Five Years After Hanau
Germany’s deafening silence on right-wing mass violence
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On February 19, 2025, about one hundred people defied the bitter cold of that night to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the racially motivated attack in Hanau in 2020. Besides commemorating the lives of Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kutrović, Vili Viorel Pâun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar, and Kaloyan Velkov, the speakers also voiced their anger and frustration at a society and a political system by which they felt forgotten, if not willfully ignored.
Those who spoke to the crowd criticized the errors and neglect by officials, the lag behind substantial governmental action, and condemned the everyday racism that enabled the assailant behind the attack. In the week leading up to the demonstration, the group Initiative Neunzehnter Februar offered many events: From City Tours to an exhibition in the Gedenkstätte Sinti Und Roma, a museum dedicated to preservation.
Tobias R., the attacker, had previously built a noteworthy track record of violent assaults and had been briefly institutionalized in 2002 after making claims about being persecuted by an unknown intelligence agency. His father effected his release via an attorney, and further psychological examinations were lost. His assaults were mostly known to Bavarian police, but not federal police.
Starting in 2013, his right-wing radicalization began: he started visiting right-wing blogs, 4chan archives, watched US-American alt-right videos, and became a gun club member. In 2019, he visited Slovakia to participate in combat training. Officials handed him the necessary papers despite being aware of a welfare fraud case against Tobias R. and his father, as well as his noncooperation in routine inquiries on how and where he kept his weapons.
Six days before the attack, he uploaded videos to Youtube and to his own website, in which he expounded on his ideology and called himself an incel, an abbreviation of the term ‘involuntary celibate’. Among other things, he had called for the extermination of several nations and German citizens he racialized as “foreign”. In January and February of 2020, he staked out the locations for his later terror attack.
This was not just an event for mourning: the families behind the group Neunzehnter Februar raised their concerns about what they describe as racism and disregard for migrants’ lives by the German police. They highlighted issues with the investigation into the shooting, disputing the inquiry’s final claim of mostly adequate police performance. Their rage particularly stems from their awareness of possible preventive measures being largely neglected.
While the official inquiry shares the view that it would have been impossible to stop the attack after the upload of the video, the Initiative Neunzehnter Februar contradicts that claim, arguing that, at the very least, his license for weapons should have been restricted. Another heavily contested question is the emergency call system of the police. During the first three hours, there were no calls for a higher state of alert.
The perpetrator was able to change sites multiple times during the night, meaning that he could target a second location multiple kilometers away. Hamza Kurtović, Said Nesar Hashemi, Gökhan Gültekin, Ferhat Unvar, and Mercedes Kierpacz were killed at this location. The perpetrator had previously shot Vili Viorel Pâun, who was trailing him by car while attempting to call the police three times. None of his calls went through.
Unlike other parts of Hessen, Hanau and its surrounding area did not have a center for emergency calls. Calls going to the station responsible for the attacked area were not forwarded to other stations. Despite awareness of these issues, officials wanted to wait for a larger center originally slated for 2013/2014 to be finished. So when the Hanau shooting happened, many calls, including Pâun’s, did not go through.
They also argued that the responsible station was not the only one with issues forwarding calls in Hessen. The group Initiative Neunzehnter Februar accuses the police of locking the emergency exit of the café in which Hamza Kurtović and Said Nesar Hashemi were killed to prevent possible escapes of suspects during police raids. They also express their outrage at the treatment of surviving victims and their family members. For instance, two injured survivors had to walk to the nearest police station, while the family of Mercedes Kierpacz was met by armed police with raised guns.
Hanau was not an isolated incident: the demonstration closed with an indignant speech connecting it to other racist attacks in Germany, but also the complicity of its people and institutions. Since 1990, right-wing extremists, sometimes with very open support from the population, have committed numerous deadly attacks such as arson against refugees or people racialized as “foreign”. The Solingen arson attack of 1993 led to the tragic death of five people and injured 14. The government responded by changing the constitution to limit the right of asylum, which, according to critical refugee rights organizations, effectively abolished the individual right to asylum.
In 2005, the legal status of “refugee” as opposed to “asylum seeker” was introduced to provide a more precautionary status of protection that would regularly be reevaluated. Yet the most infamous case of organized right-wing violence and government inaction is the Nationalsozialistische Untergrund (NSU).
From 2000 to around 2007 the nazi organisation took the lives of 10 people in total. The murder of Halit Yozgat happened while an employee of the Hessian branch of the Verfassungsschutz, the German office tasked with monitoring and stopping enemies of the constitution, was present in the same internet café. Later investigations by the UK group Forensic Architecture call his claims of ignorance about this attack heavily into question.
An investigation into Verfassungsschutz, complicity was originally slated to be kept secret for 120 years. After its existence became known in 2017, it was made public by the show ZDF Magazin Royale and the government accountability platform FragDenStaat, which received the document from an anonymous whistleblower. It reveals a general dissinterest on the Verfassungsschutz’ part in the violent activities of right-wingers: “During this time the agency (the Hessian Branch of the Verfassungschutz) collected data in an encompassing manner, yet neither did it have an overview over its collected information nor did it always let actions follow from it,” the web page says.
The report admits to severe negligence on the Verfassungsschutz’s part, for example, not acting upon hints of far-right gun ownership. The head of the federal Verfassungschutz at this time, Hans-Georg Maaßen, had also been accused of far-right sympathies. The NSU, meanwhile, went on for more than 10 years until it was accidentally unmasked in 2011. Up until that point, the murders were chiefly tied to Turkish organized crime and received the racist nickname of “Döner murders”.
Later events show the extent of right-wing sympathies within Hessian police forces. Since 2018, right-wing extremists or their sympathizers inside the Hessian police had obtained the addresses of different left-wing politicians, a journalist, lawyers on behalf of families whose members were killed by the NSU, famous people of color, and the celebrity comedian Jan Böhmermann.
They, among other people, received various death threats via letters and e-mail signed with “Wehrmacht” or “NSU 2.0”. Crucially, the fact that personal data of these people were looked up on police computers was not reported to the Hessian Minister of Interior at the time, Peter Beuth, for several months, despite being known to state police. Alongside of this, about 110 police officers were found to be active in 67 far-right chat groups, celebrating pictures of swastika and other nazi paraphernalia.
Initiative Neunzehnter Februar does not think its calls for justice have, five years after the shooting, not been met. The issues they pointed out that contributed to this tragedy and many others lie beyond poor policing, but in German society at large. Their anger stems from personal experiences with racist harassment or sentiment, but also a long row of violent racist attacks on migrants and racialized people in Germany, which were followed by political and social apathy.
The Mother of Sedat, Emis Gürbüz, refused the official apology of the city’s ruling coalition at an official ceremony this February: “The errors, lapses, and the negligence of the city of Hanau have taken the lives of nine young people. Had the city upheld her duties correctly, these children would still be alive today.” As a reaction to this, the ruling parties of SPD, FDP, and CDU have decided to limit future commemorative events in size, accusing her of disrespecting the spirit of the event and hating the German people.
