- Date of Incident
- 06 Apr 2006
- Location
- Kassel, Germany
- Publication Date
- 08 Jun 2017
- Commissioned By
- The People's Tribunal 'Unraveling the NSU Complex'
- Additional Funding
- documenta 14
- Collaborators
- The People's Tribunal 'Unraveling the NSU Complex', Initiative 6 April, HKW - Haus der Kulturen der Welt, documenta 14
- Methodologies
- 3D Modelling, Audio Analysis, Fluid Dynamics, Reenactment
- Forums
- Hessen Parliamentary NSU-Inquiry; Report of the German Federal Parliamentary NSU-Inquiry
- Exhibitions
- Counter Investigations, 77sqm_9:26min at Documenta 14, On Struggling to Remain Present When You Want to Disappear, Soon Enough: Art in Action, Broken Bonds, Forensic Justice, Im Zweifel für den Zweifel: Die große Weltverschwörung (Conspiracy Theories), Weil Ich Nun Mal Hier Lebe / Because I Live Here, Politik im Freiein Theater Festival (Politics in Free Theatre), 3. Berliner Herbstsalon, République Géniale, Saraceno-Forensic-Architecture-Lomasko, Material Contingencies, Under the Radar, Never Again, Knowledge in Images, The Labrynth: An exhibition on the NSU complex, Forensic Architecture: Design as Investigation, Forensic Architecture: True to Scale, Forensic Architecture: To Pattern the Bruised Information, Investigative Commons, Open Process / Offener Prozess, Open Process / Offener Prozess, Designing Peace, MINDBOMBS: Visual Cultures of Political Violence, Three Doors – Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh, Super Sight: A World Viewed Through Technology, OBLIQUE: Navigation Between Oblique Angles and Shadowy Zones at 8. Salon, Forensic Architecture: Witnesses
Shortly after 5:00pm on 6 April 2006, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was murdered at the desk of his family-run internet café in Kassel, Germany. His death was the ninth of ten murders committed across Germany between 2000 and 2007, by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU).
It was not until 2011, however, that the NSU and their killing spree was exposed, when two members of the group committed suicide after being pursued by police from the scene of a bank robbery. In the months and years that followed, more than a dozen parliamentary inquiries and Germany’s longest post-war criminal trial would expose the shocking extent to which Germany’s security services were aware of the NSU, and in constant contact with many of its supporters.
Those revelations laid bare what became known as the ‘NSU Complex’—the structural racism and institutional blindness that ignored the situated knowledge and experience of the country’s immigrant communities, and comprehensively failed to apprehend a violent terror cell over more than a decade, leading to the deaths of ten German citizens.
The seventy-seven square metres of the internet café, and the nine-and-a-half minutes during which the incident unfolded, can be seen as a microcosm of the NSU Complex.
At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was sitting in the next room. Temme was at the time an employee of the Verfassungsschutz, the intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme’s use of a computer in the café that day tied him to the scene.
Temme was briefly arrested and questioned. Under interrogation by police, he denied being a witness to the incident.
Specifically, Temme claimed he didn’t hear the gunshots, didn’t smell the gunpowder, and didn’t see Yozgat’s body. He would later repeat those denials in court, and in front of multiple inquiries.
A few weeks after the murder, investigating police declared that Temme was no longer a suspect. Years later, the German courts would also accept his testimony. At the trial of the remaining members and supporters of the NSU, which ran from 2013 to 2018, judges determined that while Temme had been present in the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder, it was possible not to have witnessed the killing from that position.
In November 2016, a decade after the murder, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture (FA) to investigate Temme’s testimony.
FA’s investigation became possible when hundreds of documents from the original police investigation into the murder – reports, witness depositions, photographs, and computer and phone logs – were leaked to the internet in late 2015.
One of the most important pieces of evidence in this leak was a video in which Andreas Temme re-enacted his route out of the internet café in the minutes following Yozgat’s murder. In the context of our investigation, Temme’s reenactment is not only a representation of an earlier event, but potentially a crime—perjury—in its own right.
We constructed a 1:1-scale physical model of the internet café and reenacted Temme’s reenactment, in order to investigate his testimony. Could he have smelled, heard, or seen evidence of the murder?
