LOOK AWAY

A disturbing, eye-opening look at the neo-Nazi murder spree that took place in Germany in the early 2000s.

Kushner, a foreign correspondent and professor of international reporting and migration, turns his attention to a disturbing series of racially motivated murders in Germany’s post–World War II history. He begins by tracing the rise of neo-Nazism in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when three teenagers in the small town of Jena became increasingly involved in the far-right movement. In the early 1990s, Beate Zschäpe met Uwe Mundlos, a bright youth who was enamored with Germany’s dark 20th-century history. “To many Germans,” writes the author, “pride in the past wasn’t just taboo—it was unthinkable.” Zschäpe and Mundlos became a couple, and in 1994, they met the third member of their trio, Uwe Böhnhardt. If Mundlos was the brains of the National Socialist Underground, the neo-Nazi terror group they formed, Böhnhardt brought an element of reckless violence. A beloved youngest son, Böhnhardt was in and out of juvenile detention as a teen, and he became a “sadistic…fighting machine.” Kushner moves nimbly among the personal relationships of the three young extremists, who would go on to commit a series of ethnically motivated murders from 2000 to 2011, and he effectively shows how and why German officials often ignored signs of white supremacist terrorism, even mistakenly blaming immigrants for acts of violence. “Germany’s failure to recognize its first white terrorist spree of the twenty-​first century—much less stop it—is a chilling warning for other nations that are failing to fight extremists at home,” writes the author. “Having briefly earned a reputation as a haven for the world’s refugees, Germany is now struggling to protect them from violence by native-​born whites.”

A perceptive and engrossing examination of a horrifying chapter in Germany’s recent history.