Beate Zschäpe is the only surviving member of the National Socialist Underground, the far-right terror cell known in Germany as the NSU. With Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt she went underground in January 1998, and for almost 14 years the three lived under false names in Chemnitz and then Zwickau, in Saxony. During that time Mundlos and Böhnhardt shot dead nine small-business owners and workers of Turkish and Greek origin and a young police officer, set off two bombs in Cologne and robbed 15 banks, post offices and a supermarket.
No witness or trace put Zschäpe at any of the shootings. She was convicted anyway, and the reasoning is the core of her case. On July 11, 2018, after a trial of more than five years, the 6th Criminal Senate of the Oberlandesgericht München found that she had founded the NSU with the two men as an equal member, that she had taken part in planning every murder and robbery, and that the group's plan could not have worked without her. It convicted her as a co-perpetrator, a Mittäterin, of all ten murders and sentenced her to life imprisonment, with a finding that her guilt was particularly severe. The Federal Court of Justice upheld that result in August 2021, and the conviction is final.
The case is also about the state. For more than a decade police treated the murders as crimes within immigrant communities, investigated the families of the dead, and let a label like "Döner-Morde" circulate. A parliamentary inquiry later spoke of the relatives as traumatized twice: once by the killings and again by the suspicion that followed. Chancellor Angela Merkel asked the families for forgiveness in 2012.
Zschäpe was born Beate Apel in Jena, then in East Germany, on January 2, 1975. According to the Bundestag inquiry report, which drew on a Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) profile, she was the only child of her mother and a Romanian citizen, and spent most of her first five years with her grandparents. Her mother married in 1975 and again in 1978, and the girl took each husband's surname; the second was Zschäpe. In her own account to the Munich court in 2015, she said she never met her father and that she kept a close bond with her grandmother all her life.
She attended school in the Jena housing district of Winzerla from 1984 to 1992. After a short spell as a painter's helper she began an apprenticeship on November 1, 1992, as a vegetable gardener, because, the inquiry report says, she could not get a place to train as a kindergarten teacher. She finished on August 31, 1995, did not find a permanent job, and later worked for about a year in a city job-creation program as a painter's helper. Three petty-theft cases against her in 1991 ended without a trial under juvenile law.
In her 2015 statement she said she met Uwe Mundlos around 1989 or 1990 at a playground in Winzerla where young people gathered, and that he moved into the flat she shared with her mother in 1991. Mundlos, born in Jena in 1973, was the son of a computer science professor and trained in data processing. She met Uwe Böhnhardt, born in Jena in 1977, at her 19th birthday party in January 1994 and fell in love with him while still in a relationship with Mundlos. Böhnhardt had left school after seventh grade and had already spent time in pretrial detention by 1993, according to the Bundestag report.
The three became part of the far-right scene in Jena. The Bundestag report records that Mundlos and Böhnhardt belonged to the "Thüringer Heimatschutz," a regional neo-Nazi network, and that a leading figure in it was an informant for the Thuringian domestic intelligence service. In 1996 and 1997 the group's actions escalated. Zschäpe told the court that she rented a garage in Jena on August 10, 1996, where the men stored propaganda and, as she later learned, black powder. She admitted mailing two letters prepared with black powder that could not ignite to the Jena city administration and a local newspaper in December 1996, and she described a dummy bomb left at the Jena stadium and suitcases with swastikas left in public places, which she attributed to the two men.
On January 26, 1998, police searched Böhnhardt's home and the garage. They found working pipe bombs containing 1.4 kilograms of TNT. Böhnhardt was allowed to leave during the search, and that same day the three disappeared.
After a transition period, the three lived together in five successive flats rented under other people's names or aliases: in Chemnitz from August 1998 and in Zwickau from December 2000, the Federal Court of Justice summarized. Their last home was a flat at Frühlingsstraße 26 in Zwickau, where, Zschäpe said, they moved in April 2008.
