77sqm_9:26min:The Murder of Halit Yozgat

Shortly after 5:00pm on 6 April 2006, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was murdered at the desk of his family-run internet café in Kassel, Germany. His death was the ninth of ten murders committed across Germany between 2000 and 2007, by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU).

It was not until 2011, however, that the NSU and their killing spree was exposed, when two members of the group committed suicide after being pursued by police from the scene of a bank robbery. In the months and years that followed, more than a dozen parliamentary inquiries and Germany’s longest post-war criminal trial would expose the shocking extent to which Germany’s security services were aware of the NSU, and in constant contact with many of its supporters.

Those revelations laid bare what became known as the ‘NSU Complex’—the structural racism and institutional blindness that ignored the situated knowledge and experience of the country’s immigrant communities, and comprehensively failed to apprehend a violent terror cell over more than a decade, leading to the deaths of ten German citizens.

The seventy-seven square metres of the internet café, and the nine-and-a-half minutes during which the incident unfolded, can be seen as a microcosm of the NSU Complex.

At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was sitting in the next room. Temme was at the time an employee of the Verfassungsschutz, the intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme’s use of a computer in the café that day tied him to the scene.

Temme was briefly arrested and questioned. Under interrogation by police, he denied being a witness to the incident.

Specifically, Temme claimed he didn’t hear the gunshots, didn’t smell the gunpowder, and didn’t see Yozgat’s body. He would later repeat those denials in court, and in front of multiple inquiries.

A few weeks after the murder, investigating police declared that Temme was no longer a suspect. Years later, the German courts would also accept his testimony. At the trial of the remaining members and supporters of the NSU, which ran from 2013 to 2018, judges determined that while Temme had been present in the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder, it was possible not to have witnessed the killing from that position.

In November 2016, a decade after the murder, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture (FA) to investigate Temme’s testimony.

FA’s investigation became possible when hundreds of documents from the original police investigation into the murder – reports, witness depositions, photographs, and computer and phone logs – were leaked to the internet in late 2015.

One of the most important pieces of evidence in this leak was a video in which Andreas Temme re-enacted his route out of the internet café in the minutes following Yozgat’s murder. In the context of our investigation, Temme’s reenactment is not only a representation of an earlier event, but potentially a crime—perjury—in its own right.

We constructed a 1:1-scale physical model of the internet café and reenacted Temme’s reenactment, in order to investigate his testimony. Could he have smelled, heard, or seen evidence of the murder?

Our investigation established that Temme’s testimony was very likely to be untruthful. But surrounding the circumstances of those nine-and-a-half minutes are larger questions regarding the ways in which Germany’s security services monitor, and embed themselves within, the country’s resurgent neo-Nazi underground.

Text: Forensic Architecture