BEATE ZSCHÄPE has just been charged in a Munich court as the surviving member of a neo-Nazi trio that, between 2000 and 2007, murdered eight Turks, one Greek and a policewoman, besides planting nail bombs and robbing banks. She is accused of helping two male accomplices, who shot their victims in the head with the same Ceska 83 pistol, with the aim of getting Turks and other foreigners to flee Germany in terror.The crimes of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), as the group styled itself, have held Germany in thrall ever since November 2011, when the group botched a bank robbery. The police closed in, and the two men killed themselves. Before turning herself in, Ms Zschäpe set fire to the flat where they had been living under false identities and sent out gory videos they had made, in the style of a Pink Panther cartoon, of their dead murder victims.Germany is now consumed with soul-searching. How could the NSU, in hiding since 1998, have stayed undetected for so long? For years the police searched for clues not among neo-Nazis but in the Turkish population, even suspecting the victims’ own families. If German intelligence services had worked better together, they might have stopped the NSU earlier.Instead, in a country that is highly sensitive to neo-Nazi threats, the bureaucracies failed utterly. Sebastian Edathy, chairman of an investigating parliamentary committee...
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