The Munich court found that in 1998 the three agreed, on the basis of their shared ideology, to kill randomly chosen people because of their "southern," mainly Turkish, origin or as representatives of the state. They hoped the killings would destabilize Germany and bring about a change in its state and society along National Socialist and racist lines. To increase the effect, they planned to let the public see only that the killings were a series, and to claim them later in a joint statement under the name "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund." They also agreed to rob banks, post offices and supermarkets to pay for the time-consuming planning and for their life in hiding.
The division of roles, as the court found it, was clear. Mundlos and Böhnhardt would carry out the crimes. Zschäpe would hide the group: obtaining phones and false identity papers, building a respectable cover story and keeping it up with neighbors. She managed the money, including the robbery proceeds. From March 2001, when the first version of a claim-of-responsibility video was finished, she had another task: if the men were caught or died, she was to send out the current version of the video and destroy the evidence in the flat.
Helpers supplied what a life in hiding needs. The court found that Ralf Wohlleben, a former official of the far-right NPD, and Carsten S. obtained the Česká 83 pistol with a silencer that was used in nine of the murders and passed it to Mundlos and Böhnhardt in spring 2000. Holger G. gave the group a driver's license and passport in his own name for Böhnhardt's use, and a health insurance card in a third person's name that Zschäpe used for dental treatment. Böhnhardt showed those papers when renting the vehicles the men drove to crime scenes.
The Bundestag inquiry report, a Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) account and the speech Chancellor Merkel gave at the national memorial in February 2012 together describe the ten people who were killed.
Enver Şimşek was born in 1961 in Şarkikaraağaç, Turkey, and came to Germany in 1985 (a Deutsche Welle gallery gives 1986). From the early 1990s he built up a flower business; his family ran a wholesale flower business and shop in Schlüchtern, Hesse, with three mobile stands in Hesse and northern Bavaria. In Merkel's words, he had fulfilled the dream of his own flower trade for himself, his wife and their two children. People around him described him to police as a loving father and a devout Muslim. On Saturday, September 9, 2000, he was covering for an employee who was on vacation at the family's stand on Liegnitzer Straße in Nuremberg, the third weekend in a row he had done so. He was shot while sorting flowers in his van and died two days later, at 38, without regaining consciousness.
Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, 49, had lived in Nuremberg with his family for more than 20 years and had worked as a factory hand at the same company for just as long. He and his wife had run a small alterations tailor's shop until their divorce in 1998, and he kept it going on the side. Colleagues and neighbors described him to police as friendly and helpful, a man who spent most of his free time at home or in his shop. He was shot there, on Gyulaer Straße, on June 13, 2001. He left a daughter.
Süleyman Taşköprü, 31, ran a greengrocery in Hamburg that he had taken over from his parents a few months earlier. He lived with his partner and their three-year-old daughter. On the morning of June 27, 2001, he sent his father out to buy stock; when his father came back to the shop on Schützenstraße about half an hour later, he found his son dying.
Habil Kılıç, 38, had worked for cleaning firms and freight companies around Munich and then at the city's wholesale market, a job he kept after he and his wife registered their own fresh-produce shop in early 2000. They had a daughter. He was shot behind the counter of the family shop on Bad-Schachener-Straße on August 29, 2001. His wife and their daughter, then 12, later left Germany.
Mehmet Turgut, 25, was born in the village of Kayalık in the Palu district of Elazığ province, Turkey. As a teenager he had traded first names with his brother Yunus on a passport application so as to avoid military service, and he first entered Germany in 1994, as a minor, under his brother's name. He was deported in 1996, returned in 1998 and lived in Hamburg. Police records held nothing against him beyond the immigration cases. He was in Rostock helping out at a friend's döner stand in the Dierkow district when he was killed on the morning of February 25, 2004. Because investigators kept filing him under his brother's name, he appeared for years as "Yunus Turgut," including in the 2012 indictment.
