Liberal Europe Podcast I White Terror: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and Germany's Far Right with Jacob Kushner

Jacob: Absolutely. As a foreign correspondent, I was actually based in East Africa when I first heard about the NSU. I was covering attacks on LGBTQ refugees all over East Africa, and then during the 2014, ’15, ’16 wave of asylum seekers arriving in Europe, I started seeing news of attacks against asylum seekers in Germany. I began going on reporting trips to investigate those attacks in small towns in different parts of Germany, where people had been trying to burn down a shelter meant to house asylum seekers, so that those asylum seekers couldn’t come to their towns. In the process of doing that is actually when I heard about the NSU. This was a terrorist group that formed and radicalized in the 1990s in the Eastern German town of Jena, a couple of hours from Berlin. Then, in the 2000s, they committed all of these terrible attacks — murders and bombings of immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants all across Germany. The thing that was shocking — of course, the crimes themselves were shocking, but the other thing that shocked the German public when this came to light, which wasn’t until 2013 — was that these terrorists had gotten away with it. For 13 years, this terrorist group survived living and hiding in Germany, committing these attacks over many years, and never got caught by police. That really fascinated me as a journalist, because one of the main things we’re supposed to do is hold authorities to account — trying to understand how they got away with it, and how German authorities, as it turned out, had looked the other way for so long.

Leszek: Perhaps you can tell us a bit more about Beate, Uwe, and Uwe, who are from Jena in Thuringia. How did they get involved and become so murderous — and so influential? What is the story of the people you describe in the book?

Jacob: Definitely. The NSU was a network, but the three core members grew up as teenagers in Jena in the 1990s. This was a time, remember, of high unemployment in Eastern Germany, with all the concerns East Germans had after the fall of the wall and reunification — a lot of factories closed, that sort of thing. So these were the gripes, the complaints these three had. However, it’s interesting to note that two of the three never had these unemployment issues themselves, nor did their families. The two Uwes — the two men with the same first name — Uwe Mundlos was the son of a computer science professor and was very good with computers. He ended up going to college; neither he nor his parents ever lacked for jobs. Same with Uwe Böhnhardt, although his family had more working-class jobs — but they were employed. Beate Zschäpe was a little more complicated. Her mother was going back and forth between Bucharest and Jena looking for work, had studied different things, but never held a job for too long. So her situation was a little more reflective of the popular notion of what people were experiencing in Eastern Germany at that time. I mention this because their ideology starts to form simply from being disgruntled with society — feeling they didn’t have a rightful place in it, and that immigrants were in a better position than them, which was not the case. They had many more opportunities than immigrants did. After the fall of the wall, many of these guest workers — the immigrants in Eastern Germany — didn’t have jobs at all, had visa issues to contend with, and suddenly had to leave the factories, dockyards, and dormitories where they lived and start their own businesses and live on their own for the first time. So their anti-immigrant beliefs — which also started as anti-Semitic beliefs — weren’t necessarily rooted in their own experience, although those were the beliefs they came to hold. Their pranks — frankly, they started as teenagers — were things like desecrating Jewish memorials, Jewish graves, the graves of Jewish leaders. Serious offenses, but framed as pranks. Eventually they started experimenting with explosives, setting prank bombs in stadiums or in different places, possibly outside the home of one immigrant. So they radicalized first as pranksters. But in East Germany in the 1990s, if you wanted to be a rebel or be provocative, there was no more provocative way than becoming a neo-Nazi. Eventually they bought into that hard neo-Nazi ideology — and not just them. They were growing up within a network of far-right extremists all across their state of Thuringia, so they radicalized within a much larger group.

Leszek: You commit a large part of the book to the role of the secret services in Germany and informers in the broader movement — the fact that it was tolerated, or in some ways even supported, even if that wasn’t really the goal of the collaboration. Can you describe this ambivalent relationship between the secret services, the police, and this far-right neo-Nazi movement?

