Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

German Court Rejects Bias Charge in Neo-Nazi Trial

A German court rejected on Friday an accusation of bias from a defendant in a case involving neo-Nazi racist murders, removing a potential legal hurdle to resumption of the trial.

The trial of Beate Zschaepe and four others opened last Monday in Munich but was quickly adjourned after defence lawyers delivered motions accusing chief judge Manfred Goetzl of bias. The proceeding is due to resume next Tuesday.

The trial, one of Germany’s most anticipated in decades, had already suffered delay before the accusations of judicial bias due to a dispute over media coverage of the case.

A lawyer for Ralf Wohlleben, one of the defendants, told Reuters the court had rejected his motion alleging bias. Among other issues, Wohlleben had complained that, unlike Zschaepe, he had been denied a third court-appointed lawyer for the trial.

A court spokeswoman declined to comment on Wohlleben’s motion but confirmed that the court had still to decide on a second complaint, filed by Zschaepe, alleging bias.

Zschaepe, 38, is accused of helping to found the neo-Nazi cell, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), and of complicity in the murders of 10 people, mostly ethnic Turks, from 2000 to 2007.

Wohlleben and three other men face lesser charges of assisting the NSU.

“I expect Zschaepe’s motion will also be rejected as groundless,” Mehmet Guercan, lawyer for the families of two of the murder victims, told Spiegel Online.

“I hope that we can finally begin the real trial next week with the reading out of the indictment,” he said.

The murders by the far-right cell went undetected for more than a decade. They came to light only by chance in late 2011, shocking Germans and exposing deep lapses in the country’s intelligence establishment.

Zschaepe, whose two presumed male accomplices in the killing spree committed suicide in 2011, faces life imprisonment if found guilty.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.