Abdurrahim Özüdoğru was born in Yenişehir, Turkey, in 1952. At the age of 20, he emigrated to Germany to study mechanical engineering, for which he received a scholarship. During his time at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg he met his future wife, and they later had a daughter. Abdurrahim Özüdoğru worked as a metalworker for 25 years. In addition to his shifts, he ran a tailoring business on the ground floor of his home.
On the afternoon of 13 June 2001, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru was shot dead by the NSU while working in his tailoring shop.
Nuremberg was a centre of the NSU’s right-wing terror; the group’s first known attack, on the ‘Pilsbar Sonnenschein’, took place there on 23 June 1999. In September 2000, the NSU then began its series of racist murders with the murder of Enver Şimşek at his flower stand in Nuremberg. Abdurrahim Özüdoğru was the second victim. In 2005, the NSU murdered İsmail Yaşar, also in Nuremberg. In some cases, precise local knowledge was required for the attacks and murders. In the case of the ‘Pilsbar Sonnenschein’, there was nothing from the outside to suggest that the restaurant in Nuremberg had recently been taken over by a tenant of migrant origin. Abdurrahim Özüdoğru’s tailoring business, located in a side street in Nuremberg, was not open regularly. Neo-Nazis from Chemnitz had a particularly strong network of contacts in Nuremberg.
Despite this, the authorities failed to conduct serious investigations into the right-wing milieu before the NSU revealed itself. On the contrary, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru and his personal circle were themselves the targets of the investigations, which were characterised by racist assumptions. But even when it was clear that Abdurrahim Özüdoğru had become a victim of the NSU, the police still did not conduct any intensive investigations into the NSU’s support network in Nuremberg.
For a long time, the city of Nuremberg did not officially commemorate Abdurrahim Özüdoğru. The anti-fascist initiative ‘Breaking the Silence’ placed a plaque at the crime scene, which was damaged several times and eventually had to be replaced. There has been an official memorial plaque at the crime scene since 2021. In 2023, a park in Nuremberg was named for Abdurrahim Özüdoğru.
