Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt were two of the three members of the National Socialist Underground (Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, NSU), the far-right terror cell whose existence came to light in Germany in November 2011. Neither man was ever charged or tried for its crimes. Both died on November 4, 2011, in a burning camper van in Eisenach, Thuringia, a few hours after robbing a savings bank. What is known of their role comes from investigators, from parliamentary inquiries and, above all, from the trial of the third member, Beate Zschäpe.
On July 11, 2018, the Oberlandesgericht München (Higher Regional Court of Munich) convicted Zschäpe as a co-perpetrator of ten murders and sentenced her to life. In doing so, the court made findings about the two dead men. As the Federal Court of Justice later summarized them, the court found that Mundlos and Böhnhardt carried out ten ideologically motivated killings between September 2000 and April 2007: nine men of Turkish or Greek origin, shot with the same pistol at their places of work, and a young police officer shot in her patrol car in Heilbronn. It found that they set off two bombs in Cologne and committed 15 armed robberies. Those findings were part of a judgment against Zschäpe, not against them, and the record rarely separates the two men.
Uwe Mundlos was born in Jena, then in East Germany, on August 11, 1973. According to the 2013 report of the Bundestag's first NSU inquiry committee, which drew on profiles compiled by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), his father was a professor of computer science at the Fachhochschule Jena and his mother worked as a sales assistant in a grocery store. His brother, two years older, had been severely disabled since birth. Mundlos completed tenth grade with an intermediate school certificate and on September 1, 1990, began an apprenticeship in data processing, which he finished on February 28, 1994.
Uwe Böhnhardt was born in Jena on October 1, 1977, the youngest of three brothers. His mother was a teacher and his father a department head at a glassworks. One of his older brothers died in 1988. The inquiry report describes a school career that came apart around the time of German reunification. He attended school in Jena from 1984 to 1992; in 1992 he was placed in a children's home in Burgk, near Schleiz, which he had to leave after two weeks because of offenses he had committed; and early in 1993 he was expelled from a special-needs school after a break-in there. He left school after eight years with a seventh-grade certificate.
By then Böhnhardt was already known to the courts. In 1992 he stole cars and drove them around, and from July 1992 he repeatedly demanded money from a 16-year-old under threat of beatings; in August 1993 he kicked the same youth so hard that he needed five days in hospital. He spent two spells in pretrial detention in 1993, from February 5 to May 5 and from September 1 to December 6. In custody, the Bundestag report records, he took part in abusing a fellow inmate and, with others, built a crude "pipe bomb" from a metal bed strut filled with match heads. In 1993 a Jena court gave him a youth sentence of one year and ten months for the car thefts, suspended on appeal, and in December 1993 a two-year suspended sentence for extortion and dangerous bodily harm. He then completed a pre-vocational year and, in summer 1996, a two-year apprenticeship as a construction worker. His employer kept him on until autumn 1996, when he was laid off for lack of work. From then until January 1998 he was largely unemployed and lived with his parents.
His father, a retired engineer, told the Munich court in January 2014 that the parents had demanded good school results and that his wife had looked after the boy intensively. He said he had not recognized how serious things were, that nothing they tried had helped, and that he saw a photo of his son with a shaved head at a neo-Nazi rally only when it was too late, the Abendzeitung reported. Combat boots and bomber jackets, he said, had been banned at home.
The Bundestag report notes that the trio's first recorded offenses were ordinary crimes with no visible political motive, and that Mundlos committed the first violent one: in June 1991, on their way home from a bar, he and another young man followed a man, and Mundlos shoved him onto a lawn and kicked him in the stomach. His first politically relevant offense came in 1994.
Mundlos did his military service from April 1, 1994, to March 31, 1995, with Panzergrenadier Battalion 381 in Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia. On August 13, 1994, during neo-Nazi events marking the death of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, police in Chemnitz checked him with a group of other neo-Nazis and found four business cards printed with his address and a picture of Adolf Hitler, as well as a picture of Hess. A search of his home that night turned up material from the far-right NPD. His company commander referred the case to prosecutors and asked a military court to approve seven days of disciplinary arrest. A Chemnitz court later issued a penalty order of 20 daily rates of 30 marks for producing symbols of unconstitutional organizations, which became final after Mundlos missed the hearing and filed his appeal too late. None of this stopped his military career: he was promoted to lance corporal in October 1994 and, the committee found, was still being trained on the machine gun in mid-November 1994.