Jacob: Absolutely. Readers of the book will become familiar with a character named Tino Brandt. Tino Brandt was probably the ideological leader of the far-right scene in that state. He worked for a far-right publishing house, putting out right-wing books. But in his off time, he organized far-right rallies and convened the groups. He ran legal trainings for neo-Nazis on how not to get caught with weapons in their cars, and what to do when interacting with police, so they could go out and commit violent attacks. He was a ringleader. And Tino Brandt was also an informant for the state intelligence agency. So this ringleader of the far-right scene was actually receiving money from the German state — taxpayer money — which, by his own admission later, he was investing back into the scene. So it was German taxpayer money that helped fund this extremist group within which the NSU terrorists radicalized. To get into your question about the relationship between the police and the intelligence agencies: at one point, the police were investigating Tino Brandt and his network for all of these crimes — from hate-speech-type crimes (though it’s not technically hate speech), to desecrating memorials, to violence against leftists. At some point, the police had something like 30 crimes they believed Tino Brandt was responsible for. But when they went to prosecutors to charge Brandt and some of his co-conspirators, somebody got in their way. That somebody was Thuringia’s intelligence agency, who said — and they admit this — that Tino Brandt was their informant and they wanted to protect him. Even though he wasn’t supplying any useful intelligence whatsoever, it seems, they were paying him just to have that well-placed informant. It really came to a head when the police finally got a warrant from a prosecutor to search Tino Brandt’s home, or at least his computer. The night before, Brandt’s intelligence handler got word of it and warned him to hide his computer, telling him the police were coming. So the next morning, when the police arrived, Tino Brandt was standing at the door ready for them. He handed over his computer willingly — but the computer was missing the hard drive. He had taken it out because he’d been forewarned. So just to understand: Germany’s state intelligence agency was actually thwarting the police from doing their job, helping an accused criminal get away with his crimes. That hopefully gives you an idea of the times we were living in, and the unlikelihood that that intelligence agency was ever going to take seriously the network that would become the NSU.

Leszek: Can we say the German state was tolerating or accepting this — because the police and the secret service had sympathizers, or because they were inexperienced in fighting the far right, or perhaps just weren’t taking the threat seriously? What do you think is the reason they were able to function for so long and commit so many violent crimes, mostly against immigrants?

Jacob: It’s a great question. The trio’s time in Jena comes to an end when police finally get a warrant to search the garages where they had been building bombs — but the trio escaped. The police messed up that day and let the three get away, and they were never seen together again after that. They lived in hiding in different East German towns for years. One thing that helped them get away — and frankly, the one thing I’d say wasn’t necessarily the authorities’ fault — is that they had a vast network. They had friends renting apartments for them, friends renting the camper vans that were part of how they robbed all these banks. They ended up robbing 15 banks to earn money, and they had a lot of help getting weapons and so on. So that’s one thing. But why didn’t the police and the intelligence service find them? For the police, you could say it’s because they weren’t really looking. In theory they were — but each time an immigrant was murdered, police would show up at the scene and immediately blame the victim. They’d arrive at the murder scene of, say, a Turkish man at his kebab shop or hardware store, and immediately assume there must be some kind of Turkish mafia, some kind of PKK Turkish-Kurdish conflict. They’d see a scene and immediately think organized crime. So the police would spend all their time interrogating family members — telling the wife, daughter, son, or father of someone who’d just been killed to “just admit who did it, admit who hated your husband, who hated your dad, what controversy was there” — instead of doing their job of figuring out who the actual culprits were. The idea is that these police were so blinded by institutional racism that they couldn’t fathom it would be white Germans committing these attacks, rather than immigrants themselves. That’s essentially what largely allowed it to go on for so long. Meanwhile, intelligence agencies had many informants like Tino Brandt within these far-right scenes, but either never received information about the NSU — which some feel is unlikely — or received information and didn’t act on it, the same way they hadn’t back in Thuringia when the trio was first radicalizing. That part is murkier, but the book follows one of the intelligence agents himself, who spoke with me, and who was handling one far-right informant who may have had ties to the NSU network. So how did they get away with it? A combination, I think it’s quite clear, of institutional racism by the police for not taking these crimes seriously, and a failure — or a refusal — of the intelligence agencies to risk revealing their informants for the sake of saving immigrants. When you act on intelligence from an informant, you often compromise them and may not be able to use them again, because people may realize how you got the information. So one of the questions for the intelligence agencies is: why are you funneling all this taxpayer money to far-right extremists — some of whom are even using it to commit attacks — and then refusing to use those people when it comes to actually protecting the public and protecting immigrants?

Leszek: Comparing the U.S. experience, which you write about at the end of the book, with the German context — do you think there are double standards regarding the far right and domestic terrorism versus foreign-based radical Islamist or other foreign terrorism? If so, why?