İsmail Yaşar, 50, ran a döner stand on Scharrerstraße in Nuremberg's south. Schoolchildren from the neighborhood came to his stand often, Merkel told the 2012 memorial. He was the father of three. He was shot on June 9, 2005.
Theodoros Boulgarides, 41, a Greek citizen and father of two, ran a key-cutting shop with a German partner on Trappentreustraße in Munich. Merkel described him as a businessman who believed in his future in Germany. He was shot in the shop on the evening of June 15, 2005.
Mehmet Kubaşık, 39, a German citizen of Turkish origin, had come to Germany with his wife, and the couple opened a kiosk on Mallinckrodtstraße in Dortmund. He was building a life there for his daughter and two younger sons. He was shot behind his counter around midday on April 4, 2006. His daughter Gamze Kubaşık became one of the most visible voices of the families during the trial.
Halit Yozgat, 21, ran an internet café on Holländische Straße in his home city of Kassel and was attending evening school to earn his university entrance qualification. On April 6, 2006, his father, İsmail Yozgat, came to the café to take over so that Halit could go to class, and found his son behind the desk. He was the ninth man killed with the same pistol.
Michèle Kiesewetter, 22, came from Oberweißbach in Thuringia and had moved to Baden-Württemberg for her police training. She served with the state riot police based in Böblingen. On April 25, 2007, she and a colleague, then 24, were on duty in Heilbronn and stopped for a break in their patrol car beside a transformer building on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn. The attackers came from behind and shot both officers in the head with two different pistols. She died at the scene; her colleague survived with life-threatening injuries. Their service pistols, handcuffs and other equipment were taken.
The court also convicted Zschäpe over two bombings in Cologne, which killed no one but injured many people. Between December 19 and 21, 2000, one of the men left a basket of goods with a bomb hidden in a Christmas stollen tin in a grocery on Probsteigasse run by a family of Iranian origin, saying he would come back with his forgotten wallet. On January 19, 2001, the owner's 19-year-old daughter opened the tin and was seriously injured. On June 9, 2004, the men placed a nail bomb on a bicycle outside a hairdresser's shop on Keupstraße in the Mülheim district and detonated it by remote control; the court found the attack was aimed at people of mainly Turkish origin. The Bundestag report counts 22 people injured, some critically; the Munich court treated the attack as attempted murder of 32 people.
Between December 1998 and November 2011, Mundlos and Böhnhardt, once Böhnhardt alone, robbed 15 savings bank branches, post offices and a supermarket in Chemnitz, Zwickau, Stralsund, Arnstadt and Eisenach. In two of them shots were fired with intent to kill; in one, a man was seriously wounded. The court found that Zschäpe took part in planning the robberies as well.
The only firm link between the nine shootings of men, as investigators saw it then, was the weapon. The bpb account and the Bundestag report describe how the Bavarian-led special commissions, named "Halbmond" (Crescent) and later "Bosporus," spent years looking for links to organized crime, drug trafficking, Turkish nationalist groups or a betting ring. The families themselves were investigated. Semiya Şimşek, Enver's daughter, has said police showed her mother a photo of a blonde woman with whom her husband supposedly had two children. Several families raised the possibility of a racist motive; the Bundestag committee found that those hints were not taken seriously.
A second case analysis in May 2006 floated the idea that the killers might be mobile young men with anti-foreigner motives, but assumed they were rooted in the Nuremberg area, and searches there led nowhere. A possible link to the Keupstraße bombing was examined and not established. The Heilbronn shooting, committed with different weapons, was not connected to the series at all until 2011.
The press shaped the picture too. In August 2005 a Nuremberg newspaper headline used the word "Döner-Mord," and the phrase "Döner-Morde" spread through German and Swiss papers for years, although only two of the nine men worked at döner stands. The Bundestag committee called the label cynical and belittling, and noted that it was chosen as the "Unwort des Jahres," the German non-word of the year, for 2011. "The expression was degrading and insulting to the victims, who had such different biographies," Semiya Şimşek told the committee. A 2015 study by the Otto Brenner Foundation, cited by the bpb, found that media coverage had stigmatized the families for years.
