'New' Right-Wing Terrorism in Germany? The Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU) in a Comparative Framework

For most of the 2000s, Germany became the soil of terrorist attacks on immigrants committed by the self-declared NSU. The crimes committed by the NSU, that became public only in November 2011, sparked off a debate on new forms of right wing terrorism as a specific form of political violence. This paper addresses such “new” terrorism of the extreme right as a challenge for politics and society. It is divided into three parts. It starts from a discussion of the history of the NSU, its organization, members/supporters, and strategy. It is claimed that the politically motivated murder of immigrants can hardly be captured by classic concepts of terrorism. It rather represents a type of right-wing political violence characterized by small clandestine and decentralized units that operate out of their own initiative and that have. The specific features of the “new” right wing terrorism as carried out by the NSU will then be elaborated through a twin comparison. In the second part of the paper, they will be set against previous right wing terrorist activities in Germany. In the third part of the paper, the distinctive features of the NSU will be identified by comparing them to terrorism of the far right in other European countries and the United States. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the challenges that the “new” terrorism of the extreme right poses to modern democracies. The paper brings together two lines of research: studies on the extreme right that focus mainly on the dynamics and framework of xenophobic violence and the inter-disciplinary research on terrorism and political violence.