The National Socialist Underground (NSU) was a right-wing terrorist group whose core consisted of the trio Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Beate Zschäpe. Between 2001 and 2007, they murdered nine men and a policewoman and carried out three bomb attacks. After the two men killed themselves on 4 November 2011 after a failed bank robbery, Zschäpe sent out a video in which the group confessed to the racist acts.

In the early 1990s, racist pogroms and attacks were taking place throughout Germany. It was during this time that Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos, and Beate Zschäpe joined the neo-Nazi scene in Jena. In 1996, they stood in support of the right-wing terrorist Manfred Roeder at his trial in Erfurt, and they planned and carried out their first operations, such as the planting of dummy bombs. When the police conducted a search of their property in January 1998, the trio went underground and were supported by a network of neo-Nazi friends.

Before Zschäpe exposed the group in 2011, the NSU had murdered Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Mehmet Turgut, İsmail Yaşarar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık, and Halit Yozgat ,as well as the policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter. The terrorist group carried out racially-motivated explosive attacks on the Sonnenschein bar in Nuremberg, a grocery store in Cologne’s Probsteigasse, and a nail bomb attack on stores in Cologne's Keupstraße. Many people were seriously injured and traumatized in the attacks. Atilla Özer died in 2017 from the long-term effects of the Keupstraße attack.

Witnesses at all of the crime scenes named neo-Nazis as possible perpetrators, including the father of Süleyman Taşköprü, one of the murder victims, who pointed to two ‘German’ looking men he had seen near his son’s store in Hamburg before the crime.

Despite the information provided by witnesses, friends, and families, the police investigated the victims and those around them. Racist terms such as ‘kebab murders’ were widely circulated in the media and stigmatized the victims.

The NSU trial before the Munich Higher Regional Court against Beate Zschäpe and four other supporters of the NSU, André Eminger, Holger Gerlach, Carsten Schultze, and Ralf Wohlleben, lasted from 2013 to 2018. For many survivors and families affected by the terror, the trial was a disappointment, as many questions about the selection of victims, the support network, or the role of the domestic intelligence agency remained unanswered.

In Hamburg, relatives are still demanding clarification as to why the NSU became active in Hamburg and why Süleyman Taşköprü’s murderers were able to remain undetected.