Racism 10

They tried out one theory after the other on us. First they suspected my mother and her brothers; they accused him of murder out of greed. At the time of the murder, my father was at the peak of his economic success with his flower wholesale business. He made really good money. There were always bundles of bills hidden under my parents’ mattress. It was later said that my father was probably a dealer and didn’t buy flowers in Holland, but drugs.

Süddeutsche Magazin, 10/2013.

Semiya Şimşek (b. 1986) is a pedagogist and the daughter of Enver Şimşek, who was the first person to be murdered by the NSU. Semiya Şimşek has become an important voice for victims' relatives. In her book Painful Homeland: Germany and the Murder of My Father, she works through her experiences around the murder of her father. Semiya Şimşek left Germany and now lives in Turkey.

Between 2000 and 2007, the neo-Nazi terrorist organisation National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered nine migrants and one policewoman: Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Mehmet Turgut, İsmail Yaşar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık, Halit Yozgat Michele Kiesewetter. Both the NSU and investigators kept these crimes undercover for more than ten years until the NSU exposed itself with a video in 2011. After it became public, some members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution destroyed relevant files, and high-ranking officers for the Protection of the Constitution resigned. Instead of pursuing actual clues, for years, investigators targeted the victims' relatives and accused them of criminal activities. The unprecedented right-wing terrorist crimes of the NSU, the investigations and the subsequent trial illustrate only too well the deeply rooted institutional racism of the police, the secret service and courtrooms. The victims' relatives, co-plaintiffs, activists and critical journalists denounced the fact that during the entire process, right-wing extremist groups were never investigated.

*NSU Watch. *wsws.org (Dietmar Henning, 15.07.2015): Documentary examines unanswered questions about the National Socialist Underground.

2013