83, and flee on a bicycle. Yet none of these crimes, even though they are all exactly the same, were ever connected. And they were all eventually dropped as unsolved. The reasons why the NSU got away with this for so long seems mostly to do with the police's inability

to see what was right in front of them. A year after the Cologne bombing, the Uwe cycled to the kebab stand of 50-year-old Ismail Yassar and shot him twice in the head in broad daylight. It was obvious that the motive wasn't money. All the cash was left in the till. Officers searched everywhere for drugs, bringing sniffer dogs and even testing the kebab meat.

They hounded Ismail's family for any trace of ties to drug gangs. Even when this turned up nothing, they started to pressure friends of Ismail's kids to say that he had sold them drugs when Ismail's son Kerem suggested to police that a white German could have been responsible the officer said the following which is absolutely astonishing and you are not going to believe me but it is what they said given that killing human beings is considered highly taboo within our cultural space we can safely assume that the

perpetrator is located far outside our local system of values and norms which if you need me to spell that out, what the police are saying is that only a foreigner could possibly bring themselves to kill someone. But that's not the whole story. Now yes, of course, prejudice was rife, but it wasn't just in the police. And there's also a lot of nuance in what may, on the face of it, seem like a simple case of prejudice. In a 2002 survey, only 3% of Germans said that they believed that their relatives who had lived through the Holocaust had been anti-Jewish. Only 1% believed that it was possible they were directly involved in crimes against Jews. And sure, there might have been objectors at the time, people who didn't agree with what the government was doing, no doubt there was. But if 97% of Germans in Nazi Germany had thought that Jews were absolutely a-okay, the Nazi party probably would have struggled to get

the Holocaust off the ground. Yeah, I understand why people want to believe that and why that is a narrative they tell themselves. But we've all seen that picture of like one of Hitler's rallies and there's only one guy with his arms crossed refusing to do the Zekiel. I'm sorry, your grandparents are in that photo. Or equivalents. And it's exactly the same kind of desperate optimism that may have stopped the police wanting to believe that white Germans could be responsible for these attacks. Maybe they were blinded by their desire

to believe that that kind of idea was a thing of the past. But the threat was very, very real. And it wasn't just our spruce and threesome taking their fight to the streets. Back in Thuringia, which is where our story started, police were confiscating guns and bombs from far-right individuals all the time.

Immigrants were regularly dragged out into the street and beaten. All the investigations into mafia hits came to dead ends and no connections were ever made because they weren't there. And after a decade of absolute shambles, German intelligence finally had the obvious pointed out to them. From the most unlikely source imaginable, the post 9-11 FBI. After 2001, there was only one enemy in the US's eyes, and that was Islamist terrorism. Still, they weren't exactly new to white supremacy. They had, after all, plenty of experience shutting down the KKK. In 2007, Munich police asked the FBI to review the evidence that

they had, and the FBI's verdict was immediate and clear. In a classified memo titled Serial Murder, the FBI told the German intelligence services the following. The offender is a disciplined, mature individual who is shooting the victims because they are of Turkish ethnic origin. The motivation is a combination of personal cause and thrill. The offender has a personal, deep-rooted animosity toward people of Turkish origin. It's pretty spot on. Except there's obviously two. So a decade after the bomb threat started,

with nine people killed in cold blood and dozens more seriously injured, the deaths had finally, officially been linked to anti-foreigner sentiment for the first time. The FBI also suggested putting out two press releases. One asking for any leads on where the killers could have got the gun that they used and another making public the fact

that a killer was out there targeting Turks and asking for information about anyone that may have been in the area at the time who had an axe to grind. But the German police decided to ignore this advice and put out exactly zero press releases and went back to the drawing board. It's very odd, isn't it? You would think in 90s Germany, getting hold of a gun must be quite difficult.

So it would make the search circle quite a bit smaller i would have thought and also like whether the german police had like some sort of bias to the people that were doing this crime or whatever which you know i think we can safely say was was the case because they failed to investigate it properly but once they get this information from the fbi i don't understand why they're not motivated to put an end to it, regardless, like why they ignore this advice to put out these press releases.

