On a sunny November morning, a column of police vans drives into the grounds of a high-security courthouse in Dresden. Moments later, a young woman in white sneakers, a yellow sweater and two pins in her dark blond curls is led into the courtroom by five police officers. Through the glass wall that separates the spectators from the accused, the young woman throws kisses at her mother, who is pressed against the window pane. She waves and winks at other acquaintances.
Lina E. (27) has now been imprisoned in the women’s prison in Chemnitz, in southern Saxony, for more than a year. The master’s student in pedagogy is suspected of being the brains behind a left-extremist cell that tracked down known neo-Nazis and attacked them with rods. E. would be ‘the head of a criminal organization’ and ‘undermine the democratic rule of law’. The paragraph in the code to which the public prosecutor refers is one that was created in the 1970s to combat the left-wing extremist terror of the RAF. Now criminal motorcycle clubs or drug gangs are usually prosecuted with this law.
At the beginning of November 2020, E. has just completed a digital workgroup in her student house in Leipzig when she is arrested by a special unit. The next day she is flown by helicopter to Karlsruhe, where she is escorted by masked and armed agents to the highest court – a treatment normally reserved for terrorists or serial killers.
Since then, the Lina E. case has become a symbol: to part of the public because her fanciful arrest and the list of crimes she is charged with show just how violent the left-wing scene is. Others see the grandiose trial against the student as a maneuver by the judiciary to conceal the failure of previous attempts to track down perpetrators of extreme left-wing violence and vandalism. In addition, the tenacity with which left-wing perpetrators are hunted is disproportionate to that with which the judiciary engages in right-wing extremism.
This touches on a sensitive point: in Germany there is invariably criticism of the inadequate approach by the police and the judiciary to right-wing extremism. Both the old Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer (CSU), and the new one, Nancy Faeser (SPD), have made right-wing extremism a priority, precisely because the judiciary and police have failed to deal with it so much in recent years.
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Colored peak hair
Every year on the anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden, far-right groups organize a “funeral march” through the city. This will also be the case in 2020. The approximately 1,000 participants see Germany as a victim of the war, downplay the number of victims of the Holocaust and exaggerate the number of deaths that fell during the bombing.
A group from the Saxon provincial town of Wurzen also took part in the parade in February 2020. A few young men, mainly teenagers and in their thirties, took “Trauer March” the train back to the town, a hundred kilometers west of Dresden. As soon as they stepped onto the platform in Wurzen, they were attacked “by a black wall, a group of people all dressed in black, maybe there were twenty of them”, a lanky boy who was sixteen at the time now tells the judge. in Dresden. He tried to flee, but was grabbed by his backpack, pushed to the ground, beaten on the head with a baton and kicked. He tried in vain to defend himself with a glass bottle that he picked up a moment before, saying he could exchange it for a deposit.
In front of the judge, the boy, with blond hair, gets red spots on his neck and on his cheeks when he tells about the robbery that February fifteenth. “Nazi swine,” shouted one of the robbers in black, the boy said. “It was my first demonstration,” he says. “I was not in the far-right scene.” A doctor later explains in court that the boy, like several of the victims, had several head injuries that had to be stapled in hospital.
Behind the boy in the high-security courthouse, the four defendants — Lina E., two tall men and one stockier type — sit flanked by their lawyers. Lina E. is suspected, among other things, that she was in the train with the visitors of the funeral march and informed others at the station where the group would disembark. There is no evidence for this. The gangly boy in the hooded sweater remembers an incident on the train: “A girl on the left was harassed by some of us. She then went to sit somewhere else.” The judge asks how he saw that the girl was on the left. “She had colored wispy hair. So a left one from the book,” the boy riposted. There is no indication that it could have been Lina E..
The Lina E. case also paints a picture of the microcosm of Saxony, where both the far-right and far-left scenes are firmly rooted, the extremes regularly collide and violence from one group is responded to with violence from the other. Others.
Lina E. lived in a student house in the Connewitz district of Leipzig. Connewitz is known as a left-wing district, where many homes have been squatted, where alternative forms of cohabitation are experimented with and you can eat vegan on every street corner.
“The Connewitz story begins in the 1990s,” says a local journalist from Leipzig, who does not want to be called by name so as not to harm his own investigation. “After the fall of the wall, the same thing happened everywhere in East Germany: people turned en masse to more conservative ideas. It was about work, about a new car, a refrigerator and a vacation to a faraway country. But with mass unemployment and great uncertainty, extreme right-wing violence often occurred in the 1990s against people who already lived here in the GDR, people from Vietnam or Cuba who would take those scarce jobs.”
