Mehmet Turgut was born in Turkey on 2 May 1979. His family came from the Kurdish mountain village of Kayalik in eastern Anatolia. The 25-year-old lived in Hamburg and had just moved to Rostock when he was murdered on 25 February 2004, shot three times in a snack bar where he was working by the ‘National Socialist Underground’ (NSU).
At that point, Mehmet Turgut was the fifth NSU victim.
Just under a week after the crime, the homicide squad wrote in a press release: ‘A xenophobic background can currently be ruled out.’ This was followed by a series of absurd accusations and suspicions. The German investigators travelled to Kayalik and questioned friends, relatives, and neighbours of the murdered man. This behaviour by the German authorities sparked rumours among residents of the village, and Mehmet Turgut’s family was suspected of being involved in the murder. Mehmet’s youngest brother, Mustafa Turgut, later recounted in interviews how his brother, the victim of German neo-Nazis, had himself become a suspect. Life in his home village became unbearable, and the family was forced to move away. The owner of the snack bar where the crime was committed also reported that he was not treated like a victim by the investigators, but as a suspect, as well.
Mehmet Turgut was not the last victim of the NSU. The first five murders were to be followed by three more. In all cases, the investigating authorities proceeded in the same manner. The police did not look for racist motives, but turned the victims into perpetrators and blamed their families. The investigations themselves were characterised by racism and the media did not question the official narrative. The reporting on the NSU murders remains one of the most frightening examples of structural racism in the German media landscape.
It was only seven years later, when the terror cell exposed itself in November 2011, that it became clear that all nine murders could be traced back to a right-wing network, which we now know included and includes far more than just three direct and indirect perpetrators and accomplices. The NSU complex is not an isolated case. The murders, and how the public reacted to them, are evidence of a common thread of racist and inhumane attitudes running through all levels of German society, and which have become even more entrenched since then.
Enver Şimşek, Nuremberg, 2000
Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Nuremberg, 2001
İsmail Yaşar, Nuremberg, 2005
Habil Kılıç, Munich, 2001
Theodoros Boulgarides, Munich, 2005
Süleyman Taşköprü, Hamburg, 2001
Mehmet Turgut, Rostock, 2004
Mehmet Kubaşik, Dortmund, 2006
Halit Yozgat, Kassel, 2006
Michèle Kiesewetter, Heilbronn, 2007
These names stand not only for the countless cases of right-wing extremist and racist violence in post-national socialist Germany, but also the lack of empathy shown by the authorities, media, and society towards the pain of the relatives of victims of racist violence. The lack of willingness to investigate and the suspicions directed toward the victims leave behind a deep trauma among the bereaved and survivors of right-wing violence. The very people who need protection the most have been and continue to be abandoned. This has resulted in a massive loss of trust in state institutions and security authorities.
10 years after the perpetrators turned themselves in, the list of unanswered questions remains very long. The federal and state committees of enquiry and the trial in Munich have not been able to fully clarify the role of the undercover agents, security agencies, and other entanglements. The NSU files remain under lock and key. What remains is the pain of the relatives, never knowing why their loved ones were killed.
Various initiatives such as NSU-Watch, the interdisciplinary theatre project Kein Schlussstrich!, and the Offener Prozess project are developing formats for investigating and coming to terms with the NSU complex in order to preserve the memory of the victims and bring the perspectives of the victims’ families and those affected by racism to the public eye.
More spaces and different forms of remembrance are needed to allow for society to confront institutional and structural racism. After all, the NSU murders were followed by the acts of violence in Munich, Halle, Hanau, Kassel, and many others. None of them were isolated incidents.