In Kassel, investigators found in April 2006 that an employee of Hesse's domestic intelligence agency had been in the internet café around the time Halit Yozgat was shot and had not come forward. Prosecutors opened a murder investigation against him in June 2006. The Bundestag report records that the suspicion was cleared, but also that the investigation could not establish whether he had already left the café when the shots were fired. He was never charged.
On the morning of Friday, November 4, 2011, two masked men robbed a savings bank branch in Eisenach, Thuringia, and escaped on bicycles with 71,920 euros. A passerby told police he had seen two cyclists load their bikes into a camper van. Shortly before noon a patrol found the camper in the Stregda district of Eisenach. As officers approached, they heard shots from inside, and minutes later saw smoke and fire. Inside they found the bodies of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, both with gunshot wounds to the head. The courts describe the deaths as suicide to avoid arrest. The bpb notes that, according to the official account, Mundlos shot Böhnhardt, set the vehicle on fire and then shot himself, and that the exact sequence has remained disputed. In the camper police found, among other weapons, the service pistols taken from Michèle Kiesewetter and her colleague in Heilbronn.
That afternoon, shortly after 3 p.m., an explosion tore through the building at Frühlingsstraße 26 in Zwickau, bringing down several walls; the rest of the building burned and later had to be demolished. Zschäpe later described what she did. She said she heard on the radio that a burning camper had been found in Thuringia with two bodies, and knew at once it was them. She said she rang her 89-year-old neighbor's bell and called up the stairwell to the workmen renovating the attic, heard no answer, poured gasoline from a canister through the flat and set it alight. She took the couple's two cats, handed them to a passerby, and posted part of a stock of ready-addressed DVDs before leaving. The neighbor, who was in fact at home, and two workmen were unhurt. The court rejected Zschäpe's account that she believed the house was empty and convicted her of attempted murder for the fire, in which, it found, she accepted the possible deaths of three people.
The DVDs contained a 15-minute video in which a group calling itself the "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" claimed the murders and bombings, using the cartoon character the Pink Panther (known in German as Paulchen Panther) and news footage. The Bundestag report describes it as presenting the crimes in a way that showed contempt for human life. The court found that she mailed numerous copies after leaving the burning building.
According to her own account, Zschäpe spent four days traveling aimlessly around Germany by train. On November 8, 2011, she went to a lawyer in Jena and, with him, turned herself in to police, having first asked to speak to her grandmother. A Zwickau court had issued a warrant for her arrest the day before. In the rubble of the flat investigators found the Česká 83 on November 9, along with Kiesewetter's handcuffs and the pistols used at Heilbronn; within two days ballistics tied the Česká to all nine shootings of men. Video files and DVDs were recovered on November 10.
The Federal Prosecutor General took over the case on November 11, 2011, and the BKA set up a special unit, "Trio," with about 400 officers by March 2012. Holger G., in whose name the camper had been rented, was arrested on November 13, 2011; Ralf Wohlleben on November 29, 2011; Carsten S. in early 2012. Carsten S. made a full confession, and prosecutors released him in May 2012 because he had broken with the far-right scene.
The Federal Court of Justice rejected Zschäpe's challenge to her detention in February 2012. On November 8, 2012, the Federal Prosecutor General indicted her before the state security senate in Munich as a co-perpetrator of the murders of eight men of Turkish origin and one of Greek origin, of the attack on the two police officers in Heilbronn, of attempted murder in the Cologne bombings, of 15 armed robberies, and of attempted murder and aggravated arson in Zwickau. Wohlleben and Carsten S. were charged with aiding the nine murders by supplying the pistol; André E. and Holger G. with supporting the group.
