Enver Şimşek was born on 4 December 1961 in Salur Koy. He met his future wife Adile when he was still a young man. After their wedding in 1978, Enver Şimşek first had to complete his military service in Turkey, while Adile Şimşek moved to Germany. Together they settled in Hesse in 1985 and had two children. At the age of 31, Enver Şimşek began his own florist business. His company grew to 30 employees, selling flowers at various locations throughout Germany and elsewhere. In 2000, Enver Şimşek planned to begin working less.
Enver Şimşek was gunned down by the NSU at his flower stand on the lay-by of a Nuremberg arterial road on 9 September 2000. It is the first murder known in the series of racist murders. Normally he would not have been working that day, but was standing in for an employee. Enver Şimşek died in hospital two days later. Seda Başay-Yıldız, the family’s co-plaintiff in the NSU trial, reported that the Şimşek family had been informed by the police that Enver Şimşek was in hospital and that he was expected to ‘expire at any time’.
However, the police advised the family not to travel from their home in Hesse to the hospital in Nuremberg, as nothing could be done there, anyway. ‘However, it would be very important for them to come to the police interrogation now.’ The family travelled to their loved one anyway, who lay dying in hospital. The next day, the police took Adile Şimşek directly from Enver Şimşek’s hospital bed for questioning. The police were at that point already asking questions about ‘protection rackets’ and ‘drugs’, even though the family had never attracted the attention of the police before. Little more than the fact that Enver Şimşek – like most flower wholesalers – regularly travelled to the Netherlands to buy new supplies was enough for the authorities to begin investigating the Şimşek family, and subsequently the families and friends of the other murder victims. The investigations continued in that vein for years, despite those investigations having led the police nowhere, right from the first murder of Enver Şimşek.
In 2006, following the murders of Mehmet Kubaşık and Halit Yozgat, relatives of the murder victims held protests in Kassel and Dortmund under the slogan ‘9 victims – We don’t want a 10th victim. Stop the murderers’. They also wanted to draw attention to a possible right-wing motive for the series of murders. Semiya Şimşek, the daughter of Enver Şimşek, describes in her book ‘Schmerzliche Heimat’ why she gave a joint 2006 interview with Gamze Kubaşık, the daughter of Mehmet Kubaşık, who was murdered in Dortmund: ‘When Gamze and I met, we decided we would no longer remain silent, that we would go public. We gave a television interview. We were furious that nothing was happening, that the relatives were only being mishandled with the same old suspicions, that the possibility of xenophobia was never investigated. […] It all fizzled out without causing any [media or societal] echo.’
Enver Şimşek’s family continues to fight for justice and transparency to this day. The crime scene in Nuremberg was renamed Enver Şimşek Square in 2021. A square was also renamed in his honour in Jena, the city of origin of the core NSU members.
