NSU convict Beate Zschäpe must stay in prison until at least 2035

Court sets minimum term

The Higher Regional Court of Munich (Oberlandesgericht München) has fixed the minimum term Beate Zschäpe must serve at 24 years, so she must remain in prison until at least 2035. The court also refused to suspend the rest of her sentence on probation. Zschäpe, who is 51, has been in custody since November 2011 and is held at the prison in Chemnitz, Saxony. Neither she nor the Federal Prosecutor's Office (Bundesanwaltschaft) challenged the order, and the court said on Friday, 6 November, that the decision is now legally binding. The decision itself had been announced on 27 October.

Statutory minimum term15

Defence request (not more than)20

Court-set minimum term24

Federal Prosecutor's Office demand25

Statutory minimum term

15 years

Defence request (not more than)

20 years

Court-set minimum term

24 years

Federal Prosecutor's Office demand

25 years

Data from the article text

The 2018 conviction

Zschäpe was convicted in 2018 as an accomplice in the NSU murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court also found a particular gravity of guilt, which had made early release after 15 years almost impossible. When that threshold approached, she applied for early release and was brought from Chemnitz to Munich at the end of August for a hearing. Her lawyer, Mathias Grasel, asked for a total sentence of no more than 20 years. The court concluded that developments during her imprisonment did not carry enough weight to offset what it described as an exceptionally high degree of guilt.

Mitigation and remorse

The court credited Zschäpe with admitting that she knew, after the first murder in Nuremberg in September 2000, that further killings were planned. Stern reports that she has now admitted knowledge in nine of the ten murders, which the court weighed in her favour. Because of this, the court stayed one year below the 25 years the Federal Prosecutor's Office had requested. The court also said Zschäpe had expressed shame at having destroyed or seriously impaired the lives of innocent people chosen at random. She has distanced herself from the National Socialist ideology behind the crimes, the court noted.

The NSU and its victims

The National Socialist Underground (NSU) was a far-right terror cell formed by Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt. From 2000 it killed ten people across Germany, five of them in Bavaria. Nine of the victims were tradespeople of Turkish and Greek origin, and the tenth was a German policewoman. Mundlos and Böhnhardt also carried out two bomb attacks in Cologne that injured dozens of people. The two men died in 2011 to avoid arrest, which is when the group was exposed and Zschäpe surrendered to police. She is the only surviving member of the trio and was convicted as an accomplice, although there is still no proof that she was present at any of the crime scenes.