Our Son Was A Neo-Nazi Terrorist
The teenager in the photographs is 16 years old. In one picture, he and his girlfriend hold hands and smile shyly at the camera. “Maybe it’s better he’s dead,” says his mother softly. “We wouldn’t know how to relate to him after what he’s done.”
The pictures were taken in 1996 and show Uwe Böhnhardt, who was to become a multiple murderer, and Beate Zschäpe, his girlfriend and accomplice-to-be.
The couple belonged to the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU) - National Socialist Underground - a terror cell. Also involved in the group was a man named Uwe Mundlos, with whom Böhnhardt and Zschäpe allegedly robbed 14 banks and shot nine people to death. They may also have been involved in the killing of a policewoman in Heilbronn. In 2004, they set off a bomb in Cologne and apparently had a video made in which they bragged about it. The series of attacks was the most deadly committed in Germany in the last 20 years.