Our investigation established that Temme’s testimony was very likely to be untruthful. But surrounding the circumstances of those nine-and-a-half minutes are larger questions regarding the ways in which Germany’s security services monitor, and embed themselves within, the country’s resurgent neo-Nazi underground.
Methodology
In addition to constructing a digital model of the scene of the event—something common to most Forensic Architecture projects—we also built elements of Halit Yozgat’s internet café as a 1:1-scale physical model at Berlin’s House of World Cultures (HKW) between 6 and 11 March 2017.
The materials used in the construction of this model were specified by acoustic experts in order to ensure that, when tested, they would perform similarly to the original building materials of the café in Kassel.
Each experiment that we subsequently undertook to test the claims made by Andreas Temme was conducted in both physical and digital formats. The final results of our report were achieved through the synthesis of physical and digital data.
Our full methodology, including reports from our expert advisors in ballistics, acoustics and fluid dynamics, is available here.
Updates
Update — 6 April 2017
On the eleventh anniversary of the murder of Halit Yozgat, a team from Forensic Architecture traveled to Kassel to publicly present the draft conclusions of our investigation to a press conference.
Later that day, we are invited by the Yozgat family to speak at a commemorative event for the eleventh anniversary of their son’s murder, while in Athens, the people’s tribunal present the investigation at the opening of Documenta, a contemporary art exhibition held concurrently in Kassel and the Greek capital: our investigation was active across three forums in the same day.
Around the same time, we began discussions with the lawyers for the Yozgat family to present our results to the Munich courtroom in which the remaining members and supporters of the NSU were on trial.
Update — 6 May 2017
A regrettable technical error on the part of one of the lawyers involved in the ‘NSU trial’ in Munich excludes Forensic Architecture from participation in the trial.
The Yozgats’ legal team nevertheless tells a Frankfurt newspaper that despite the mistake by their colleague, they have full confidence that our conclusions would be ‘adequate to convict the witness Temme of giving false statements’.
Update — 25 August 2017
Our investigation was presented to a state parliamentary inquiry into the NSU in Hessen. An exchange followed with members of the ruling Christian Democrat party (CDU), which was in charge of the security services at the time of the murder. The CDU produced a substantial critique of our investigation.
A report on this controversy and the deeper history of the NSU, can be found here. The report was co-authored by a member of our team and a senior reporter at The Intercept.
Update — 19 December 2017
Our response to the CDU is published on our website, and reported in the Frankfurter Rundschau. You can read the letter here.
As part of this exchange, police files from 2008 were made public for the first time. The following diagram shows the apparent timeline of events according to the updated timings. These new timings support what we have called ‘scenario 3’—in which Temme was at PC-2 at the time of the killing.
Update — 7 March 2018
The investigation is displayed as part of our exhibition Counter Investigations at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA).
For that exhibition, we produced a graphic mural telling the story of the NSU case from Yozgat’s death in April 2006 to the appearance of his parents before a parliamentary inquiry in Hessen in December 2017. Given the immense complexity of the NSU story, and the many elements of it which are yet to be understood, that story is necessarily partial.
The mural is a graphic representation of the counter-forensic process, and makes visual the route of our investigation. Below is the mural exhibited at the ICA. On the ground in front of it is a plan view of Halit Yozgat’s internet café.
In contrast to the police investigation, which progresses directly from crime scene to courtroom, our investigation was required to move between cultural, legal and political forums, and to engage with civil society and the media, in order to advance. You can explore the whole mural through the media library.
Our video investigation and accompanying mural continue to be exhibited across Germany and around the world.
Update — 17 October 2019
In a state parliamentary committee hearing on the murder of Hessen politician Walter Lübcke, Interior Minister Peter Beuth admitted that Andreas Temme was ‘professionally concerned’ with Stephan Ernst, the far-right extremist who had admitted to that murder.
Ernst had previously confessed to police that he had murdered Lübcke as a result of the politician’s pro-refugee stance.
Temme had been responsible, in his role within the Hessen Verfassungschutz, for handling informants within Hessen’s far-right underground scene. According to the Verfassungschutz, Ernst was never an informant of the state.