The Fragility of Trust
Neo-Nazi Victims Seek Peace with Germany
The police confronted Adile's brother and showed him a photo of a young woman. "According to our investigation, Enver had a girlfriend," they told him. "I can't believe it," he said, "but if it's true, his death would have been justified." They said to Adile: "We have learned that Enver brought cutting agents for heroin from the Netherlands to Germany." "I can't imagine that," she replied. After all, she said, they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and had led a godly life. Was it supported with drug money all those years? Impossible.
But how long does trust last?
"Frau Simsek begins to cry," the interrogation report reads. "She has an angry outburst and rips up the photo of Enver lying on the desk in front of her."
The second murder occurred three-quarters of a year later and no connection between the victims was found. The Simseks slowly felt the pressure of the investigation subsiding; the police, it would seem, no longer suspected the family in Enver's murder. Nevertheless, the cloud of suspicion lasted for the next 10 years, and they weren't the only ones it affected.
Nine of the victims had only one thing in common: They looked Turkish. Yet the "Baden-Württemberg Operational Case Analysis" professed to have uncovered other shared elements. According to the 2007 report, the victims were likely part of a group that earned "a living with illegal activities." The only possible suspects, the report concluded, were those who did "not feel in the least bit bound to our norms and values."
The killing spree continued, dubbed the "Döner Murders" in the press. An article in SPIEGEL wrote that the killers were protected by the "almost impenetrable parallel world of the Turks."
"We felt left alone and vulnerable," says Semiya. "It wasn't just us, but all Turks. Because it didn't stop." And because it seemed that they were the only ones to be outraged by the fact that someone was going around the country, murdering foreigners.
But whom did they suspect? "At first we thought there might be a dispute among flower merchants. Then, after the second murder, we thought it might be someone who had had bad experiences with Turks," says Semiya. Perhaps a madman. But Nazis? That was impossible, they thought for a long time.
'We Trusted Them'
The police had always said: What's missing is a clue linking the killings. "We thought to ourselves: They're the experts, and they should know. We trusted them."
On the day before her wedding, Semiya went to the grave, where wild herbs and flowers were growing. She had been going there for years, whenever she went to Turkey on vacation. She would pray at the grave and speak to her father: We miss you. How could you leave us so alone? Why did this happen?
After Simsek's death, Adile's brother tried to continue running the business. But he became fearful during trips to the wholesale flower market in Rotterdam. He would stand at a rest area and think to himself: Is someone going to come up to me and ask me to transport drugs? And if I say no, will they shoot me?
The family lived in constant fear. They began locking their doors and looking around nervously while walking outside at night. They couldn't keep the business afloat. After living without financial worries, they were now welfare recipients with a mountain of debt. Adile despaired at the prospect of going it alone with the children.
No one helped them after Enver's death, no trauma therapy specialists and no victims' assistance organizations. The other families were in no better shape, as they struggled with the perception of lost honor, doubts and feelings of shame. One family even had to clean up the father's blood from the floor where he had died.
After a while, the family stopped looking for answers. Adile's depression became permanent. She moved back to Turkey, not to the house in Salur, where she had nightmares about her dead husband, but to the city of Isparta. The children studied in Germany, and Semiya became a social worker. While on vacation in Turkey, she fell in love with a man named Fatih. The suspicions against her father began to fade into the fabric of everyday life.
On that Friday evening in November, when the case was finally solved, everything came rushing back: the images of her father in the hospital, the blood-soaked pillow, her despairing mother, the interrogations, the fears, the sense of powerlessness and the question mark at the edge of her consciousness: What if he did have a dark side, after all?
'Killed Him a Second Time'
Now, finally, everyone could see that there was no blemish on his reputation at all.
After their father's murder had been solved, Semiya's brother Kerim felt sick for weeks, and Semiya went to a friend's house to cry on her shoulder. "The neo-Nazis shot him to death," says Semiya. But she blames others for the question marks and the loss of trust. "The German authorities killed him a second time."
Enver's daughter has returned to the village of her ancestors in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains for her wedding. The village is covered with deep snowdrifts in the winter, and in the summer the trees are heavy with fruit, as the men sit in front of the café in their striped shirts and flat caps. Enver was a respected man in Salur. He didn't forget his village, buying computers for the school and donating money for new wells and the local mosque. The villagers had nothing but praise for him. But after he died, people wondered: Is it really possible to make so much money with flowers?
Then they heard Semiya speaking on television a year ago, at a memorial ceremony in Berlin to honor the victims of the NSU killing spree. Enver's daughter spoke after the German chancellor. The café in Salur was packed, with everyone looking up at the TV set hanging from the ceiling in the corner. "We were unable to mourn him and say goodbye in peace. For 11 years, we were not even allowed to be victims with a clear conscience," Semiya said in faraway Berlin. The villagers also felt that her words were directed at them. "We all had goose bumps," one resident recalls.
