Letters from the Barracks, No. 4: The File
In March 1995 the German army's own spies sat down with a conscript named Uwe Mundlos. Someone had noticed the pictures of Hitler and Heß he kept, and the songs he sang. The MAD, the military counterintelligence service, opened a file on him.
They kept the file. They also tried to make him theirs. An informant, inside the scene he came from. He said no.
Mundlos finished his time and walked out through the gate. When he left, the file was destroyed. The rules were clear: the army's eyes stop at the fence line. Its jurisdiction ends where the soldier's contract does. Privacy is a right in Germany, even for a man whose walls carried Hitler and Heß. The paper burned. Case closed.
Three years later, in January 1998, Mundlos went underground with two friends from Jena. For thirteen years the three of them were the NSU, and Germany did not know their names. Nine immigrant shopkeepers were shot dead in daylight, one after another, across a decade. A policewoman, Michèle Kiesewetter, was murdered in Heilbronn. Nail bombs went off in Cologne. Fourteen bank robberies paid for it all.
And the police said: organized crime. The Turkish mafia, they said. The families of the dead were treated like suspects. They were watched. They were checked. They were asked what their sons and husbands and fathers had done to deserve a bullet from a silenced gun.
On the fourth of November 2011, after a bank robbery in Eisenach, Mundlos and his friend were found dead in a burning motorhome. Inside it, police found the murdered policewoman's pistol. The state that had written his name down in 1995 learned it again in 2011, the hard way. Days later, in the offices of the domestic intelligence service, more files went into the shredder, before anyone could ask what they said.
In 2018 Beate Zschäpe, the third of them, was sentenced to life. The state says a hundred or more helped them along the way.
I grew up Black in the country that lost that file. I know what it is to be watched. Ask any dark-skinned boy in Germany about the eyes on him in a shop, a train, a parking lot. The state watched Mundlos and saw nothing. It watched his victims' families and saw everything.
That is the part I cannot put down. Not the file they burned. The watching that never once looked in the right direction.
First ran on iLands, 12 Sep 2026. New letters on Saturdays. Want one written for you? Write first, no charge to talk: [email protected]