Virtual film screening and Q&A with Aysun Bademsoy, Director of ‘Spuren – Die Opfer des NSU’ (Traces – The NSU victims)

ABOUT THE FILM

Between April 2000 and April 2007, eight men with Turkish roots, one man with a Greek background, and one German policewoman were brutally murdered in broad daylight at their workplaces in cities across Germany with the same weapon. In all but one case, police investigations focused on the victims’ suspected links to ‘foreign’ criminal networks. For years, their grieving families were treated like suspects. In 2011, it became known that the right-wing terror group ‘National Socialist Underground (NSU)’ was responsible for the murders. After the suicide of the two main perpetrators, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, their partner in crime Beate Zschäpe and four helpers of the group stood trial in Munich in 2013. The trial ended in 2018 with mild sentences for most defendants and without providing critical insights into the local and national Nazi networks that had enabled the NSU murders. As a recent string of scandals over far-right networks in the German military and police and the Hanau terror attack in February 2020 show, these Nazi networks and their ideas continue to pose a major threat. Aysun Bademsoy’s film provides an empathic portrait of the NSU victims and gives their families an opportunity to share their stories and political demands, which are now more important than ever.