Prosecutors call Beate Zschaepe Germany’s most dangerous neo-Nazi and from on Monday she will sit in the dock in the country’s biggest far-right murder trial of the post-war period.
But as the proceedings get underway against Zschaepe and four alleged accomplices in the southern city of Munich, the unassuming bespectacled brunette remains an enigma behind a wall of silence.
When she walked through the door of the police station of Zwickau, a sleepy town in former communist East Germany, on November 8, 2011 to turn herself in, she told officers simply: “I’m the one you’re looking for.”
Since then, she has refused to divulge any secrets from the previous 14 years which she, according to the authorities, spent underground and on the run as part of a far-right killer trio blamed for 10 murders.
“Everyone in Germany knows her name but no one knows who she is,” the daily Die Welt wrote about a woman who has shaken the country’s self-image as having learned the lessons of its Nazi past.
Four days before she gave herself up, her two fellow gang members, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, died in an apparent murder-suicide after a bungled bank heist, finally bringing their lethal “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) to light.