Jacob: Yeah, absolutely. Before even considering the double standard between far-right and, say, Islamist terror, look at leftist terror. When you speak to authorities in Germany, they’ll say that at the time these attacks happened, they didn’t think of right-wing violence as terrorism. When they thought of terrorism in Germany, they thought of the RAF — the Red Army Faction — which was kidnapping bank executives, hijacking planes, doing various leftist things. That’s their defense for why they didn’t necessarily consider this terror when they first saw it; some of these murders looked like organized crime to them. So first, you have the bias that authorities in a place like Germany are accustomed to investigating left-wing terror, maybe more so than right-wing. And then, as an American, I see this in the United States too — the vast bias in how the U.S. treats far-right extremists versus Islamist ones, not just since September 11th, but before that as well. There’s a fascinating book called The Terror Factory by the journalist Trevor Aaronson, which looks at how, after 9/11, the U.S. government essentially fabricated Islamist terrorist cases through entrapment. The FBI would sometimes find a mentally unstable Muslim, convince this person they were angry and wanted to act on it, and convince them to buy into a plot to acquire weapons and commit some sort of attack. The FBI would concoct most of it, entrap somebody, and then charge and convict that person with terrorism — in order to get convictions, to make it look like the FBI was taking Islamist terrorism seriously after 9/11. You still see this discrepancy today in terms of modern-day white terrorist attacks in the United States. The best example is Dylann Roof, the white terrorist who massacred Black churchgoers in Charleston some years ago. He even released a terrorist manifesto before the attack, explaining his terrorism — and yet prosecutors didn’t charge him with terrorism. Now, prosecutors may have felt they wouldn’t get a terrorism conviction because an American jury might not have thought of it as terrorism. But that just shows the vast discrepancy between what we think of as terrorism — we think of it as Islamist. In fact, in the United States since 9/11, more Americans have been killed by far-right extremists than by Islamist ones, and there have been three times as many far-right attacks as Islamist ones. In Germany, too, there have been more far-right attacks than Islamist ones. So I think we need to rethink what we picture when we think of terrorism. I come to the example, in Germany a few years ago, of the coup attempt by the Reichsbürger group to overthrow the German government. One of the ringleaders was a prince who lived on the same river the NSU trio grew up on — the river Saale in Eastern Germany. When he was arrested at his castle, Der Spiegel described him as wearing a tweed jacket, an aristocratic man, not what you’d expect a terrorist to look like. But the journalists got it wrong. That’s exactly what a terrorist looks like. Most terrorists in Germany, as in the United States, as in most countries where the population is predominantly white, are male, right-wing, and white — just like Reuss was. So there’s still this mistake many of us make, even journalists, in associating terrorism with something purely Islamist, when the numbers suggest it’s more often far-right extremist.

Leszek: Do you think the fact that the NSU case and the coup plot you described were so influential and so entrenched in the system — do you think revealing those cases changed the culture of fighting far-right extremism in Germany, which is at least officially not tolerated because of historical analogies? Or is it still being widely ignored? And with the rise of anti-immigrant political movements, mostly the AfD, do you think there’s now a wider acceptance even of violent anti-immigrant behavior from groups like a new NSU that might emerge in the future?

Jacob: That’s a good question. There’s a lot of research — that I’m not the expert on — looking at the link between speech and violence, and I think that’s really important to consider. After the NSU came out, there was a five-year-long trial of some of the involved members, five of them, which I chronicled in the book. There was a whole lot of shock in Germany, and the Bundestag ended up doing three different investigations into the NSU and how they got away with it. The heads of a couple of the intelligence agencies — the federal one and one or two of the state agencies — were fired and replaced. But I think we have a mixed signal. I do think Germany has learned some things. For example, we now know about so many cases of far-right extremism in Germany’s military and police. There was a group of police officers in Baden-Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, who were messaging about the idea of creating a terrorist attack and blaming immigrants to start a race war. There was a soldier, Franco Albrecht, caught doing the same — he was going to commit a terrorist attack using weapons siphoned from the military and frame an immigrant for it, to start a race war. So this is prevalent, but we do know about it because these cases were caught. So it’s that question: are we aware because the authorities are doing a better job and catching these things, or are we still just scratching the surface, with so many more we don’t know about? It’s hard to know. But I will say Germany is doing a much better job than the United States, which has for years known about far-right groups here — like the Oath Keepers — that have been trying to recruit active-duty soldiers and veterans into militias. There’s just no political appetite to confront that. During the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security created a report showing how these groups were trying to recruit within the U.S. military. When part of that report was released, the outrage against President Obama — that he would even release such a report, or suggest members of our military might be far-right extremists — was so intense that they retracted it. They took it back. That shows how far we are, here in the United States, from acknowledging or wanting to admit far-right violence. In that respect, Germany might be a little ahead of us. But then again, with the intelligence agencies, you’ve seen very little change. I wrote a story for Foreign Policy about a former head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maaßen, who was himself far-right — perhaps not an extremist, but associated with far-right extremists. Die Zeit called him the Steve Bannon of Germany. He was the head of the agency for years, until relatively recently. There’s still not much oversight that the Bundestag has over the intelligence agencies. How many informants do we have? There’s no public accountability. The public doesn’t get to know these things, and the Bundestag gets to know very little. So I’m not sure how much has changed. I would say this is a difficult thing for societies to grapple with — thinking that they themselves are the biggest threat. To tie it together, the thing that sticks with me: in this book, readers will meet Gordian Meyer-Plath, a German intelligence handler who eventually became the head of intelligence in one of the German states. One time he went to the United States and visited Oklahoma City, where the U.S. experienced one of its largest white terrorist attacks in history — a bomb that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more, a few decades ago. He visited the memorial and the bookshop there, and he noticed that the bookshop was full of books about Islamist terror and extremism all around the world, about what terrorism looked like — and there wasn’t a single book about the type of terrorism that had happened right there. That really shows how far we are, at least in the United States, from being willing to acknowledge domestic terrorism for what it truly is.