The trial opened on May 6, 2013, before the 6th Criminal Senate of the Oberlandesgericht München, presided over by Judge Manfred Götzl. Relatives of the dead and survivors of the attacks took part as joint plaintiffs (Nebenkläger) with their own lawyers. For two and a half years Zschäpe said nothing. Her court-appointed lawyers were Wolfgang Heer, Anja Sturm and Wolfgang Stahl; in 2015 she brought in two more, Mathias Grasel and Hermann Borchert, and tried without success to have the first three removed.
On December 9, 2015, the 249th day of the trial, Grasel read out a long statement in her name. She denied being a member of a terrorist organization and denied any part in the murders and bombings. She said she learned of each killing only afterwards, the first in December 2000, three months after Enver Şimşek was shot, and that she had been appalled and had thought of going to the police but stayed because she depended on the two men, above all Böhnhardt, whom she called her family. She admitted knowing about the robberies and living from their proceeds. She said she felt morally guilty for failing to stop ten murders and two bombings and apologized to all victims and relatives. She would answer written questions from the judges, she said, but not questions from the prosecution or the victims' lawyers.
Many relatives rejected the statement. Gamze Kubaşık called the apology an affront, particularly as it came with the announcement that none of the families' questions would be answered, according to the trial blog run by joint-plaintiff lawyers. In 2016 Zschäpe told the court that nationalist ideas no longer played a role for her, MiGAZIN later reported.
Her mental state became a further battleground. The court's expert, the psychiatrist Henning Saß, found no personality disorder and saw her as self-confident and assertive. In 2017 Grasel presented a report by a Freiburg psychiatrist, Joachim Bauer, who had examined her in prison and diagnosed a severe dependent personality disorder that, the defense argued, reduced her criminal responsibility. Federal prosecutor Anette Greger told the court that Saß's findings were clear and no further report was needed, the taz reported. The court did not accept the defense position, and Zschäpe was sentenced as fully responsible.
On July 3, 2018, the 437th day, the defendants spoke their last words. Zschäpe asked the court not to convict her "as a stand-in for something that I neither wanted nor did," as the bpb recorded it.
The verdict came on July 11, 2018, the 438th day. The court convicted Zschäpe of nine murders in the Česká series; of murder and attempted murder for the shots at the two officers in Heilbronn; of attempted murder in the Keupstraße bombing (32 counts in one act) and in the Probsteigasse bombing; of the robberies; of attempted murder by aggravated arson in Zwickau; and of membership in a terrorist organization. It imposed life imprisonment and found that her guilt was particularly severe, citing the large number of murders and other serious crimes. It declined to order preventive detention, reasoning that with a life sentence and a severity finding, release would only be possible if public safety allowed it in any case.
The co-defendants received fixed terms. Ralf Wohlleben was sentenced to ten years for aiding nine murders. Carsten S., who had been a young adult at the time, received a juvenile sentence of three years for the same offense; the court credited his full confession, and he lives in a witness protection program, the bpb reported. Holger G. received three years for supporting a terrorist organization in three cases. André E. received two years and six months for supporting a terrorist organization and was acquitted of aiding attempted murder; the prosecution had asked for twelve years. For all four the court weighed in their favor that the crimes were long past, that they had no prior convictions, and that the trial had lasted unusually long.
Federal prosecutor Herbert Diemer called the verdict "a success for the rule of law." Mehmet Daimagüler, a lawyer for several families, said the sentences for Wohlleben and André E. seemed "too mild" to him and that there must be other accomplices still free. Gamze Kubaşık said gaps remained, and that as long as they did, her family could not find closure.
German criminal law (section 25(2) of the Criminal Code) treats people who commit a crime jointly as perpetrators, each liable for the whole act. Whether someone is a perpetrator or only an accessory is decided by an overall assessment, chiefly of two things: how far the person controlled the crime (Tatherrschaft) and how strong his or her own interest in it was (Tatinteresse).