And in the dilapidated Connewitz of that time, says the journalist, squatters, punks and migrants lived. The neighborhood became a target of the far right. “There was a response to those attacks: the left cannot just be beaten up, but is starting to defend itself, and violently.”
Swapped license plates
In January 2016, there was another attack on Connewitz, still a left-wing island in predominantly right-wing Saxony, by about 250 men from the extreme right-wing milieu. Cars are set on fire, shops are vandalized, passers-by are beaten. “The police took the personal data of more than 200 people, but they were sentenced at most to suspended sentences. That heist acted as an accelerator for that idea of self-protection in Connewitz. And it didn’t stop with strict self-defense, they chose the flight to the front.”
After the attack on Connewitz in 2016, no research was done into the connections between the perpetrators. Among some residents of the neighborhood this reinforced the idea that justice is not doing enough, and that matters must be taken into their own hands. Violence from the extreme left has been increasing since 2016.
The bar owner of a far-right haunt was beaten with rods and hammers
The detectives spot E. at the end of 2019 because she tries to steal two hammers in a hardware store. The next day, the bar owner of a far-right meeting point in Eisenach, Thuringia, is robbed in the street at night and beaten with rods and hammers, among other things. Later that evening, E. and others are arrested in E.’s car. The number plates have been changed, but the original ones are still on the back seat.
From that moment on, the detectives’ efforts focus on Lina E. Her phone is tapped, her car is tracked with a GPS. One of her two lawyers, Erkan Zünbül, points to the charge accusing her of being the head of a “criminal organization”. “That paragraph 129 is also being used to extend powers during the investigation. In recent years, hundreds of people have been wiretapped in Leipzig referring to that paragraph, including journalists and lawyers. All those investigations were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence.” According to critics, that paragraph is used far too easily, just to facilitate the investigation of the detectives.
The trial of Lina E. began in September. A verdict was initially expected in March, now the court is taking into account the end of June. Twice a week, Lina E. is driven from the prison in Chemnitz to Dresden under high security. Lawyer Zünbül: “The entourage of vans with flashing lights is also used to produce certain images, to suggest a danger that is not there. If you gave my client a train ticket in Chemnitz in the morning, she would also show up in Dresden on time. And that helicopter flight to Karlsruhe was also staged in such a way that photographers were already there on arrival, to let those images go through the country before it was even clear what the charges were.”
For several days, the court will discuss the robbery at Wurzen station. In addition to victims, witnesses are also heard. One of the teenagers who was with the group in Dresden managed to escape and fled. He tells about one of the initiators of the group from Wurzen, a pale, puffy man, as can be seen in the photos. “A spritz”, says the teenager, someone who drinks a lot, and also someone who fights with everyone, “it doesn’t matter with whom, left and right,” says the boy.
“I often experience the villages in Saxony as open-air museums,” says the Leipzig journalist. “Beautifully refurbished, but only old people live there, and those who have stuck around. All highly educated people go to the city.”
You can’t dismiss the extreme right-wing movement in Saxony as one of backward drinkers, he thinks, because it is far too well organized for that. But that image of ‘our boys’ probably influences how the police and the judiciary deal with it. “It is often after all: oh, that’s Ronnie from the neighbours, who said hello so kindly this morning when he went to work.”
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Wigs and sunglasses
When she was arrested, wigs and sunglasses, 4,000 euros in cash and a stolen identity card were found in E.’s student room. There is no clear indication that she would have played a captain’s role. Referring to that getaway car in Eisenach, the indictment finds that “E. command”. In addition, she would have followed the victims and ‘pepper spray against the victim’ [hebben] deployed,” while the other defendants, the men, hit the victim.
The fact that E. has been designated as foreman makes a big difference to the ultimate penalty. She’s the only one stuck now. E.’s friend Johann G., who was previously convicted of assault and now also charged with participating in the group around her, is on the run.
On the day of the arrest, the police took everything from E.’s home. A handful of SD cards are being vetted in court; it shows, among other things, videos of E.’s friend with a bus of graffiti, and holiday photos of the two. E.’s mom shakes her head wildly as all that personal information now becomes part of the process. But no detail will be left untouched until June.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 24 December 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 24, 2021
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