NSU trial

The following is an editorial commentary by Gisela Friedrichsen in Spiegel Online International dated May 13, 2013 titled "Victim's Lawyers Should Stop Fanning Outrage."

Relatives of the victims of the NSU terror cell were furious that the trial was adjourned last week so the judge could consider a defense motion of bias against him. But the victims' lawyers criticized this legitimate instrument. They are giving their clients exaggerated expectations and should know better.

A scandal! An insult! Another slap in the face of the victims! Such was the language that accompanied the decision by Munich's Higher Regional Court to cancel two sessions of the National Socialist Union (NSU) trial and not resume proceedings until this week. This came on the first day of the trial, when the defense entered two motions alleging bias: one directed at chief judge Manfred Götzl and the other against him and two fellow judges.

May 19, 2013

Taken from Spiegel Online International (by Gisela Friedrichsen) which is doing a fair job of covering this trial for English readers. Pictured right is Beate Zschäpe on Day 3 of her trial, May 15. Highlights:

The trial resumed on Tuesday, May 14 "after an eight-day adjournment during which the court considered - and rejected - a defense motion to replace the judge on the ground that he was biased because he had ordered defense lawyers to be frisked before entering the courtroom."

Carolyn - No participant in the trial, including the Turkish "victim families" and their attorneys was searched - ONLY the three defense attorneys. Wow, talk about totally unnecessary, but it does serve to give the German people a sense of the bias of this court. On this 2nd day, the charges against the defendents were read out. The media plays up that there were "emotional gasps and sobs," etc. from the "victim family members" in the gallery.

New Motions

"On [the[ third day of the trial, the morning [was] focused on a purely legal problem -- who sits on the judge's bench. Motions against the judges are difficult. They have to be made straight after the charges have been read. A defense that botches this aspect of the trial is doing a bad job."

Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, has halted public subsidies to the Nationalist Party of Germany (NPD) over an unpaid fine.

All parties in Germany receive 85 euro cents for every vote they get in European, legislative and regional elections, which drops to 70 cents once they have four million votes or more. According to Der Spiegel, NPD spokesman Frank Franz said he was unsurprised by the decision which he believed to be a way of blocking the party from standing at this September's general election.

AND YET ...
BERLIN February 25, 2013 (AP)

Germany's domestic intelligence agency has come under fire for paying almost a quarter of a million dollars to a neo-Nazi informer linked to a far-right terror group.  [This actually refers to the three, yes 3 persons (on Spiegel cover at left) who are being patsied by German Intelligence (a misnomer) as murderers in order to paint a picture of dangerous political extremism in Germany.]

Opposition lawmakers and anti-Nazi campaigners criticized the payments made over 18 years after they were first reported Sunday by conservative weekly Bild am Sonntag.
Officials at the intelligence agency declined to comment on the report. But the head of a parliamentary committee tasked with investigating a string of murders allegedly carried out by the group says the information appears accurate.

Lawmaker Sebastian Edathy told The Associated Press on Monday that the newspaper's report matched information submitted to his committee. Edathy said the payments totaling €180,000 ($240,000) to a man identified by the newspaper as Thomas R. were "off the scale" for an informant.

In other words, no money for the country's one nationalist political party, but over-the-top amounts of money to pay informants within the nationalist groups. It's hard work to try to build a murder case out of nothing.

Beate Zschäpe turned herself in to Police on Nov. 8 after being named the 3rd member of an alleged neo-nazi terror cell in Zwickau, Germany.

Her lawyer, Public Defender Wolfgang Heer, filed a complaint against her detention with Germany's Federal Court of Justice on Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2011. In it, he said there were insufficient grounds for suspecting his client of having founded a terrorist organization or being a member of such an organization.

He stated there was no evidence of a firm organizational structure among Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Zschäpe and  currently no proof of a common will to organize, which is also a legal criterion for a terrorist organization. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Zschäpe was involved in creating the videos that were found on the scene of the burned house where the two men had lived.

In an interview with Der Spiegel on 12/27, Heer said, "Currently we have only seen about 500 pages (of case files), of which most are not significant in relation to the accusation of forming a terrorist organization. We have not even seen any of the files from the murder investigations."  He said it was impossible to guarantee a fair trial under such conditions, and that Zschäpe's ability to defend herself was severely curtailed as a result.