Leszek: Jacob, just to finish: what do you think is the right strategy — drawing on the experience from the book in Germany, and the U.S. experience — to fight these far-right extremists? It doesn’t seem that trying to appease the far right works. We can see that with Trump, and with the groups that feel empowered by him becoming president, January 6th, and more. In Germany too, moving the whole political spectrum to the right doesn’t really disarm the AfD. Do you think there’s a structural way to fight the far right? Is it police work? What do you think is the right strategy for Europeans — beyond Germany — and for the U.S. as well?

Jacob: It’s a great question. You discussed this with one of your previous guests, Jan-Werner Müller, and he was saying that center-right parties shouldn’t appease — I’m extrapolating a little on what he said — but I don’t think you can appease people who are anti-immigrant because of their beliefs, as opposed to for economic reasons. People who are xenophobic, for example — you’re not going to appease them. If you’re a centrist or center-right party, you’re not going to win those people over by moving further right, when there’s another option for them that is actually the AfD, or actually the Republican Party — parties that are genuinely very opposed to immigration. So it’s important that party leaders consider the research showing that appeasement doesn’t work, and set it aside as a strategy. When it comes to Europe, I think it’s a tricky balance, because on one hand, liberals are sometimes afraid of too much state interference — do we give intelligence agencies more power? And in Germany, these intelligence agencies have been run by people who sometimes even sympathize with these extremists, and certainly by people who weren’t willing to act on the intelligence they received to protect immigrants. So it’s a big question. But the number one thing in Germany, and in Europe in general, is being able to acknowledge the nature of these threats by keeping and releasing statistics. It wasn’t until relatively recently that Germany was releasing police statistics focusing not just on leftist and Islamist violence, but on far-right extremist violence too. So it begins with acknowledging where terrorism comes from. And journalists are responsible too — we give so much more coverage to Islamist attacks here in the United States than we do to far-right ones. It’s a big question, but it starts with acknowledging the problem. And for political parties, it starts with not acquiescing — not assuming xenophobia will go away if we just nudge a little more toward those voters. What you need politically — and this is just my perspective as an observer — is to give people different options. You need distinct parties with distinct platforms: one could be welcoming of immigrants, one could be not, so you give the public a clear choice. I think that’s what we’re seeing in the United States, where the Democratic Party is really struggling to articulate where it stands on these issues. Obama deported more people than any president in modern U.S. history, and he was a Democrat. So Democrats need to decide: are they going to emulate the policies of President Trump if they come back into power in the midterms or the executive, or are they going to strike out on their own? As a journalist, I see the need for a clear distinction between the parties when it comes to immigration.

Leszek: I think those are important lessons for us, having had experience with the far right in the past, and also with far-left extremism. We know that terrorism leads to terrorism. We don’t need another situation like Colombia, with far-right and far-left groups fighting each other and the government. Whatever the political views, extremism — and especially violence — should be absolutely out of the question. I think your book and your research are an important reminder that we have to be vigilant, especially liberals, who claim to be tolerant and to fight for pluralism and inclusivity. So, Jacob, thank you so much for these important lessons from across the pond — from New York, I suppose. Thank you for being with us on Liberal Europe today, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing you at the Freedom Games in Łódź in October.

White Terror: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and Germany’s Far Right with Jacob Kushner

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White Terror: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and Germany’s Far Right with Jacob Kushner

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