The policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter may have foiled a neo-Nazi meeting in a restaurant run by a friend of right-wing terrorist Beate Zschäpe. That would be a motive for the last known NSU murder.
One year before she was murdered by the self-proclaimed “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) in Heilbronn, police officer Michèle Kiesewetter may have prevented a meeting of neo-Nazis in what was then a pub in Thuringia. This is said to be the result of a note found by Martina Renner, a member of the Bundestag, in the investigation documents of the time and reported on by the magazine “MDR Investigativ”.
This would give the members of the right-wing terrorist NSU, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, who were considered to be the perpetrators, a motive for the murder of the policewoman. According to the investigation, Kiesewetter and her colleague Martin A. had been sitting in their patrol car with the doors open and had taken a break. Like Kiesewetter, A. had been shot in the head during the attack and survived seriously injured.
According to the research, there is a witness statement in the NSU investigation files about a meeting organised by the NPD in the village of Lichtenhain on 18 March 2006 in the restaurant “Zur Bergbahn”. The event was broken up by the police and the public order office. The impetus for this presumably came from Kiesewetter.
The pub in question in Lichtenhain is only one kilometre away from the village of Oberweißbach, where Kiesewetter had grown up. The owner, David F., was apparently friends with Beate Zschäpe and later also a partner. After the NSU unmasked itself and Mundlos and Böhnhardt died, Zschäpe was sentenced to life imprisonment as the only NSU member still alive.
According to investigations by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), Kiesewetter had been off duty for a week during the week in which the meeting was to take place at the restaurant. Whether she was in Oberweißbach or Lichtenhain on that day, however, could no longer be determined.
The Left Party MP Renner now asks why the note was not followed up in the police investigation. The committees of enquiry were not aware of it either. The Federal Public Prosecutor told “MDR Investigativ” that the BKA had followed up the note at the time, but had not found “any evidence relevant to the investigation”. Neither the owner of the restaurant F. nor Ralf Wohlleben, who was convicted as an NSU aide, had testified to a possible influence of Kiesewetter to prevent the NPD event.
The murder of Michèle Kiesewetter in 2007 was the last of a total of ten murders committed by the NSU. In order to clarify these acts as well as 15 robberies and three bomb attacks by the trio, various state parliaments as well as the Bundestag had set up 15 investigation committees. There, as in the NSU trial, the thesis prevailed that the murder of the policewoman Kiesewetter could have served to procure weapons. There was also speculation as to whether she and her colleague could have been “accidental victims” of the NSU.
It is also possible that there were three members of the NSU involved in the murder of Kiesewetter: in the remains of the NSU residence in Zwickau, which Zschäpe destroyed in an explosion, the police found a pair of grey jogging trousers with tiny splashes of Kiesewetter’s blood on them. According to an expert assessment, a third person, i.e. not Böhnhardt and Mundlos, was wearing the trousers and thus had been standing next to or behind the murderer during the shooting of Kiesewetter and her colleague.
However, the court paid no attention to the expert opinion, although Zschäpe could have been the third person in Heilbronn: It is still unclear where the right-wing terrorist had been on the day of the crime.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: A memorial plaque at the Theresienwiese crime scene in Heilbronn for police officer Michèle Kiesewetter (P. Schmelzle, CC BY-SA 3.0).
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