Uproar as ‘Nazi moll’ trial gets under way

Prosecutors call Beate Zschaepe Germany’s most dangerous neo-Nazi and from Monday, she will sit in the dock in the country’s biggest far-right murder trial of the post-war period.

Already there is uproar after a Munich court used a lottery to assign press seats at the trial and left major German dailies as well as international news agencies without a place in court.

The lottery, which saw 324 applications for the seats drawn from 10 different lots, came after the court’s first allocation in March on a first-come, first-served basis saw no Turkish journalists granted a guaranteed seat, even though eight of the victims were ethnic Turks.

The announcement of the 50 media representatives, which include women’s lifestyle magazine Brigitte, advertising journal Hallo Muenchen, and a series of local newspapers and radio stations, provoked jeers and howls of disbelief.

As the proceedings get under way against Zschaepe and four alleged accomplices in Munich, the unassuming bespectacled brunette remains an enigma behind a wall of silence. When she walked through the door of the police station of Zwickau, a sleepy town in former communist East Germany, on Nov 8, 2011, to turn herself in, she told officers: “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

Since then, she has refused to divulge any secrets from the previous 14 years which she, according to the authorities, spent underground and on the run as part of a far-right killer trio blamed for 10 murders.

“Everyone in Germany knows her name but no one knows who she is,” the daily Die Welt wrote about a woman who has shaken the country’s self-image as having learned the lessons of its Nazi past.

Four days before she gave herself up, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, her two fellow gang members, died in an apparent murder-suicide after a bungled bank heist, finally bringing their “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) to light.

Investigators say the three were locked in a macabre love triangle, robbing banks and living comfortably off the proceeds while they carried out a nationwide hunt for immigrant victims.

Now 38, Zschaepe, the only surviving member of the group, is suspected of involvement in the killing of nine shopkeepers of Turkish or Greek origin across Germany between 2000 and 2006 and a German policewoman in 2007, as well as 15 armed robberies, arson, and attempted murder.

Dubbed “the Nazi moll” by the tabloids, Zschaepe faces life in prison.

Zschaepe had a chaotic upbringing. Her mother, Annerose Apel, gave birth to her on Jan 2, 1975 in the East German city of Jena, purportedly without knowing she was pregnant.

Her father was believed to be Romanian but refused to acknowledge her as his child.