This murder of an elected promigrant of Angela Merkel’s party had awakened in June 2019 the specter of far-right terrorism in Germany: the verdict at the trial of the alleged murderous neo-Nazi of Walter Lübcke was delivered Thursday in Frankfurt.
This trial has historic significance, as it is the first murder of an elected official since 1945 attributed to a far-right sympathizer.
Stephan Ernst, 47, faces life imprisonment for the murder of Mr Lübcke, as well as for an “attempted aggravated murder” against an Iraqi refugee in 2016.
On the night of June 2, 2019, Walter Lübcke, a 65-year-old elected official from the chancellor’s conservative CDU party, smokes a cigarette on the terrace of his house in Kassel in Hesse, when he is shot in the head shot almost at close range.
“Cruel and cowardly”
After two weeks of investigation, Mr. Ernst, close to the neo-Nazi movement, is arrested. He also accuses an alleged accomplice, Markus Hartmann, also on trial in this trial which began on June 16.
Stephan Ernst has apologized to the victim’s family for this “cruel and cowardly” murder. His lawyer hopes for a “proportionate” sentence for this murder committed with a “political objective”, the prosecution asking him for life imprisonment.
His alleged accomplice is accused of having trained him to shoot in the forest, “including with the weapon used” for the murder, without being “aware of the real plans” of Stephan Ernst.
The prosecution requested a sentence of nine years and eight months’ imprisonment against him, his lawyers pleading the acquittal.
The two suspects had, according to the prosecution, attended together, ulcerated, a public meeting during which Walter Lübcke had supported the generous migration policy decided by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
More than a million refugees were welcomed in Germany between 2015 and 2016. In the process, the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), made a sensational entry into parliament during the 2017 parliamentary elections. .
Stephan Ernst had been known to authorities since the late 1980s as a potentially violent neo-Nazi sympathizer.
As early as 1993, he was suspected of having planned a bomb attack against a hostel for asylum seekers. In 2009, he participated in a race riot in Dortmund.
Despite this busy past, the intelligence services had stopped monitoring him in recent years.
Failures of the investigation
The investigation revealed another police error, already often accused in the past of appeasing neo-Nazis: they did not report to the authority issuing permits to carry weapons that the alleged accomplice was a still active member of the ultra-right. This enabled him to obtain pistols and rifles.
The parliament of Hesse will conduct investigations into the dysfunctions and failures of the investigation.
The murder of Walter Lübcke has awakened the specter of “brown” terrorism in the country.
Underestimated in the 2000s by the authorities despite the murders at the time of eight Turkish immigrants, a Greek and a German policewoman by a small neo-Nazi group NSU, the threat is perceived today as a crucial challenge for internal security.
In October 2019, a far-right sympathizer nearly committed a massacre on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, in a synagogue in Halle, before killing a passerby and a man in a restaurant frequented by immigrants.
He was sentenced to life in December.
In February 2020, a man also killed nine people of foreign origin in two bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt, before taking his own life.
Finally on Wednesday, German justice paved the way for the trial of a far-right sympathizer suspected of having considered attacking elected officials and Muslims.
At the same time, German politicians and Holocaust survivors have warned of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the country, on the occasion of the annual day of remembrance of the victims of Nazism.