In March 1995, shortly before his discharge, the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) questioned Mundlos and five other soldiers from Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt who had attracted attention by playing neo-Nazi music and displaying far-right symbols. According to the MAD report quoted by the Bundestag committee, Mundlos called himself an "Oi-Skin," denied belonging to any party and said he had nothing against asylum seekers who were genuinely persecuted. Asked whether he could imagine reporting planned attacks on asylum seekers' homes to the police or the domestic intelligence service, he said no: he would not take part in such actions himself, but could not imagine cooperating with the authorities. The MAD passed its findings to federal and state intelligence offices in June 1995. After August 1995 Mundlos attended the Ilmenau-Kolleg to earn his university entrance qualification; from early January 1998 he stopped turning up.
Böhnhardt was examined for military service in June 1997 and found fit, but two psychological assessments in September 1997 concluded that he was unsuitable to serve.
Both men moved in the circle that became the "Thüringer Heimatschutz" (THS), which grew out of the "Anti-Antifa Ostthüringen." The Thuringian domestic intelligence service counted about 120 people in it by 1998 and up to 170 by 2001. Its spokesman and leading figure, Tino Brandt, was at the same time a paid informant of that service, and was exposed as such in 2001, according to the Bundestag report. The journalist Andrea Röpke, heard as an expert by the committee, told it that the THS's Jena section was co-led by Böhnhardt and Mundlos as deputy leaders and that Zschäpe was a member.
From 1995 the record shows the three acting together. They put up posters in May 1995 rejecting the "lie" of Germany's liberation in 1945; in November 1995 Böhnhardt and Zschäpe ordered a funeral wreath "in memory of Rudolf Hess"; in November 1996 Böhnhardt and Mundlos appeared at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in uniform-like clothing resembling the Nazi SA and were banned from the site. On April 13, 1996, a torso of a doll marked with a yellow Star of David and a dummy bomb was hung from a highway bridge over the A4 near Jena; Böhnhardt's fingerprint was found on one of the boxes. A Jena youth court sentenced him in April 1997 to three years and six months, combining the torso case with CDs of hate-inciting content found at his home and the 1993 extortion. On appeal, the regional court in Gera acquitted him over the torso in October 1997 but imposed two years and three months for the CDs and the earlier offense. That sentence became final in December 1997. He had not begun serving it when the three disappeared.
Mundlos's father, testifying in Munich in December 2013, rejected any blame for his family and argued that contacts with intelligence informants and with Böhnhardt had drawn his son into the far right, according to the trial reports published by lawyers for the victims' families.
On August 10, 1996, Zschäpe rented garage number 5 in a garage complex beside the sewage works in Jena. The Thuringian domestic intelligence service later watched Böhnhardt and Mundlos there: on November 25, 1997, observers saw the two men buy methylated spirits and rubber bands and take them to the garage, behaving conspiratorially, the Bundestag report records.
On January 26, 1998, police searched the garage and other premises. In garage number 5 they found pipe bombs and about 1.4 kilograms of TNT, items that tied the group to earlier dummy bombs left in Jena, and papers belonging to Mundlos, including his passport and an address and telephone list. The Bundestag committee counted the handling of that search among the gravest early errors: Böhnhardt was able to leave unhindered while it was under way, and the three went underground the same day. The committee also criticized the fact that Mundlos's address list, which investigators rated as "of no significance," was never properly evaluated. The Thuringian state parliament's inquiry later reported that the list contained the names and numbers of the group's contacts, including police informants, the Associated Press reported in 2014.
The prosecutors in Gera did not apply for arrest warrants on January 27, 1998, though the Bundestag committee found the legal grounds existed. An enforcement warrant for Böhnhardt's 1997 youth sentence was issued on May 12, 1998.
After a period of moving between contacts, the three settled in Chemnitz, Saxony, in August 1998, the Federal Court of Justice summarized; they lived together in five flats in turn, rented by other people or under false names. Right-wing extremists in Chemnitz helped them find housing, visited them and collected money for them, and money also came from the Blood and Honour network, the journalist Frank Jansen, who covered the trial for the Tagesspiegel, told the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) in 2015.
