An alleged neo-Nazi terrorist on trial in the southern German city of Munich spoke for the first time in her three-and-a-half-year trial to renounce her past nationalist convictions.
Beate Zschaepe, 41, the only survivor of the so-called Nationalist Socialist Underground (NSU), said that she regretted her “misconduct” and what the two other NSU members Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt had done to the victims.
She also backpedalled from her previous “nationalist ideology” in the brief one-minute address that she read from a piece of paper to the Munich regional court room.
She admitted that she had previously “absolutely identified with parts of nationalist ideology”, but that this was no longer the case.
As time had passed, things such as “the fear of being swamped by foreigners” had become “increasingly unimportant”, she said.
“Today I do not judge people on where they come from or what their political views are, but on their behaviour,” Zschaepe said during her address, which was delivered rapidly and in a quiet voice.
Zschaepe was arrested in 2011 after Mundlos and Boehnhardt, with whom she had been living, died after a murder-suicide.
She is accused of being an accessory in a series of 10 mainly racially inspired murders carried out by Mundlos and Boehnhardt between 2000 and 2007, as well as setting fire to the apartment the three lived in.
Zschaepe had reluctantly maintained a silence during the trial on the advice of her original defence council before the court agreed to her request to add other lawyers to her team.
In a statement delivered by her new legal team in December, she denied being involved in the NSU crimes and apologised to the victims and their families.