The Munich court found both. It found that Zschäpe took part in planning every murder and robbery: with the two men she evaluated what they had learned from scouting, and the three decided together on the method (gun or bomb), the place, such as a particular flower stand or kiosk, the victims and the time. During each attack she stayed in or near the shared flat, which served as their base, by agreement, so that she could explain the men's absence to anyone who asked and react to anything that threatened their respectable front. Her promise to burn the flat and send out the video if they died, the court held, gave the men a safe retreat and made the political purpose of the killings achievable, since the attacks were meant to be claimed only once the group was exposed. The court described her as an equal member who had "willingly submitted" to a jointly intended overall plan.
The defense saw it very differently. Her lawyers argued that there was no evidence she had ever been at a crime scene, that her account of learning of the killings afterwards had not been disproved, and that her acts amounted at most to helping, not to perpetration. Anja Sturm said after the verdict that the reasoning was "extremely thin," and the legal news service LTO noted that the Federal Court of Justice senate that would hear the appeal had in the past set high hurdles for co-perpetration. The written judgment ran to 3,025 pages and was filed on April 21, 2020; the defense answered with an appeal brief of about 2,300 pages, according to the bpb.
The 3rd Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice, which hears all state security cases, decided on Zschäpe's appeal in writing on August 12, 2021, without a hearing, and announced the result on August 19. It upheld the court's assessment of the evidence, including the finding that she took part in planning each crime, as resting on conclusions that were rational and "highly plausible." On the law, it agreed that she was a co-perpetrator. She had made no contribution at the moment the crimes were carried out, the court noted, but she had a decisive influence on the planning, on the joint decision to act and on the men's continued will to act, and her promised tasks were an important objective contribution in themselves. Her interest in the crimes was no less than theirs. Membership in a terrorist group alone does not make a member liable for every act, the court said, but a shared ideological or political aim can weigh toward treating a participant as a perpetrator.
The court changed the verdict on two technical points. It held that the murders of Mehmet Kubaşık and Halit Yozgat, two days apart, formed a single legal act for Zschäpe, because her contribution to both was the same planning and the same continuous cover at the flat; this removed one of the individual life sentences. It also corrected the legal label of one attempted-murder count in a Chemnitz robbery. The overall life sentence and the finding of particular severity of guilt were unaffected. The court rejected the appeals of Wohlleben and Holger G. at the same time, and on December 15, 2021, rejected both André E.'s appeal and the prosecution's appeal against his acquittal on the aiding charge. Carsten S. had not appealed.
Zschäpe's lawyers then complained that she had been denied a fair hearing because the court had ruled without an oral hearing. The Federal Court of Justice rejected that complaint on September 22, 2021. The Federal Constitutional Court declined to accept her constitutional complaint on September 30, 2022, in a decision published on October 24, 2022; it noted that she had only set out in fragments what new arguments on co-perpetration she would have made at a hearing.
Zschäpe was held in Munich's Stadelheim prison during the trial. On February 4, 2019, she was moved at her own request to the women's prison in Chemnitz, which is responsible for her, the taz reported. She has been there since.
In 2023 she testified for more than seven hours, inside the Chemnitz prison, to the NSU inquiry committee of the Bavarian state parliament. According to accounts from the committee, she described herself as having left the far-right scene and accepted wider responsibility for the NSU's murders, bombings and robberies, conceding that the series would not have been possible without her. In 2023 she also applied to Saxony's state exit program for neo-Nazis and was turned down; her lawyer Mathias Grasel said the reason given was that the end of her sentence was not yet in sight. In August 2025 Grasel confirmed that she had been admitted to an exit program and had attended several sessions; he did not name the program.
In December 2025 she testified for hours as a witness at the Oberlandesgericht Dresden in the trial of her friend Susann E., the wife of André E., who was accused of lending Zschäpe her identity card and health insurance card and of helping rent the camper used in the last robbery. Zschäpe told the court, "I am ashamed." She said she now fully accepted her 2018 conviction, that it had taken her a while, and that she had understood the effects of her crimes only through the testimony in Munich. She had not contacted victims or relatives, she said, because she would find that intrusive. In July 2026 the Dresden court convicted Susann E. of supporting a terrorist organization and aiding an aggravated robbery and gave her a two-year suspended sentence; that verdict was not yet final.