The Munich court found that still 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, hoping the killings would destabilize Germany and lead to a National Socialist and racist change of its state and society. To magnify the effect they meant to let the public see at first 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 savings banks, post offices and supermarkets to pay for their life in hiding and for the time-consuming planning of the attacks. Mundlos and Böhnhardt were to carry out the crimes; Zschäpe's role, as the court found it, was to hide the group, manage its money and keep up a respectable cover story.
The federal prosecutors' indictment, quoted in the Bundestag report, described the arrangement as a group with no leader, in which decisions were made jointly and each subordinated himself to the will of the whole. It said the three adopted the motto "Taten statt Worte" (deeds, not words), used the name NSU from 2001 at the latest, and from 2002 sent a propaganda letter in the group's name to at least two far-right magazines.
The first robbery came on December 18, 1998, at an Edeka supermarket in Chemnitz. The two men threatened the head cashier with a loaded gun and took the day's takings of about 30,000 marks. As they fled on foot, the indictment states, they fired several shots aimed at the head and chest of a youth of about 16 who was following them; he gave up the chase. In 1999 and 2000 three post offices in Chemnitz followed.
In December 2000 the three moved to Zwickau, where they lived until 2011. The flats were later fitted with alarm systems and other security devices, the indictment said. To the outside world the three appeared under cover names, invented life stories and forged or borrowed papers. Holger G., a friend from Jena who resembled Böhnhardt, supplied a passport in his own name with Böhnhardt's photo, and Böhnhardt used it to rent the camper vans in which the men traveled to crime scenes, the bpb account notes.
Neighbors and acquaintances saw little. A neighbor in Zwickau told the Munich court the two men kept their distance, offering only a passing greeting; on a Baltic Sea campsite where the three spent holidays, Mundlos was known as "Max," a sociable man whom other couples took for a computer expert, Legal Tribune Online reported from the testimony in December 2013.
Behind that front, the indictment said, the group assembled about 2.5 kilograms of black powder, an arsenal of 20 firearms including two submachine guns, more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition, and a firing device hidden in a wooden box. Some 90,000 electronic files recovered after 2011 contained a collection of 10,116 names and places: politicians, religious and community institutions and other possible targets.
The weapon used in nine of the killings was a Česká 83 pistol with a silencer. The Munich court found that Carsten S., then a young man in the Jena scene, obtained it through the mediation of Ralf Wohlleben, a former NPD official, and that it was handed over to Mundlos and Böhnhardt.
The Munich court found, as the Federal Court of Justice summarized, that Mundlos and Böhnhardt shot the nine men in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Munich, Rostock, Dortmund and Kassel "insidiously" (heimtückisch), the German legal term for killing a victim who suspects nothing, with the same Česká pistol, and that the men were small business owners or helpers at the place where they worked. The three, the court found, chose each place, such as a particular flower stand or kiosk, and decided on the victim: as a rule the small trader present, if his appearance suggested "southern" descent. The court did not establish which of the two men fired in each case. The Bundestag inquiry, the bpb and Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at the national memorial in February 2012, each set down something of who these men were.
Enver Şimşek, born in 1961 in Şarkikaraağaç, Turkey, came to Germany in 1985 and from the early 1990s built up a flower business. His family ran a wholesale flower trade with a shop in Schlüchtern, Hesse, and three mobile stands. Merkel described him as a man who had fulfilled, for himself, his wife and their two children, the dream of his own flower business. Those around him described him to police as a loving father and a devout Muslim. On Saturday, September 9, 2000, he was standing in for a vacationing employee at the family's stand on Liegnitzer Straße in Nuremberg, the third weekend in a row he had done so. He was shot in the cargo area of his van while sorting flowers, and died on September 11, at 38, without regaining consciousness.
Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, 49, had lived in Nuremberg with his family for more than 20 years and had worked at the same firm for as long. He and his wife had run a small alterations tailor's shop until their divorce in 1998, and he kept it going alongside his job. Colleagues and neighbors described him to police as friendly and helpful. He was shot in the shop on Gyulaer Straße on June 13, 2001. Merkel noted that he left a daughter.
Süleyman Taşköprü, 31, had taken over his parents' greengrocery in Hamburg 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 returned to the shop on Schützenstraße about half an hour later, he found his son fatally wounded.
