Officials face difficult questions over how fugitives were able to carry out 10 murders, 14 bank robberies and two nailbomb attacks
At 9.15am on Friday 4 November, two men stormed into a building society in the east German town of Eisenach. One was wearing a black balaclava, the other a gorilla mask. Both had guns. They demanded money, punching a bank teller before grabbing €70,000 (£60,000) from the safe and hopping on to bicycles they had propped up outside. They knew what they were doing – it was their 14th bank robbery in 12 years.
The thieves pedalled furiously, but not fast enough. Someone spotted them bundling the bikes into a white camper van and called the police. Soon 13 patrol cars were on the case. Officers were hiding behind a wall in the car park when they heard two shots. Smoke appeared from the VW Winnebago's roof. When officers opened the door, they found two bodies: one was shot in the head, the other in the chest.
At 3pm, 110 miles east in the Saxon town of Zwickau, a house in the quiet Frülingstrasse exploded. Minutes before the blast ripped through the upper floors of No 26, a woman had rushed to the neighbouring house carrying two cages. She shoved them into the hands of a girl who answered the door and said: "Look after my cats; I'll be back very soon." Joseph Hergert, the girl's father, told the local paper: "She had her phone pressed to her ear, said 'I'm phoning the fire brigade,' and ran away. Shortly afterwards, we heard a bang."
By Saturday evening, German police had unearthed a link between the crime scenes in Eisenach and Zwickau. The two dead men, they learned, were Uwe Mundlos, 38, the son of a university professor, and Uwe Böhnhardt, 34, two of the most wanted neo-Nazi terrorists in Germany.
Officers joined the dots and figured out that the woman who offloaded the cats in such a hurry was not Susann Dienelt, as her neighbours knew her. In fact she was 36-year-old Beate Zschäpe, who had been on the run with the Uwes since 1998, after their bombmaking factory was discovered in their home town of Jena.
Three days after the two men's deaths, on Monday 7 November, Zschäpe turned up at a police station in Jena, flanked by a lawyer. "I'm the one you're looking for," she said.
At the time of writing, Zschäpe had yet to break her silence. But after talking to those who remember her and her two boyfriends, two things becoming clear. One: they have a long history of rightwing extremism stretching back to their youth. Two: the German authorities have some very difficult questions to answer about how and why they failed to stop the fugitives' 13-year run of violence which resulted in 10 murders – including the killing of a police officer and a series of attacks on Turkish immigrants – 14 bank robberies and at least two nailbomb attacks. The toll could rise as investigators reopen dozens of unsolved cases dating back to 1998.
Detectives were so sure that the perpetrators of the "Doner murders" were foreign gangsters, probably from Turkey, that they codenamed the investigation Operation Bosphorus. The victims' relatives were told their loved ones had probably got mafia connections and were in all likelihood mixed up in a drug-smuggling racket.
That was until the police sat down last week to watch some DVDs salvaged from the Zwickau explosion.
The bizarre DVDs used the Pink Panther cartoon character to lay claim to the nine Doner murders. The cartoon character is shown going on a "tour of Germany", counting down the murder victims, some of whose bloody corpses had been photographed, freshly murdered. The killers introduce themselves as the National Socialist Underground (NSU), "a network of comrades united under the motto 'actions instead of words'." They then threaten future attacks "if there are no fundamental changes in politics, the press and in freedom of speech".
By the end of this week, investigators appeared to have finished sifting through the charred remains of Frülingstrasse 26. But the bombsite was still drawing stares from everyone who passed. Surveying the melted vacuum cleaner, blackened rugs and upturned bathtub scattered in front of the house, an elderly couple shook their heads. "You wouldn't think it would happen here," said the woman, refusing to give her name. "I can't believe something like this is possible nowadays."
Less than an hour's drive west to the industrial town of Jena, one man was not surprised to be told that everyone in Zwickau had expressed their shock at the discovery of a Nazi terror cell living in their midst. "We were all shocked to hear about [the nearby concentration camp] Buchenwald too," said Lothar König, a youth pastor from the inner city parish, with heavy irony. "How could any of us have known about it? None of us saw it." He took a long drag of his cigarette. "History is repeating itself. You can see it happening again - it's hard to watch, it's hard to understand, so people look away. They would much rather spend their evenings in the pub, or zoning out in front of the telly."
Back in Zwickau, Rene Hahn was not surprised that his charming town of gothic churches at the foot of the Erzgebirge mountains had become a neo-Nazi haven. The local councillor for the leftwing Linke party said: "Sometimes there are neo-Nazi demonstrations and every now and again there are assaults. The last big one was only in August this year, when seven young people were beaten up by a gang of 40 Nazis."
