Look Away
A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A thrilling narrative investigation into the National Socialist Underground (NSU)—a German terror organization that targeted immigrants—and how a government failed to stop it.
Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, three teenagers became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of deep uncertainty: some four million East Germans found themselves out of work. The friends began attending far-right rallies with people who called themselves National Socialists: Nazis. And, like the Hitler-led Nazis before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. From 2000 to 2011, they embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants.
Look Away follows Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices—and sometimes lovers—as they became radicalized within Germany’s far-right scene, escaped into hiding, and carried out their terrorist spree. Unable to believe that the brutal killings and bombings were being carried out by white Germans, police blamed—and sometimes framed—the immigrants instead. Readers meet Gamze Kubaşık, whose family emigrated from Turkey to seek safety, only to find themselves in the terrorists’ sights. It also tracks Katharina König, an Antifa punk who would help expose the NSU and their accomplices to the world. A masterwork of reporting and storytelling, Look Away reveals how a group of young Germans carried out a shocking spree of white supremacist violence, and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This staggering account from journalist Kushner (China's Congo Plan) connects the dots between Germany's far-right movement and a string of terror attacks from 2001 to 2010. Tracking three white nationalists who comprised the core of the National Socialist Underground (the chillingly racist Beate Zschäpe and her two male lovers turned accomplices) as they committed escalating acts of domestic terrorism—bank robberies, bombings, and brutal daylight murders targeting Germany's immigrant population—Kushner documents how law enforcement, "blinded by their own prejudice," ignored evidence that the perpetrators were white. Worse still, the police " evidence to feed officers' fantasies that immigrant crime syndicates were to blame" and framed immigrants for the crimes. As police dithered, "men of Turkish and Greek background continued to be murdered one by one," among them Enver Simsek—shot while selling flowers—and Halit Yozgat, murdered at his family's cybercafé. Kushner also profiles Katharina König, an antifascist punk and "walking antifa Wikipedia" whose documentation of Germany's neo-Nazis helped unravel the NSU after it was finally exposed following a botched bank robbery. Most shockingly of all, Kushner reveals that the far-right support network that aided the NSU was likely funded by Germany's intelligence networks via paid informants. Readers will be astounded and dismayed.