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 early in 2000. They had a daughter. He was shot behind the counter of the shop on Bad-Schachener-Straße in the Ramersdorf district on August 29, 2001.
Mehmet Turgut, 25, was born in the village of Kayalık in the Palu district of Elazığ province in Turkey. As a teenager he had swapped first names with his brother Yunus on a passport application so as to avoid military service, and he first came to Germany in 1994, as a minor, under his brother's name. Police held no record against him beyond his immigration cases. On the morning of February 25, 2004, he was opening a döner stand in the Dierkow district of Rostock where he was working, and was shot there. Because he had first been registered under his brother's name, investigators kept him on file as "Yunus Turgut," and the 2012 indictment still used that name.
İsmail Yaşar, 50, ran a döner stand on Scharrerstraße in the south of Nuremberg. Schoolchildren from the neighborhood came to his stand often and gladly, Merkel told the 2012 memorial; he left three children. He was shot on the morning of June 9, 2005. Witnesses had seen two men with bicycles near the stand shortly before.
Theodoros Boulgarides, 41, a Greek citizen and father of two, had opened a key-cutting shop on Trappentreustraße in Munich with a German partner, who found him in the shop on the evening of June 15, 2005. Merkel described him as a businessman who believed in his future in Germany.
Mehmet Kubaşık, 39, a German citizen of Turkish origin, had come to Germany with his wife and opened a kiosk with her on Mallinckrodtstraße in Dortmund, building a livelihood for his daughter and two younger sons. He was shot behind his counter shortly before 1 p.m. on April 4, 2006.
Halit Yozgat, 21, ran an internet café on Holländische Straße in his home city of Kassel and attended evening school. On April 6, 2006, two days after the Dortmund killing, 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. The Federal Court of Justice record states that the two men drove a camper van rented in Chemnitz to Dortmund and on to Kassel for the two attacks.
Michèle Kiesewetter, 22, came from Oberweißbach in Thuringia and had moved to Baden-Württemberg for her police training; she served with the riot police based in Böblingen. On April 25, 2007, she and a 24-year-old colleague took a break in their patrol car beside a transformer building on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn, with the doors open. Shortly before 2 p.m., the indictment states, the attackers approached from behind and shot each officer in the head at very close range, one with a Radom VIS 35 pistol and the other with a TOZ TT-33. Kiesewetter died at the scene. Her colleague survived after intensive care. The attackers took the officers' service pistols, magazines, handcuffs and other equipment. The court found that the group's plan from the start included killing people as representatives of the state, and the federal prosecutors saw the Heilbronn attack in that light; Frank Jansen told the bpb in 2015 that this motive remained an assumption.
The court also found the two men responsible for two bombings in Cologne that killed no one but injured many. Between December 19 and 21, 2000, a man left a basket of goods in a grocery on Probsteigasse run by an Iranian family, saying he would come back for his forgotten wallet. Hidden in a Christmas stollen tin in the basket was a gas cylinder filled with about a kilogram of black powder. On January 19, 2001, the owner's 19-year-old daughter opened the tin and was seriously injured.
On June 9, 2004, a bomb made from a gas cylinder holding at least five kilograms of black powder and packed with ten-centimeter nails was placed on the luggage rack of a bicycle outside a hairdresser's shop on Keupstraße in Cologne's Mülheim district, a street of mainly Turkish-run businesses, and set off by remote control. The Bundestag report counts 22 people injured, some critically; the Munich court treated the attack as the attempted murder of 32 people. A security camera at a nearby television company recorded two men with bicycles in the street that afternoon.
From December 1998 to November 2011, the court found, Mundlos and Böhnhardt committed 15 armed robberies, once Böhnhardt alone, in Chemnitz, Zwickau, Stralsund, Arnstadt and Eisenach. The targets were savings bank branches, post offices and the one supermarket. In two of them, the court found, shots were fired with intent to kill. In one, in Chemnitz, the shots missed. In the other, on October 5, 2006, at a savings bank in Zwickau, where, according to the Federal Court of Justice summary, Böhnhardt shot an employee who tried to overpower him; the man was struck in the abdomen and seriously wounded, and the robber fled without money. The largest haul, according to the indictment, was 169,970 euros from a savings bank in Stralsund on January 18, 2007, the second robbery of the same branch in ten weeks. After the Heilbronn shooting in April 2007, the series of killings stopped; the robberies continued, with a gap of more than four years before a savings bank in Arnstadt, Thuringia, was robbed on September 7, 2011.