One of Hahn's fellow councillors is Peter Klose. Until April he was a prominent member of the legal far-right NPD party, which Merkel's CDU and opposition SPD want to ban. Notorious for hanging a Nazi flag outside his city centre flat to celebrate Hitler's birthday every year, Klose denies knowing anything about the terror cell. But he concedes that until a few days ago, his Facebook name was Paul Panther, the German name for the Pink Panther: a complete coincidence, he says.
Nonetheless, there are claims that NPD activists had known for years where the trio were hiding. One ex-member told the German tabloid Bild that he had seen Zschäpe at a NPD Christmas party after she went on the run in 1998, and that she had also turned up at an event in Georgsmarienhütte, near the Dutch border, in March 2004. "The Nazis thought she was hot stuff," said the man, who claimed she was known as a founder member of the National Socialist Underground.
In 2010, a CD entitled Adolf Hitler Lives was being circulated among rightwing extremist circles. According to the taz newspaper, the CD included a song called Döner Killer, which included the lyrics: "Nine times now he has struck/There is fear and horror at every kebab stall/... Nine are not enough."
Despite all this, the German authorities still claim they had no idea where the trio had been living since 1998; less still that they were responsible for the Doner murders.
However, there is growing evidence to the contrary. First, it emerged that an agent from the Hessen branch of the Verfassungschutz, Germany's domestic intelligence service, was present in April 2006 when Mundlos and Böhnhardt are believed to have shot dead a 21-year-old Turk in a Kassel internet cafe. Then, the German TV channel MDR claimed that local police had located them in the town of Chemnitz, near the Czech border, in 2001, but were not given authorisation to arrest them in time. There are also numerous reports that they were seen in the early 2000s in Winzerla, the down-at-heel suburb of Jena where they had spent their formative years.
In Hugo, Winzerla's youth club, social worker Thomas Grund recalled his first meeting with Mundlos and Böhnhardt, back in 1991. He even has a picture of Mundlos from the September of that year, at the opening of the old youth club up the road. Then aged 17 or 18, Mundlos is wearing what Grund called "a typical skinhead outfit from the time: jeans with black, red and gold braces".
By then, Mundlos was already on his way to becoming a fully fledged neo-Nazi, said Grund. "About a year later, he was suddenly together with Beate Zschäpe. Then I remember one day he bought a mate along: Böhnhardt. He was a real babyface. He was like Mundlos's adjutant, I thought. Mundlos didn't talk to us any more. He said we were 'Zecken', ticks – that was the word they used for everything they hated; something they wanted to stamp on.
"I remember the first discussions we had about rightwing ideologies. They said that Auschwitz was an invention of the Russians, they only built Buchenwald in 1945 to discriminate against the Nazis, no Jews were gassed ... all that sort of stuff."
He remembered how the Uwes turned up at the youth club one day with a Nazi flag they wanted to put up. A few years later the neo-Nazis were banned from the club, but for "a few years afterwards", said Grund, "they would hang around outside drinking and trying to harass people".
On the Winzerla estate where Mundlos grew up, Kerstin, a 48-year-old woman, recalled how her son, now 28, would be regularly chased by neo-Nazis as a young teenager in the 1990s. "He is half-Arabic, so looks different," she said, refusing to give her surname for fear of reprisals. "Even now he told me it's not sensible for him to be out late at night here, or in Jena."
Lothar König, a youth pastor from Jena, said Mundlos was known to have disliked the "uncouth" elements of the rightwing scene. "He was clever, more correct – he wanted things to be done properly. Very German, if you like." A friend of Mundlos told German media that he was obsessed with punctuality, to the point that he would arrive early for every meeting "and then hide behind a tree or a wall so that he could stroll out exactly on time".
Böhnhardt is said to have been more hotheaded. In April 1996, he hung a doll from a motorway bridge in Jena with a Star of David on it and a bomb planted inside – he was convicted for inciting hatred but received no custodial sentence.
Mundlos's father, Siegfried, a professor in computing at Jena's Technical University, told Stern magazine that he had done everything to stop his son's extremist behaviour. He claimed he had phoned the parents of his son's friends, met the police and was mocked by his boy for his attempts to start a "self-help group". He said he could never understand how his child, who cared so much for his wheelchair-using younger brother, could be so callous.
Grund too remembers Mundlos wheeling his brother into the youth club, "chastising us for not making it properly accessible for people with disabilities".
Now Mundlos is dead, along with Böhnhardt. No one understands why they killed themselves – indeed if that really is how they died. Angela Merkel has demanded a "full investigation". The chances are, we will never fully know what led two blond boys from Jena to ignore the lessons Germany thought it had learned from its dark past.