Under German law a person serving life can generally be considered for release on probation after 15 years. Because the Munich court found that Zschäpe's guilt was particularly severe, the court must first decide how long she has to serve before release can even be considered. Pretrial detention counts toward the term, and since she has been in custody since November 2011, the 15-year mark falls in November 2026.
On Thursday, August 27, 2026, the Oberlandesgericht München heard Zschäpe in a closed session of about an hour and a half to prepare that decision; she was brought from Chemnitz for it. Grasel told the German news agency dpa that he had asked the court to set her total time in prison at no more than 20 years. The court is not bound by that request. Even a 20-year minimum, reached in November 2031, would not mean release on that date, only that a further review could begin, in which public safety, her conduct and an expert assessment would weigh. On September 30, 2026, the Thüringer Allgemeine reported that the Federal Prosecutor had asked the Munich court to order the confiscation of nearly 500,000 euros from her.
As of October 16, 2026, no decision on her minimum term had been reported. She remains in prison in Chemnitz, aged 51.
Ralf Wohlleben was released from prison in Saxony-Anhalt on May 20, 2026, after serving his full ten-year sentence, the Federal Prosecutor's office said; the court had refused early release in 2022, finding that it could not be justified given public safety. André E.'s sentence of two and a half years became final in December 2021, and Holger G.'s three-year term in August 2021.
On February 23, 2012, the constitutional bodies of the Federal Republic held a national memorial for the NSU's victims at the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and workers across the country observed a minute of silence. Chancellor Merkel named each of the ten dead and described their lives. She said that some relatives had for years been wrongly under suspicion themselves, called this especially oppressive, and said, "For this I ask your forgiveness." Semiya Şimşek, Gamze Kubaşık and İsmail Yozgat spoke after her.
On January 26, 2012, the Bundestag set up an inquiry committee on a motion of all parliamentary groups, the first time in its history this had happened unanimously. Its report of August 22, 2013, set out what the committee called massive failures, misjudgments and errors by Germany's law enforcement and security agencies, with recommendations for police, prosecutors and the domestic intelligence services. State parliaments in Thuringia and Bavaria, among others, held inquiries of their own.
The committee also examined the shredding of files at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency. Files were destroyed there on November 11, 2011, a week after the cell was exposed; the section head responsible faced disciplinary proceedings for ordering the destruction and for not informing the agency's leadership. When the destruction came to light, the agency's president, Heinz Fromm, informed the interior ministry on June 27, 2012, and asked on July 2, 2012, to be retired early. He told the committee that he had been kept in the dark, and that what mattered was not the mistake but the attempt to cover it up.
For the families, the trial left questions open. The bpb noted in 2020 that it was still not settled how the victims were chosen or how far the circle of supporters reached. Relatives and their lawyers had put more than 300 questions to Zschäpe during the trial, MiGAZIN reported, and many remain unanswered in their view. When news of her exit program broke in 2025, Semiya Şimşek said the families would be watching and that Zschäpe had answered none of their questions in court; the family's lawyer, Seda Başay-Yıldız, called the step purely tactical. Barbara John, the federal ombudswoman for the victims' families, said she suspected Zschäpe was preparing an early release, and argued that relatives should have a right to be heard on it. After the August 2026 hearing, Lina Boulgarides, whose father Theodoros was killed in Munich, said: "We got life too."
Her role. Zschäpe's account and the courts' findings remain far apart. She has said she learned of each murder only afterwards and stayed out of dependence on the two men. The Munich court, the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Constitutional Court did not accept that, and the conviction as co-perpetrator is final. Her later statements, in 2023 and 2025, moved toward accepting responsibility, but MiGAZIN and the families' lawyers have pointed out that she still has not answered key questions, such as how the victims were chosen.
