Looking into the abyss

The shots were fired almost exactly ten years ago. On November 4, 2011, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos put an end to their lives in Eisenach. The date marks the beginning of a horrific and deeply shameful realization: two serial killers had been able to commit their crimes unchallenged for years.

Under the name “National Socialist Underground” (“NSU”), they had carried out a number of attacks against people with a history of immigration, killing nine of them and a policewoman. Security authorities and some politicians dismissed the terror as a crime committed in the milieu or as drug-related crime, and even targeted the victims’ relatives. To this day, the systemic failure due to ignorance and incompetence has not been comprehensively addressed. Even after the conviction of accomplice Beate Zschäpe and several accomplices and despite the work of a number of investigative committees, the bottom of the brown abyss has not been illuminated. Questions remain about the extent of the right-wing extremist network, about henchmen, about terrorist structures …

Over the past 33 years, the CIVIS Media Prize has been awarded to contributions which, in journalistic or artistic formats, have excelled in dealing with right-wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism. A selection of these productions from television, radio, cinema and the Internet can be found here.