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Top German court to rule on appeals in neo-Nazi terror case

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4 years ago

August 19, 2021

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Three years after the longest and most expensive trial in German history, the country’s top court would rule on appeals made by members of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) against their sentences on Thursday.

The NSU carried out ten murders of people with immigrant backgrounds in various parts of Germany between 2000 and 2007.

Following the suicide of two of the NSU’s founding members in 2011, a third founding member, Beate Zschaepe, turned herself into the police, who for years denied the murders had a racist motive.

The trial, which ran in Munich from May 2013 to July 2018, gripped the nation and ended with a life sentence for Zschaepe and sentenced of varying severity for the other NSU members on trial.

Zschaepe and three of her co-defendants in the NSU trial were appealing against their sentences, and the case reached the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in January.

The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which led the prosecution in the original trial, was also challenging the sentence handed down to one defendant, which it views as being surprisingly lenient.