Nazi cell: “Actions not words!”

Underground: Holidays, friends and mail from the East

Wanted poster from 1998.

During their 13 years on the run, the three members took annual holiday trips to the Baltic Sea. There they would spend several weeks bicycling, surfing and card-playing with friends they made in the area. They made the acquaintance of several families with whom they developed casual friendships over the years. The trio visited these families and maintained contact with them via telephone, Skype and emails.

In the summer of 2009 they got to know a family whose other holiday acquaintances had raved about the three young people from eastern Germany. A family member later told the investigators: “They were nice, very pleasant, polite people who did not, however, tell much about themselves.”

After the holiday, this family even received a package from Beate Zschäpe, who used the name Liese as one of her aliases in public. The package, with no return address,  contained Thuringian bratwurst, a CD with pictures of the shared holiday and sweets for the two children in the family. Zschäpe cared for animals, too. When she, Böhnhardt and Mundlos went on a journey, she engaged a caregiver for their cats and granted  access to the apartment. It was also Zschäpe who stayed in contact with the neighbours in Zwickau, visiting them and spending evenings with them.

Ideological role models
To understand the NSU terror, it is necessary to study possible ideological role models and the international neo-Nazi scene in the 1980s and 1990s. There is reason to believe that the future members of the National Socialist Underground were inspired by militant concepts commonly discussed in international neo-Nazi circles of the time.

The Turner Diaries is one of the most famous books of the extreme right. The novel by William L. Pierce was published in 1978 and contains over 200 pages of the fictional diary of Earl Turner, who is described as going underground in the 1990s with fellow travellers to fight violently against “the system” as a part of a racist and anti-Semitic group. In Pierce’s novel, “The Order” was an inner circle of political leaders in a terrorist organization.

German-language propaganda material published under the C18 name.

The novel directly inspired an actual U.S. white nationalist terrorist group, which named itself The Order in a tribute to The Turner Diaries. The group, founded by Robert Jay Mathews, was active in 1983 and 1984. In addition to bank raids and bomb attacks, it created death lists containing the names of “foes and enemies“. On 18 June 1984, members of The Order fatally shot the liberal lawyer and anchorman Alan Berg outside his Denver, Colorado, home. Berg had been second on the members’ death list.

The group ceased activities that same year after Mathews died in an exchange of gunfire with FBI officials who had stormed his house. The Order is renowned among German neo-Nazis not only for its actions but for the famous “Fourteen Words” of one of the members, David Eden Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.”

Lane was sentenced to 190 years in prison for his involvement in Berg’s murder. He died in prison in 2007. The 14 words are still widely quoted by the far right on T-shirts, in song lyrics and as the number code “14” today. Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe are also accused of creating so-called death lists. One of the first versions of their video contains a link to the “Fourteen Words”. Fourteen  text boxes filled with the dates of the German attacks are used as a graphic element in the NSU video.

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