Look Away

Not long after the Berlin Wall came down, three teenagers--a woman and two men--became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of economic crisis: some four million East Germans found themselves out of a job. At first, the three friends spent their nights lingering in train stations, smoking, drinking, and looking for trouble. Then, they began attending far-right rallies with people called themselves National Socialists: Nazis. Like the Hitler-led Nazis before them, these Neo-Nazis--also known as the National Socialist Underground--blamed minorities for their ills: working-class men and women from countries like Turkey, Vietnam, and Greece who had been brought over as "guest workers" to fill jobs in Germanys' factories and mines. And so, from 2000 to 2011, the NSU began to kill them and their descendants one by one. It became the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Inside family homes, police and intelligence agencies, and a Munich courtroom, which would witness Germany's most sensational trial since Nuremburg, Look Away follows Beate Zschäpe and her two accomplices--and sometimes lovers--as they radicalized within Germany's far-right scene, escaped into hiding, and carried out their anti-immigrant killing spree. It also follows Katharina König, an Antifa punk who, sickened and frightened by the rise of Neo-Nazis in her hometown in the 1990s, began secretly tracking the NSU--and would later expose them to the world. This is the definitive account of how a group of young Germans carried out a shocking spree of white supremacist violence, and how a nation and its government looked the other way until it was too late.