A Zwickau detective who had led the investigation of the robbery series since 2002 told the second Bundestag inquiry in 2016 that he had asked Thuringian colleagues to call him at once if a similar robbery happened there. After Arnstadt, he said, it was immediately clear to him that "these are our people." He described them as offenders of great aggression and great professionalism who left almost no usable traces.
For the nine shootings of men, the only certain link was the weapon. The Bavarian-led special commissions, named "Halbmond" (Crescent) and later "Bosporus," spent years looking for organized crime, drug dealing or Turkish nationalist groups, and the families themselves came under suspicion. The bpb has recorded that Semiya Şimşek, Enver's daughter, said police showed her mother a photo of a blond woman with whom her husband had supposedly had two children. German-language media spoke of "Döner-Morde" (döner murders) from 2005, though only two of the dead had worked at döner stands. A second case analysis in May 2006 considered that the perpetrators might be mobile young men with anti-foreigner motives, but placed them in the Nuremberg area.
The Bundestag committee found that chances were missed. In May 2006 an eyewitness from the Yaşar case in Nuremberg was shown the security video from Keupstraße and said she was sure one of the men was the same ("That was him!"); the report notes that the record of her interview gave her statement only in weakened form. In Heilbronn, investigators spent years chasing a DNA trace of an "unknown woman" that turned out to come from contaminated cotton swabs, and with it a false lead toward Sinti and Roma. The committee also found that the number plate of a camper van from Chemnitz had been recorded at a checkpoint about 20 kilometers from the Heilbronn scene on the day of the shooting, but that the checkpoint lists were not evaluated until summer 2010. No investigation into the police killing ever considered right-wing terrorists before the weapons turned up in 2011.
In Thuringia, the search for the fugitives from 1998 to 2003 was a "complete disaster," the Thuringian state parliament's inquiry concluded in an 1,895-page report in August 2014. So many mistakes were made, it said, that "deliberate sabotage" could be suspected, the Associated Press reported. The Bundestag committee reached a narrower conclusion in 2013: it found serious failures and organizational shortcomings at federal and state agencies, but no evidence that any authority had helped the group escape, and no evidence that Mundlos, Böhnhardt or Zschäpe had ever been informants of a security agency.
At about 9:10 a.m. on Friday, November 4, 2011, two masked men with handguns robbed the savings bank branch at Am Nordplatz 13 in Eisenach, Thuringia, and escaped on bicycles with about 72,000 euros. A passerby told police he had seen two cyclists hurriedly load their bikes into a camper van whose number plate began with "V" and drive off. Shortly before noon a patrol car spotted a camper van with that plate parked in the street Am Schafrain, in the Stregda district.
As two officers approached on foot, they heard shots from inside. According to the federal prosecutors' indictment, quoted in the Bundestag report, the two men fired a submachine gun at the officers; the weapon jammed after the first shot and the officers took cover. The men then set the camper van on fire, and Mundlos shot Böhnhardt and then himself. At 12:07 p.m. the officers saw smoke and flames inside and called the fire brigade. Once the fire was out, two male bodies with gunshot wounds to the head were found inside, dressed as witnesses had described the robbers. Fingerprints identified Mundlos the same day; that the second man was Böhnhardt emerged the next day.
The first detective to examine the van told the second Bundestag inquiry in 2016 that there had been no sign, before or after the bodies were found, that a third person had been in or near the vehicle. In the afternoon, investigators found among the weapons inside the service pistols taken from Michèle Kiesewetter and her colleague in Heilbronn in 2007. The detective said that gave the case "a completely new dimension." The courts later described the two deaths as suicide to avoid arrest.
Shortly after 3 p.m. that day, an explosion and fire destroyed much of the building at Frühlingsstraße 26 in Zwickau, where the three had lived. The Munich court found that Zschäpe, having heard of the men's deaths on the radio, set the flat on fire with gasoline as agreed, to destroy evidence, and then mailed out copies of the group's video; she turned herself in to police in Jena on November 8. In the rubble investigators found the weapons used in Heilbronn and Kiesewetter's handcuffs, then, on November 9, the Česká 83. Within two days ballistics tied that pistol to the nine killings of men. The Federal Prosecutor General took over the case on November 11, 2011.
