During a panel discussion at the School of Public Policy at CEU on June 5, a distinguished group of experts discussed two current court cases in Germany and Hungary: the ongoing NSU (National Socialist Underground) trial in Munich, and the 2011-13 trial in Budapest that led to the conviction in August 2013 of Zsolt Petö and Arpad and Istvan Kiss for the murder of six Roma between March 2008 and August 2009. The panel was moderated by Karoly Bard, professor and chair of the Human Rights Program at CEU’s Legal Studies Department.
Carsten Ilius, a Berlin-based lawyer who is representing one of the plaintiffs at the NSU trial, and his colleague Volker Eick, a member of the Republican Lawyers’ Association in Berlin, described the series of attacks between 1999 and 2011 that led to the murder of 10 people, nine of Turkish/Greek origin and one German. Ilius explained that the goal of these attacks that took place at different times and in locations throughout Germany was to terrorize the Turkish and other minority communities with the hope that they would leave the country, and also to encourage other groups to carry out similar attacks.
Ilius elaborated on the strong links among the defendants and neo-Nazi groups such as Blood & Honour, and Combat 18 – links that were ignored by the German police until the arrest of Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos, and Beate Zschäpe in 2011. Both Ilius and Eick presented many examples showing that the German Security Services were aware of the activities of the NSU and other neo-Nazi groups and, in many cases, provided them with valuable assistance and support. “Almost one-third of NSU members were financed by German secret services,” said Eick. He said that international public pressure was needed to push Germany to conduct an investigation of its secret service.
In their investigations over a 12-year period, the German police ignored many leads that would have revealed that a Nazi group was behind the attacks. “The Turkish families of the murder victims were traumatized by the fascist attacks, and then by the structural racism of the German police,” said Ilius. He stressed that the German NSU trials were taking place today not because of good police work, but because of the damning evidence that was found after Böhnhardt, Mundlos, and Zschäpe were arrested.
Hungarian filmmaker and journalist András Vágvölgyi summarized the 2008 and 2009 attacks in Hungary, and also provided detailed portraits of the three men who were responsible for the murder of six Roma. He said that there were many similarities between the attacks in Hungary and Germany, pointing in particular to the strong ties between the secret services and neo-Nazi groups in both countries.
Liz Fekete, director of the Institute of Race Relations where she has worked for 30 years, opened her remarks by saying that she was “still shocked, still angry, and still learning more.” She applauded the other panelists for “speaking truth to power.” Fekete said that the Munich and Budapest trials were important because they are “still live” and also because they are not isolated cases. “We have to say that there is a pattern across Europe,” she said. She urged everyone to join “our struggle for truth recovery,” a struggle that she said must be won to ensure Europe‘s democratic future.
Watch the panel here: