© picture-alliance/dpa/H. SchmidtPeople in Halle held a memorial for the victims and demonstrated against right-wing extremism
A German court has sentenced the attacker behind a deadly 2019 attack on a synagogue and surrounding areas in Halle to life in prison.
Far-right extremist Stephan B. was found guilty of two murders and more than 50 counts of attempted murder at the end of his 26-day trial on Monday.
German special police escorts Stephan B., suspected of killing two people in a shooting in Halle October 9, 2019, as he arrives prior to a hearing at the Federal Court in Karlsruhe
She expressed horror at the murder of 20-year-old Kevin S. in a kebab shop after the attempted attack on the synagogue. "You executed the defenseless Mr. S. in a cowardly manner," she told Stephan B. directly, before comparing the attacker to his victim. "Unlike you, he didn't retreat into his childhood bedroom — he worked, he enjoyed football, he got qualifications."
Mertens said the defendant would sit in his childhood bedroom at the age of 27, soaking up "crude conspiracy theories" on the internet. The judge said she could not blame his family for failing to avert the crimes, but only because they refused to testify and did not appear to disabuse him of his extremist worldview.
Judge to attacker: 'You are a danger to humanity'
The defendant occasionally grinned and rolled his eyes as the judge delivered the verdict. Some 45 survivors had attended the trial as co-plaintiffs, and many were present for the sentencing.
"You are a danger to humanity," the judge told the defendant, pointing out that he had shown no remorse and only repeated his ideology in court, before adding she could think of no other way to protect society from that danger than to keep him locked up.
As the judge concluded her statement, which lasted nearly three hours (including two breaks to air the courtroom), the defendant flung a file at the co-plaintiffs that he had carefully rolled up in the last few minutes. He ended up being dragged from his chair and pulled out of the courtroom by three guards.
The attempted attack on the synagogue would have been the worst anti-Semitic atrocity in Germany since the Holocaust.
Attacker denied Holocaust, planned massacre
The defendant is a 28-year-old German man who showed little remorse for his crime during his closing statement at the trial. He confessed to the attack and used his statement to expound anti-Semitic views and deny the Holocaust, which is an offense in Germany.
On October 9 last year, Stephan B. attempted to blast his way into Halle synagogue in eastern Germany, where 52 people were observing Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. He failed largely because his arsenal of homemade firearms and explosives couldn't breach the locked outer gates.
In frustration, he shot dead two other people — 40-year-old passerby Jana L. and 20-year-old Kevin S., a workman eating his lunch in a nearby kebab shop — before firing at several police officers and other passersby as he made his escape.
Despite driving past the police outside the synagogue, he was only detained 90 minutes later, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside the city.
The synagogue's locked gate and CCTV system were all that stood between the attacker and worshippers inside
A new type of terrorist
The atrocity shocked Germany, not least because of the attacker's intended target: the city's Jewish community, most of which was inside Halle's only synagogue, along with Jewish visitors from the US and elsewhere.
Had he succeeded in breaking through the outer gate, Stephan B. would have been responsible for one of the worst anti-Semitic attacks in postwar Germany. His defense attorney Hans-Dieter Weber compared the crime to those committed by the Nazis.
It offered little relief that Stephan B. had seemingly acted alone. Unlike most of the other far-right terrorists that Germany has seen in the past few years, Stephan B. was not a member of any neo-Nazi terrorist cell, like the National Socialist Underground (NSU), and had not joined any extremist political group.
Instead, he represented a new, globalized type of the isolated terrorist: radicalized by a globe-spanning internet community of often isolated young men that convenes on forums known as "imageboards."
Mark Lupschitz, lawyer for the co-plaintiffs, said the judge's personal and occasionally even emotional approach in the final ruling had been "surprising," but he said the judge had "depoliticized" the crime. "We heard little context, in other words how the perpetrator became radicalized," he said. "The verdict gave us the feeling that we were dealing with a single perpetrator who came out of his childhood bedroom."
"But that is simply not the case," he said. "There was a network. It might have been a rather newer network, a newer structure in the history of crime, but that is what terrorism is like nowadays."
Because they thrive by being unmoderated, many such imageboards have become breeding grounds for unfiltered anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, racist and misogynist content. Attacks such as the Christchurch mosques massacre in March 2019 and Halle have been streamed live onto such channels, specifically to inspire and encourage other people.
Apparent reluctance to investigate this virulent subculture by the police was a consistent theme during the trial, angering some of the survivors. Testifying as witnesses, some of the officers admitted they had known little about the internet-based culture that radicalized the defendant.
"What was surprising was how unpolitical, and how un-empathetic to the affected the verdict was," said attorney Kristin Pietrzyk, who also represented survivors, many of whom had complained about insensitive handling by police. "We had people affected here who spoke very openly about how they were discriminated against by police - that wasn't mentioned once."
Survivors 'relieved and empowered' but also frustrated
There were emotional scenes outside the courtroom, where anti-racism campaigners had set up a tent on every one of the trial days, and where several of the survivors and their lawyers gathered one last time to show their solidarity and to address the media.
Naomi Henkel-Gümbel, one of the synagogue survivors, delivered a speech excoriating the media for what she said was their complicity in spreading the defendant's message by showing his face and quoting him.
Like many of the co-plaintiffs, she was extremely disappointed by the judgment, especially the judge's apparent failure to explore the internet community that had sparked his radicalization. "It seemed as though the internet was something new for the judge," she told DW. "But during the trial, she gave a lot of space to the co-plaintiffs and the experts who the co-plaintiffs called as witnesses."
She was also angry that two of the co-plaintiffs, Ismet T. and Aftax I., were not recognized as victims of attempted murder as they had demanded. Ismet T., who also spoke at the event afterwards, had been outside the kebab shop, while Aftax I. was hit by the defendant's car.
Lupschitz, who represented nine of the synagogue survivors, said his clients felt "relieved and empowered" by the conclusion of the trial, "and by the fact that they took part in the trial, that they were taken seriously, and they were given the space to tell their stories."
*DW has withheld last names in accordance with German privacy laws.
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