On the night of 16 to 17 December 1988, Josef Saller, who was 19 years old at the time of the crime, set fire to a residential and commercial building on Schwaigerstraße in Schwandorf, Upper Palatinate. Saller deliberately chose a building in which predominantly migrant residents of Schwandorf lived. At the time of the attack, there were 16 people in the building, four of whom died in the arson attack, including the Can family:
Six other residents were seriously injured in the attack.
The fire was initially deemed an accident rather than arson. Although Saller was known to the police for using symbols of unconstitutional organisations, incitement to hatred, and abusing a wheelchair-bound teenager, the authorities initially ruled him out as the perpetrator, along with a racist motive for the arson attack. Weeks later, clear evidence, including a sticker with a racist message near the scene of the crime, led to the neo-Nazi Josef Saller.
Saller was dismissed by the media and authorities as an ‘oddball’ and ‘lone wolf’. His close links to the neo-Nazi scene in Germany and Austria were discounted in the investigation, even though Seller had been a member of the Nationalist Front (NF) party. Decades later, journalist Andrea Röpke would testify before the NSU committee of enquiry of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament that the NF was a party that was a ‘thoroughly militant fighting organisation’. The ‘Nationalist Front’ was founded in 1985 and banned in 1992 as an unconstitutional organisation. Saller attended their training camps and national party conferences and was also involved in the ‘Young National Democrats’ (JN) and the ‘Free German Labour Party’ (FAP), whose propaganda material he distributed. Josef Saller was a well-known neo-Nazi in the small town, who described himself as a ‘sheriff’ and regularly roamed the town armed with a baseball bat, bomber jacket, and combat boots. Saller cited hatred of foreigners as the motive for his crime. However, he said he did not want to hurt anyone in the arson attack, which he described as having ‘occurred to him in the moment’, but merely wanted to ‘annoy foreigners’. However, he recanted this confession a few days later. In 1989, Saller was sentenced to twelve years in juvenile detention, which he served in Straubing prison. His membership in the NF and his attempt to found a ‘Wehrkampfgemeinschaft’ (militia) in Schwandorf were taken into account in the sentencing. During his imprisonment, Saller was looked after by the ‘Hilfsorganisation für nationale politische Gefangene und deren Angehörige e.V.’ (HNG, Aid Organisation for National Political Prisoners and their Families)
Saller’s crime was downplayed by the authorities and the public for decades. This could be seen in the way the victims and their relatives were treated; the victims of the racist act were not officially commemorated until 21 years later, on 17 December 2009. The ‘Bündnis gegen Rechts’ (Alliance against the Right) had a memorial plaque set up for the victims on the tenth anniversary of the attack in 1998, but it was later taken down, while numerous requests for a memorial plaque were rejected by the main committee of Schwandorf city council. It was not until autumn 2016 that the city council decided to erect an official memorial plaque, which was finally placed in front of the building’s green space in 2017.
A current exhibition on right-wing terrorism from 1945 to the present day organised by the Memorium Nuremberg Trials commemorates the arson attack in Schwandorf to highlight the contiguities of right-wing violence, inhumane ideologies, and conspiracy theories. Further, it is essential to consider the conjectures of right-wing violence in Germany and to oppose ‘lone wolf’ theorising and other forms of trivialisation. These serve only to elevate sham debates above a thorough re-evaluation of racist violence while obstructing commemoration and remembrance of its victims.
