Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants

This staggering account from journalist Kushner (China’s Congo Plan) connects the dots between Germany’s far-right movement and a string of terror attacks from 2001 to 2010. Tracking three white nationalists who comprised the core of the National Socialist Underground (the chillingly racist Beate Zschäpe and her two male lovers turned accomplices) as they committed escalating acts of domestic terrorism—bank robberies, bombings, and brutal daylight murders targeting Germany’s immigrant population—Kushner documents how law enforcement, “blinded by their own prejudice,” ignored evidence that the perpetrators were white. Worse still, the police “[fabricated] evidence to feed officers’ fantasies that immigrant crime syndicates were to blame” and framed immigrants for the crimes. As police dithered, “men of Turkish and Greek background continued to be murdered one by one,” among them Enver Simsek—shot while selling flowers—and Halit Yozgat, murdered at his family’s cybercafé. Kushner also profiles Katharina König, an antifascist punk and “walking antifa Wikipedia” whose documentation of Germany’s neo-Nazis helped unravel the NSU after it was finally exposed following a botched bank robbery. Most shockingly of all, Kushner reveals that the far-right support network that aided the NSU was likely funded by Germany’s intelligence networks via paid informants. Readers will be astounded and dismayed. (May)