Her presence at the scenes. In September 2013 a woman from Dortmund told joint-plaintiff lawyers that she had seen Zschäpe with Mundlos, Böhnhardt and a fourth man on a property in Dortmund in the week Mehmet Kubaşık was killed, LTO reported. The court did not base its verdict on any such presence. Its findings, as the Federal Court of Justice summarized them, place Zschäpe in or near the flat in Zwickau throughout the Dortmund and Kassel attacks.
A wider network. Whether more people than the three, and the convicted helpers, knew of or took part in the attacks has never been settled in court. After the verdict the Federal Prosecutor General said investigations into further supporters would continue, and lawyers for the families said they had to assume that other accomplices were free. The 2026 conviction of Susann E. is one result of those continuing investigations.
Eisenach. The bpb has noted that the exact sequence of events in the camper on November 4, 2011, remains disputed, although the courts proceeded on the basis that the two men died by suicide.
Kassel and Heilbronn. The presence of an intelligence agency employee in the Kassel internet café, and the Bundestag committee's view that many questions about the Heilbronn shooting were not conclusively answered, have kept both cases at the center of public debate. The intelligence employee was cleared and never charged.
January 2, 1975: Beate Apel born in Jena.
1989 to 1994: meets Uwe Mundlos (about 1989 or 1990) and Uwe Böhnhardt (January 1994), by her account.
November 1, 1992, to August 31, 1995: trains as a vegetable gardener.
August 10, 1996: rents the garage in Jena, by her account.
January 26, 1998: police find pipe bombs in the garage; the three go underground.
August 1998: the three settle in Chemnitz; December 1998, first robbery.
December 2000: move to Zwickau.
September 9, 2000: Enver Şimşek shot in Nuremberg; dies September 11.
January 19, 2001: Probsteigasse bombing, Cologne.
June 13, 2001: Abdurrahim Özüdoğru killed, Nuremberg.
June 27, 2001: Süleyman Taşköprü killed, Hamburg.
August 29, 2001: Habil Kılıç killed, Munich.
February 25, 2004: Mehmet Turgut killed, Rostock.
June 9, 2004: Keupstraße nail bomb, Cologne.
June 9, 2005: İsmail Yaşar killed, Nuremberg.
June 15, 2005: Theodoros Boulgarides killed, Munich.
April 4, 2006: Mehmet Kubaşık killed, Dortmund.
April 6, 2006: Halit Yozgat killed, Kassel.
April 25, 2007: Michèle Kiesewetter killed and her colleague wounded, Heilbronn.
November 4, 2011: Eisenach robbery; Mundlos and Böhnhardt found dead; Zschäpe sets fire to the Zwickau flat.
November 8, 2011: she surrenders to police in Jena.
November 11, 2011: files shredded at the federal domestic intelligence agency; the Federal Prosecutor General takes over.
January 26, 2012: Bundestag inquiry committee set up.
February 23, 2012: national memorial in Berlin; Merkel asks the families for forgiveness.
November 8, 2012: indictment.
May 6, 2013: trial opens in Munich.
August 22, 2013: Bundestag inquiry report.
December 9, 2015: her statement is read in court.
July 11, 2018: life sentence with particular severity of guilt.
February 4, 2019: moved to prison in Chemnitz.
April 21, 2020: 3,025-page written judgment filed.
August 12, 2021 (announced August 19): Federal Court of Justice upholds the conviction; verdict final.
September 30, 2022: Federal Constitutional Court declines her complaint.
2023: testifies to the Bavarian parliament's inquiry; Saxony's exit program turns her down.
August 2025: admission to an exit program reported.
December 3, 2025: testifies in Dresden, "I am ashamed."
May 20, 2026: Ralf Wohlleben released after serving his sentence.
July 17, 2026: Susann E. convicted in Dresden (not final).
August 27, 2026: closed hearing in Munich on her minimum term.
September 30, 2026: confiscation request of nearly 500,000 euros reported.
November 2026: 15 years in custody completed; minimum-term decision pending as of October 16, 2026.