Michèle Kiesewetter was born on 10 October 1984 in Oberweißbach, Thuringia. Her uncle was a police officer and in 2002, she also decided to join the police force. From 2003, she was a member of the Baden-Württemberg state police.
On 25 April 2007, she spent her lunch break with her colleague Martin A. on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn. Sitting in their shared police car, they did not see the perpetrators approaching them from behind. The perpetrators are presumed to have suddenly opened fire. Martin A. survived the attack seriously injured. He provided his testimony on the 75th day of the Munich NSU trial. According to Martin A., he was initially told in hospital that he had had an accident. Finally, when asked about his colleague, he was told that ‘Michèle was no longer there’ and that he had been shot in the head and had been in a coma. He burst into tears and punched his colleague in the stomach because he thought he was trying to get a rise out of him. When asked about other effects of the attack on his life today, Martin A. replied that there were many. Above all, the trauma: ‘You don’t just get over an attack like that!’ His colleague was simply gone afterwards. He doesn’t sleep well, waking up many times a night. His childhood dream of becoming a normal police officer was gone.
After the murder of Michèle Kiesewetter, the investigators treated the family with the care that is expected and desirable after the murder of a close relative. However, the perpetrators of this crime were not found, either, and the murder remained unsolved until the NSU revealed itself in November 2011. As the perpetrators used a different weapon than in the ‘Ceska murder series’, it had not been linked to those murders prior to that. It was only the NSU’s confession video that brought clarity.
The murder of Michèle Kiesewetter could probably have been prevented if the police had listened to the relatives of the murder victims of the series of racist murders and investigated a right-wing motive. The relatives demonstrated in Kassel and Dortmund in 2006, demanding: ‘No 10th victim’. Michèle Kiesewetter became that tenth victim just under a year later. She is the last known murder victim of the NSU.
