Annette Ramelsberger / Tanjev Schultz / Rainer Stadler / Wiebke Ramm
On 6 May 2013, the biggest criminal trial since German reunification begins in Munich. A woman and four men stand accused of having founded or supported the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a neo-Nazi terrorist group thought to be behind the murder of ten people, two bomb attacks and 15 bank robberies. The trial will take more than three years and will see more than 600 witnesses and experts called to make statements.
Annette Ramelsberger, Tanjev Schultz and Rainer Stadler are among the few journalists who were granted access to the courtroom, and they have covered the entire proceedings from day one. Their faithful transcription of events in court, documented here, constitutes an extensive protocol.
Judges, witnesses, experts, lawyers and defendants speak, and through their words – which are abridged but otherwise verbatim – a stark picture emerges of ten years of terror, of the unending pain of victims’ families, of the cold-blooded actions of the perpetrators, of amateurish investigating and of the difficulty in finding the truth – even as the facts now seem so clear.
The NSU Trial – a piece of German history.