It is really baffling to me. But whatever led them to make this decision, it was a decision that they would come to regret very soon. Because the NSU's next two victims weren't Turkish immigrants.

They were police officers. And this case is enormous. We've already told you that it spans many, many years. We just don't have the time to get into exactly what happened next. You'll have to read the book if you want all of the details, and I very much encourage you to do so. What happened next was a deadly shootout between the police and the Uvas on the streets of Hillebron. And we have to mention it because the response to this gunfight was so different to the previous murders. There were multiple helicopters, dozens of squad cars. They were immediately dispatched to hunt the killers down. A perimeter was set up five kilometres around the scene to prevent the assailants' escape, and the police documented

33,000 suspect vehicles in the area, investigated a thousand tips, and considered 5,000 leads. Compared to the 90 minutes that Suleiman Tuskapur lay in his own blood before a single officer even turned up it's quite stark and in this investigation guess who the main line of investigation was not the Turkish this time the Roma immigrants instead

which brings us back to where we started this episode. Because finally, in 2011, after 15 bank robberies, nine immigrant deaths, one dead police officer, and untold chaos across Germany, the two Uwe's were finally caught robbing that bank. And the Uwe's and Beate all followed through on their promises to each other. Realising they were finished, one Uwe shot the other, then himself. Beate torched her apartment and fled. On her way out, as well as her cats, she made sure to pick up 15 DVDs. Dozens of identical DVDs were later found in the blackened wreckage of the van in which the two Uwe's lay dead. And more lay in their apartment,

alongside hit lists of prominent left-wing politicians and Jews. A few days later, DVDs started arriving at newspapers and Muslim community centres all over Germany. It was a manifesto. It mostly featured clips taken from the cartoon The Pink Panther. But it told a story in which the Panther joins the NSU, follows a bunch of foreign caricatures around, and then plans to bomb them.

It also featured photos that the NSU had taken of their dead victims, plus a map with nine white Xs to represent their victims. At the end, the Panther is celebrated for ridding his homeland of immigrants. There was now absolutely no way around it. This had been a terrorist campaign. And a few days later, Beate handed herself in. She was charged with 10 counts of murder, 32 counts of attempted murder,

membership of a terrorist organisation, complicity in bank robberies, and arson that could have resulted in death for burning her own flat down. And the trial of Beate Scherper lasted for five years. And naturally, it was the biggest story in Germany for decades. And Jacob Kushner,

he was there. To attend the NSU trial is to sit among Nazis. As a member of the press or the public, you could go up to the balcony and observe the trial, and you'd be sitting next to skinheads. I sat next to a far-right extremist who had attempted to bomb a Jewish synagogue in Munich and had been released after serving time for that plot. The papers at the beginning of the trial called Beate Cepa the Nazi bride, which from the beginning, the media was framing and misframing her as this housewife. And that indeed was her defense, is that she was trapped by the Uwe's. But she wasn't the only one on trial. You have several other people on trial. You have Ralph Rolheben, a close friend of the trio's in the far right scene, back in Yena, who's accused of helping furnish a weapon. All of these folks on trial, and then some of their lawyers, one of these defendants is herself from the far right scene. And then you

have audience members looking on from the far right or from the left. And you have the family members of the victim. And there's this large courtroom that is packed. And it's a fascinating scene because everybody wants something that can't necessarily be achieved by this trial. And what I mean by that is there is a army of lawyers, 60 lawyers representing the interests of the family. So these aren't even the prosecutors or the defense attorneys. These are lawyers who are victims advocates lawyers in Germany. So they're there to make sure the family's interests are served at the trial. But whenever these lawyers try to introduce evidence that could implicate Germany's state, police, intelligence agents, that sort of thing, the prosecutors object saying the state isn't on trial here and the judge usually

agrees. And so the families of these victims, what they really want is justice in terms of at least five of these people to be convicted, of course, but what they also want is for the state to be investigated and for Germany's government and all of Germany to have to reckon with how this was allowed to occur, how their loved ones were murdered because of who they were and how the NSU was able to do that, go on murdering these people for so many years. Really, this whole trial, despite that it lasts five years, despite that it's exhaustive in some ways, in other ways, doesn't really give many people in Germany

the answers that they really want to know about how the state was complicit in allowing these crimes to go on for so long. In Germany, there aren't any juries. It's just a team of five judges. Beate was up against a life sentence,

though in Germany you can appeal that after 15 years. During the five-year trial, legislators were forced to write and rewrite enormous reports on the NSU and their terrorist sprees across Germany because they kept on omitting the very salient fact that the institution's own biases were to blame. The vast majority of the trial centered around Beate and the question of her complicity in the attacks. If prosecutors wanted Beate to be sentenced to the maximum,

which in Germany is essentially 15 plus years, they had to prove that she wasn't just around, she wasn't just aware, but that she was complicit in the murder. She was a murderer herself and that she was a member of a terrorist group. And this was tricky to do because Beate used the defense of she made statements saying that she was trapped by the Uves, that they had threatened to kill themselves if she were to go to police and reveal themselves, then she didn't want her two best friends in the world to have to die. So prosecutors really had to prove that Beate was aware of what was going on and that she was in on it herself. And part of the way they were able to do that

was because for many of these cases, the two Uves would go out and commit the murders or the bombings themselves, but Beate would stay back and record the DVD footage. And so that shows that she had foreknowledge of these attacks and that she was complicit in it. Her role was simply to do the recordings so that they could eventually release a manifesto. And, you know, of course, she was living with the Uves on the run this entire time. Nobody knows exactly who built the bombs, that sort of thing. But the NSU had guns all over their apartment. She gave this defense saying, oh, at every step of the way, it was only after the Uves committed

some sort of crime or attack that she learned about it. They would tell her later and then she would be sad. Suffice it to say that that wasn't a very believable line at court. It was just too perfect to believe that at every single one of these crimes and attacks and bank robberies as well, by the way, that, you know, she didn't find out about it till afterwards. And then, and then she couldn't go to the police because she was trapped. In 2018, Beata Cepa was found guilty of 10 murders and for being a part of a terrorist group what are your thoughts because it's less clear i guess like how much she is hands-on involved but i think fine oh yeah yeah like i don't really have any issue with her being found guilty of that no i don't either and i just don't i don't doubt a coercive control argument was made by her defense but like they don't have

another choice nah like as i said she had the money to leave if she wanted to and she's making the tapes and sending them into the press i don't i don't have any problem with her conviction at all no four others were also given jail time for helping the nsu from prison our old friend of the pod anders bravik even sent a letter to beata chepa praising the NSU's exploits and calling her a martyr. I'm amazed it took him that long to get in touch to be honest. Now no official body was ever investigated as a part of this trial. I was interested in who wasn't on trial. So someone who appeared in the courtroom

but was never charged was Tino Brandt. Tino Brandt testified during the trial to receiving all this taxpayer money and then investing that taxpayer money that he's supposed to receive to reveal potential threats in the far-right scene, to investing that in the far-right scene to grow the far-right scene, and to actually, he admits to sending some of that taxpayer money onto the NSU. So taxpayer money may have even contributed to some of these murders. This is something that has happened throughout history and throughout the world. Brandt received something like 200,000 Deutschmarks over his tenure as a spy. And so they protect them. And so often these very agencies that are supposed to be

using these spies, these mons to gain information, end up becoming these people's protectors. And that's what happened in the case of Tino Brandt. But a few months after the verdicts, officials formed a committee to investigate the NSU and its network. It aimed to uncover what had been missed by authorities about the NSU. And the committee concluded that Thuringia authorities had acted with, quote, sheer indifference to finding the three fugitives in the first place and also that the state intelligence agency's delays and refusals to share intelligence with police may have amounted to deliberate sabotage and deliberate thwarting of the search but since the trial was over all they could do was compensate victims which is remarkable because the trial went on for fucking five years they had time in nuremberg a large stone was carved with the names of the