Now the people of Salur are paying close attention to Germany's handling of the affair. "They dragged his name through the mud, without any evidence," said one villager. "It was character assassination, a disgrace for the village." Another resident said: "The Turks were portrayed as criminals. Now they see that we're not so bad, after all. We were pleased that Merkel realized this and apologized."
But can the German government be trusted? Hadn't some of the records pertaining to the case been destroyed?
On the day of the memorial service in Berlin, Semiya also wasn't sure what to think of this new Germany. The German president had held a reception that morning, with the country's top politicians in attendance. Andreas Vosskuhle, the president of the Federal Constitutional Court, came to the table where the Simseks were sitting. Vosskuhle is the highest-ranking representative of the German judiciary. He said he found it incomprehensible that such a thing could have happened and assured the family that other German officials were dismayed as well. Semiya told him how the families had demonstrated in Kassel, a city in central Germany, in 2006. "First the Jews, then the Turks. Who's next?" one of the banners read. By that time, they were convinced that the murderers were right-wing extremists.
Betrayal and Conspiracy
"Really? Five years ago?" Vosskuhle asked, sounding shocked. "We never read anything about that, or at least I didn't."
"No one took us seriously," Semiya replied. "No one believed us." Vosskuhle said nothing in response.
For 11 years, she had been seen as the daughter of a drug dealer, and now she was sitting with the country's political elites, as a family member of an innocent murder victim whose death was being commemorated by an orchestra playing works by Johann Sebastian Bach. The chancellor asked the families for forgiveness for the false suspicions. Children came into the room carrying candles, and Semiya saw politicians with tears in their eyes.
After the event, Chancellor Angela Merkel went up to Semiya and told her how pleased she was that she had referred to Germany as "my country" in her remarks. I wanted to be able to trust again, Semiya thought, but it's easy to make an apology.
The chancellor had promised that the investigation would now be conducted "at full speed." But what Semiya has heard since then is a lot of mutual recrimination and reports of failure: shredded documents, scandals involving confidential informants, police officers in the Ku Klux Klan, and theories of betrayal and conspiracy.
On the evening before their wedding, Semiya and Kerim are sitting with their attorneys, Jens Rabe and Stephan Lucas, on the terrace of the house that was abandoned for so long. There is a view of the mountains where Enver tended sheep as a boy, the same Enver Simsek whose death will now be part of one of the biggest criminal trials in postwar German history, with a 488-page indictment and hundreds of binders filled with documents. Enver's children are taking every opportunity to prepare for the trial. The attorneys are already almost part of the family.
So Near, So Far Away
Shortly after the murder series had been cleared up, Semiya watched the video manifesto -- complete with music from the Pink Panther cartoon -- which Beate Zschäpe, the only surviving member of the neo-Nazi terror cell, had dropped into the mail after the deaths of her partners. In it, the killers looked at her father as he lay in his blood, bent over him and took a picture.
"I feel no hatred toward that woman," says Semiya. "I can't imagine what it will be like when we look each other in the eye. But I want to see justice served. I want to know whether the authorities covered anything up. I want to have closure." Attorney Rabe is skeptical. "It won't be a grand truth commission," he says. "It's just a criminal trial. Of course, one can try to criticize the government for its failings. But the defendant is Beate Zschäpe, not the Federal Republic of Germany."
Before the wedding, the attorneys visit Enver's brothers, hoping to convince them to testify in court. One of the brothers, Yusuf, still tends sheep in the mountains and lives in a simple mud house, where they sit on the floor. His wife brings us tea. "I have carried the pain of Enver's loss with me for 12 years," he says. "His child is getting married tomorrow, and her father won't be there. The child will feel a great emptiness." There are tears running down his face.
"If my brother hadn't died, I would have been an important man in the village, and not someone people point at," says Yusuf. But why go to court? "I don't trust Germany. It was Germans who killed my brother." In the end, however, the family council decides that everyone will participate -- for the family honor, for Enver and for his children.
In the afternoon, a marching band performs in the courtyard, with drums, cymbals and a wind instrument called a Zurna. The wedding party assembles for the giving away of the bride, an old ceremony. Traditionally, the father of the bride places a red ribbon around his daughter, as a sign of fertility, and entrusts her to the care of her future family, in a ritual that is both a farewell and a new beginning. There is no specific place in the house where the ritual is supposed to occur, and the wedding guests, looking serious, stand in front of the door to the room where Enver's body was laid out, wrapped in a shroud nine meters (30 feet) long. Semiya's brother Kerim, his face ashen with exertion, assumes the role of the father.
Never was the father so near, and yet so far away, as in that moment.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
