“Especially heavy guilt.” The neo-Nazi wanted early release from prison

Beate Zschaepe will remain in prison until at least 2035. The Higher Regional Court in Munich did not accept her request for early release. The judges found that the 51-year-old, who was arrested in 2011 and sentenced seven years later to life in prison, must serve a minimum of 24 years of her sentence. The court also did not agree to the automatic suspension of serving the sentence after this deadline.

The National Socialist Underground (NSU) is a far-right terrorist organization that operated in Germany from 2000 to 2011. The group consisted of three people: Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Boehnhardt and Beate Zschaepe. During eleven years of activity, they murdered ten people - in nine cases the victims were immigrants from Turkey and Greece, and the tenth victim was a German policewoman. Mundlos and Boehnhardt also carried out two bombings in Cologne and numerous bank robberies.

In 2011, after being surrounded by police, Mundlos and Boehnhardt committed suicide. Only then did the truth about the NSU's activities come to light, which for years had been wrongly associated with scores of accounts among immigrant communities.

After the death of her partners, Zschaepe set fire to their apartment, trying to cover her tracks, and then handed herself in to the police. In 2018, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The court found her guilt to be "particularly grave", which excluded the possibility of release after 15 years of serving the sentence.

During the trial, Zschaepe claimed that she only found out about the murders and attacks after the fact. However, while serving her sentence, she changed her testimony and admitted to participating in planning the crime, which the court considered an admission of guilt.

The Higher Regional Court in Munich emphasized that although Zschaepe has distanced herself from National Socialist ideology and is showing positive changes in behavior, her "particularly grave guilt" does not allow for early release from prison. The Federal Prosecutor's Office demanded that the minimum sentence be 25 years.

The court's judgment is not final.