The DVDs recovered from the Zwickau rubble on November 10, 2011, held videos in which a group calling itself the "Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund" presented itself as "a network of comrades" with the motto "deeds, not words." According to the indictment, the group had begun assembling videos from 2001 out of photos taken at the crime scenes and clips from newspapers and television, and by May 2006 at the latest had produced a DVD in which the attacks were worked into cartoons of the Pink Panther, known in Germany as Paulchen Panther. Copies sat ready in addressed envelopes. Between November 4 and 8, 2011, at least 15 copies were sent to political, religious and cultural institutions and to media outlets.
The indictment said the video claimed the twelve attacks, the ten killings and the two bombings, in a cynical way that mocked and denigrated the victims. Merkel, speaking at the national memorial in February 2012, said she had watched it. Its makers boasted of the murders and mocked the victims, she said, and she had never seen anything more contemptuous of human beings in her work.
The Munich trial ran from May 6, 2013, to July 11, 2018, with Zschäpe and four alleged helpers in the dock. The court sentenced Zschäpe to life imprisonment with a finding of particular severity of guilt; Ralf Wohlleben to ten years and Carsten S. to a three-year youth sentence for aiding the nine murders with the Česká; Holger G. to three years for supporting a terrorist organization; and André E. to two years and six months for supporting a terrorist organization.
The judgment's findings about the two dead men, as the Federal Court of Justice set them out in 2021, were these. The three founded the NSU together as a terrorist group. Mundlos and Böhnhardt carried out the twelve attacks of the murder series and bombings and the 15 robberies, once Böhnhardt alone. In the Dortmund and Kassel attacks they traveled in a camper van rented in Chemnitz and killed their victims with shots to the head from the Česká. Zschäpe was not present at any scene; the court found she took part in planning each crime and stayed at the shared flat to give the men a safe retreat. When the men were discovered after the last robbery and faced arrest, they "evaded it by suicide."
Because the trial was about Zschäpe and the helpers, the court did not have to decide which of the two men fired the shots in each case, and the published findings do not say. The Federal Court of Justice upheld Zschäpe's conviction on August 12, 2021, so the findings on which it rests are final. The two men were never parties to the proceedings and had no defense; legally, neither was convicted of anything after 1997.
The court did not hear the two men, but it heard their families. Böhnhardt's mother testified over two days in November 2013. According to the trial reports of the joint plaintiffs' lawyers, she described phone calls and three meetings with the three after they went underground, said domestic intelligence officers had asked the family to persuade them to surrender, and referred to the crimes only as ones her son was "claimed" to have committed. Barbara John, the federal ombudswoman for the victims' families, wrote in a Tagesspiegel column that in court the mother blamed "the system," suggested that police had planted evidence in Jena, and no longer repeated the regret she had expressed in interviews in 2011 and 2012. Mundlos's father clashed with presiding judge Manfred Götzl in December 2013 and blamed the state agencies for what followed. Böhnhardt's father, who testified in January 2014, closed by saying he wished to express his condolences to the victims.
The Bundestag set up its first NSU inquiry committee on January 26, 2012; its report of August 22, 2013 (Drucksache 17/14600), runs to more than 1,300 pages. A second committee, which reported in June 2017 (Drucksache 18/12950), went further than the first on one central question. It stated "strong doubts" that the NSU consisted only of a trio, as the federal prosecutors' indictment assumed, and doubts that Böhnhardt and Mundlos committed all the murders, robberies and bombings attributed to them alone. It criticized police for focusing too narrowly on the core trio and their closest circle. Its chairman, Clemens Binninger, said questions remained open. State parliaments, including Thuringia's, held inquiries of their own.
One episode concerned Mundlos directly. The Bundestag committee found that the MAD no longer had its 1995 report on him when the committee was set up, that fax copies of extracts from his military file sent to the defense ministry for a press briefing in December 2011 were destroyed after use, and that the full personnel file reached the committee only in September 2012, after Der Spiegel told a committee member it had a copy. The committee found no evidence that the MAD's question in 1995 had been an attempt to recruit him as an informant.
On February 23, 2012, Germany's constitutional bodies held a national memorial for the NSU's victims in the Konzerthaus in Berlin. Merkel named each of the ten dead and described their lives, and said some relatives had for years been wrongly under suspicion themselves: "For this I ask your forgiveness." Semiya Şimşek, Gamze Kubaşık and İsmail Yozgat spoke after her.
In Zwickau, where the three lived for eleven years, ten memorial trees were planted in the Schwanenteichpark in 2019, one for each victim. The first, for Enver Şimşek, was cut down in early October 2019, a few weeks after it was planted, and a temporary bench put up in its place was also destroyed. On November 4, 2019, the eighth anniversary of the Eisenach deaths, Merkel and Saxony's minister-president Michael Kretschmer laid white roses at the replanted trees, while a few dozen protesters shouted at them from a nearby crossing, the Protestant news agency epd reported. Merkel said relatives should not always be portrayed only as "victims' families."
Remembrance remains unsettled. The federal coalition agreement of 2025 promised an NSU documentation center in Nuremberg, the city where three of the ten were killed; in July 2026 an alliance against right-wing extremism in the Nuremberg region criticized the draft 2027 federal budget for allocating no money to it, epd reported. Prosecutors also continued to pursue people around the cell. On July 17, 2026, the Higher Regional Court in Dresden convicted Susann E., the wife of André E., of supporting a terrorist organization and of aiding the 2011 Eisenach robbery, for which she was accused of helping rent the camper van, and gave her a two-year suspended sentence; the verdict was not yet final.
The story reached television in 2016 with the ARD trilogy "Mitten in Deutschland: NSU," whose first part, "Die Täter: Heute ist nicht alle Tage," directed by Christian Schwochow, told the story from the perpetrators' side, with Albrecht Schuch as Mundlos and Sebastian Urzendowsky as the Böhnhardt character; the second and third parts took the side of the victims and of the investigators.
The deaths in Eisenach. Federal prosecutors concluded that Mundlos shot Böhnhardt, set the camper van alight and shot himself, and the courts proceeded on the basis of suicide. The bpb wrote in 2020 that the exact course of events remains disputed. Questions about the scene were raised before the Thuringian inquiry: in 2015 the state police told the interior ministry that the files did not show whether a trained fire-cause investigator had been deployed, dpa reported; firefighters told the committee that police barred them from entering the vehicle, and the Eisenach fire chief confirmed that a memory card with a firefighter's photos was returned empty, Der Freitag reported. These are questions about how the scene was handled. No inquiry or court has found that anyone other than the two men was in the van, and the first detective at the scene told the Bundestag that he saw no sign of a third person.
A larger network. Whether more people than the three, and the convicted helpers, knew of or took part in the attacks has never been settled. The second Bundestag committee doubted that the two men acted alone in every crime. A Baden-Württemberg police task force found 52 people with links both to the NSU and to that state, and witnesses placed the trio at gatherings in Ludwigsburg in the 1990s, but the task force found no concrete act of support, the Bundestag's press service reported in 2016. How the victims were chosen is also unexplained, the bpb noted in 2020.
Informants. Informants of several agencies were active around the group, beginning with Tino Brandt in the THS. The 2013 Bundestag committee found no evidence that Mundlos, Böhnhardt or Zschäpe were ever informants or that any agency shielded them, and examined, among other things, reconstructions of files on seven informants that were destroyed in November 2011. Opposition members of the Bundestag were still pressing the federal government with questions about the cell's helpers in 2024.
Heilbronn. The Bundestag committee said that in no other case did the investigation leave decisive questions as open as in the killing of Michèle Kiesewetter. Why a police patrol in Baden-Württemberg was attacked, and whether others were involved, remains unresolved. The committee noted that a man related by marriage to Ralf Wohlleben, who had known the trio in Jena, ran a pub from 2005 to 2007 in Oberweißbach, Kiesewetter's home town; nothing made public shows that this connection had anything to do with her death. Her group leader in Böblingen had earlier been a member of a Ku Klux Klan offshoot, which, the committee found, came to light only in 2012; the Baden-Württemberg task force found no link between such groups and the NSU.