nine murdered men and placed in the city center to commemorate the victims of the nsu which it's just tokenistic isn't it but never mind where are now? I think these attacks that we've seen in Germany speak volumes about the far-right extremist danger that still exists. In Germany, as in the United States, there are many people who wonder what immigration means for them, what it means for their jobs, their livelihoods. There are some people who wonder what it means for their nation, their identity, their race. And we know so much about what that means. We have economists who show that Germany in particular has a huge shortage of workers and needs immigration to economically survive. Germany famously had a lower birth rate for a number of years than China did

under the one-child policy. And so, you know, if it's an economic argument, there's evidence that shows that these countries need immigration. If it's an ideological concern that people have of what does this mean for my race, I think people need to ask themselves what their country is. Is the United States a nation of immigrants or is it a nation that has repeatedly throughout its more than 200 year history excluded immigrants of certain races who Americans didn't want to be like them or didn't want to bestow the definition of American upon them? This issue, immigration and migration, is going to be the issue of our time. There are more people in the world on the move than any time before, even more than during World War II, which upended so many people. There are more people who

have been forced to flee their homes as refugees, asylum seekers, than ever before. Many of these people are fleeing wars that were fought by Western nations. For example, Germany's refugee crisis, if you want to call it that, was largely people arriving from Syria. And so I think we're going to see more and more people on the move due to climate, due to wars, due to conflict. And because this question isn't going away, what's important is how politicians deal with this and how the media, frankly, frame these discussions. According to the German intelligence agency,

at the end of 2022, there were almost 40,000 far-right extremists in Germany. And 14,000 of those 40,000 were classed as potentially violent. Race-fuelled far-right assaults were up 16% from the previous year. In 2020, a 23-year-old electrician was sentenced to prison for planning a massacre at a synagogue or a mosque, he didn't really mind which one. In December 2022, 3,000 police raided 150 properties across the country of Germany and arrested 25 suspected far-right extremists from the Reichsberger conspiracy movement, who had been plotting to overthrow the government.

Presumably, like a Guy Fawkes situation if they're called the Rice Burger conspiracy. By 2023, attacks against refugees or their accommodation had almost doubled from the previous year. In recent elections, the AFD, a fiercely anti-immigrant party whose members have been fined for using Nazi slogans, got more votes than any other party in the state of Thuringia. And need I remind you, that is where our trio of Nazis are from. In January this year, the German court cut off state funding for neo-Nazi party Die Heimat. Why did they have state funding in the first place? I don't know. Anyway, Germans today are demanding that the government ban the AFD, but obviously banning political parties is a very dangerous game and a slippery, slippery slope. Yeah, absolutely. Especially

because in certain parts of Germany, the AFD carried the youth vote overwhelmingly. And yeah, it's always going to be a tricky game to start banning or censoring political parties. I think my gut feeling is that's not going to end well. And there's no doubt that the world, particularly Europe right now, is in the midst of a migration crisis. It is, if you look at the last election we had in this country, in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, it is the number one concern for voters. And I think banning politicians who speak out against immigration or speak out to reduce immigration or demonizing

anyone who raises valid concerns about it is only going to make things worse as well. Because once people realize that they can't make change happen democratically with their existing political parties, they are going to start looking for alternatives. And that leaves the door very widely open for someone truly scary and truly far-right to say that they have the answer. We've seen it before.

Anyway. If you want to learn more about this case it's politics it's ideologies and what the fucking shit we are going to do about migration i don't know i'm just three raccoons in a trench coat we really recommend that you go and read jacob kushner's book white terror i've read it enjoys the wrong word but it's good and once again thank you to jacob himself the man of the hour for joining us this very special day and we will see you next week for something else that might not be nazis but to be honest i can't promise goodbye gutenberg that's the one it It's not. It's not.

Auf Wiedersehen. Auf Wiedersehen. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts.

But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest

to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health.

This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.