Kassel. An employee of Hesse's domestic intelligence agency was in Halit Yozgat's internet café around the time of the shooting and did not come forward. He was briefly suspected, was never charged, and said he saw nothing. Frank Jansen told the bpb in 2015 that some lawyers suspected he knew more but that the evidence heard at trial had not borne that out.
Nuremberg, 1999. Carsten S. told investigators that the two men had set off a bomb in a bar in Nuremberg run by a man of Turkish origin in June 1999. Frank Jansen treated that as their act in his 2015 bpb interview, but it was not part of the indictment, and no court has ruled on it.
Switzerland. In 2023 Zschäpe gave new statements to the BKA, on August 2 and 3 and October 19 and 20, the federal government confirmed in July 2024. Der Spiegel reported, as summarized by the Swiss portal blue News, that she told investigators Mundlos had been away for long periods because of a relationship with a woman in Switzerland, and that Swiss police searched the home of a woman with ties to the neo-Nazi scene near Zurich, who denied knowing him. The federal government declined to answer parliamentary questions about it, citing ongoing investigations. Nothing about it has been established.
A false lead: the Peggy case. In 2016 investigators reported that Böhnhardt's DNA had been found at the site in a Thuringian forest where the remains of a girl named Peggy had been discovered. In March 2017 prosecutors in Bayreuth announced that the trace had nothing to do with her death: it came from a tiny textile fragment linked to a headphone from the Eisenach camper van and had most likely been carried to the site on a folding ruler used at both scenes. Böhnhardt has no established connection to that case.
August 11, 1973: Uwe Mundlos born in Jena.
October 1, 1977: Uwe Böhnhardt born in Jena.
1993: Böhnhardt spends two periods in pretrial detention; youth sentences for car theft, extortion and assault.
April 1, 1994, to March 31, 1995: Mundlos does military service in Bad Frankenhausen; August 1994 police find Hitler business cards on him in Chemnitz.
March 1995: MAD questions Mundlos; he refuses to report planned attacks.
April 13, 1996: doll torso with a Star of David and dummy bomb hung from an A4 bridge near Jena; Böhnhardt's fingerprint found.
August 10, 1996: Zschäpe rents garage number 5 in Jena.
November 1996: Böhnhardt and Mundlos banned from the Buchenwald memorial.
October 16, 1997: Böhnhardt sentenced on appeal to two years and three months (final December 1997).
November 25, 1997: intelligence observers watch the two men at the garage.
January 26, 1998: police find pipe bombs and about 1.4 kilograms of TNT in the garage; the three go underground.
August 1998: the three settle in Chemnitz.
December 18, 1998: first robbery, Edeka supermarket, Chemnitz.
Spring 2000 or earlier: the Česká 83 is handed to the two men, as the court found.
September 9, 2000: Enver Şimşek shot in Nuremberg; dies September 11.
December 2000: move to Zwickau.
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.
October 5, 2006: Böhnhardt shoots a savings bank employee in Zwickau, as the court found.
April 25, 2007: Michèle Kiesewetter killed and her colleague wounded, Heilbronn.
September 7, 2011: savings bank robbery, Arnstadt.
November 4, 2011: Eisenach robbery; both men found dead in the burning camper van in Stregda; the Zwickau flat is set on fire.
November 8, 2011: Zschäpe surrenders in Jena.
November 9 and 10, 2011: the Česká and the video DVDs found in the Zwickau rubble.
November 11, 2011: Federal Prosecutor General takes over the case.
February 23, 2012: national memorial in Berlin.
August 22, 2013: first Bundestag inquiry report.
May 6, 2013, to July 11, 2018: Munich trial; the court finds that the two men carried out the ten murders.
August 2014: Thuringian inquiry calls the 1998 to 2003 search a "complete disaster."
March 8, 2017: Bayreuth prosecutors rule out any link between Böhnhardt and the Peggy case.
June 2017: second Bundestag inquiry reports doubts that the NSU was only three people.
November 4, 2019: Merkel visits the Zwickau memorial trees.
August 12, 2021: Federal Court of Justice makes Zschäpe's conviction final.
2023: Zschäpe gives new statements to the BKA.
July 17, 2026: Susann E. convicted in Dresden of supporting the NSU (not final).