“Who belongs to Germany and who doesn’t?”
This is a central question that drove director Marcin Wierzchowski in his documentary “Das Deutsche Volk” (The German People). The work premiered at the , marking the fifth anniversary of the racially-motivated shootings that shook Germany on .
That night, a far-right extremist terrorist killed nine people — Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar and Kaloyan Velkov — and injured five more in the city of Hanau, near Frankfurt, in the state of Hessen.
After his rampage, the perpetrator returned to his apartment, where he killed his mother and then committed suicide.
It was found that the gunman, 43-year-old Tobias R. — identified by his first name and last initial in keeping with German privacy laws — had published a racist “manifesto” online before committing his murders. Documents promoting conspiracy theories and far-right views were also found in his home.
At the time, the far-right populist party was already contributing to the normalization of strong anti-immigrant positions.
The Hanau shooting came just a few months after other far-right attacks shook Germany, including in October 2019 in a that killed two people, and the murder of pro-migrant CDU politician in Kassel in June 2019 by a man with neo-Nazi ties.
Director spent five years working with survivors
Filmmaker Marcin Wierzchowski immediately began documenting the developments surrounding the Hanau shootings. He ended up accompanying the victims’ families and survivors for nearly five years to make his film. As a person who was born in Poland and who came to Germany as a child, Wierzchowski says he also experienced racism.
His documentary, shot in black-and-white, follows the families in their grief and their battle to obtain proper information surrounding the death of their loved ones. The victims’ relatives have denounced the authorities for having failed to critically deal with the circumstances that led to the murders — and for having, at times, avoided addressing certain aspects of the investigation.
From the start, the affected families were treated as second-class citizens. In some cases, the police took more than 24 hours to inform the victims’ parents. Their children’s bodies were seized for autopsy without their consent and they were only told a week later where the remains could be found. In that first week, they were not informed of what was being undertaken by authorities and what they could expect — not even through a press conference.
“Just imagine that, seven to eight days of this trauma: Their children were shot, confiscated without their consent. It was later claimed that they had given their consent, which is not true,” Marcin Wierzchowski told DW.
The victims’ families took action
It is in this context that the documentary filmmaker got to know the victims’ families, who fought to bring different procedural failings to the public’s attention.
Among others, it was found that the perpetrator was legally allowed to own a gun even though he had on many occasions drawn the attention of authorities due to his aggressive, paranoid-schizophrenic behavior and right-wing extremist beliefs.
Another question that is central in the case is that the police only stormed the suspect’s house almost five hours after his attack. It was also found that the emergency dispatch center could not be reached on the night of the crime.
Then there is the issue that the perpetrator’s father, who was at home when his son returned from his shooting spree, was also found to share the killer’s ideology. After his son’s crime, he downplayed the murders and publicly insulted the victims. He has repeatedly harassed one of the victim’s mothers, Serpil Temiz Unvar, with letters and contact attempts, ignoring all restraining orders.
Despite the threatening situation, the police instead called some of the victims’ families to warn them that they shouldn’t undertake anything that could be seen as an act of retribution against the man. “That destroyed the last shred of trust they [the victims’ relatives] had left in authorities,” the filmmaker points out in his press presentation of the documentary.
SWAT team police officers active on far-right chats
A year later, in June 2021, a unit of Hessen’s special forces was disbanded after its officers were found to have taken part in racist far-right group chats. There were 13 officers from that group on duty in Hanau’s SWAT team on the night of the shootings.
Volker Bouffier, Hessen’s Minister-President then, was quoted by the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper as pointing out that even if the police officers potentially had right-wing extremist views, it didn’t provide any indication on how they had done their work that night.
Facing the state’s limited investigation, the victims’ relatives commissioned Forensic Architecture, a London research group that uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world.
By painstakingly piecing together witness statements, police helicopter footage and surveillance cameras, the London researchers revealed more details surrounding the special forces’ delayed intervention.
They also identified another sensitive issue — the fact that the emergency exit was locked at the Arena Bar, one of the crime scenes, which prevented several victims from fleeing. According to some witnesses, the police — who often raided the premises, mainly frequented by migrants — had previously pressured the bar owner into locking that emergency exit so that customers could not escape through it.
Five years later, support for the AfD — whose rhetoric was found to have directly influenced the murderer — keeps growing in the state of Hessen and in Germany.
For the victims’ relatives, the whole ordeal and the current developments only reinforce their pessimism: “My children were born here, but we were made to feel like we’ve never belonged and that we would never belong,” one of the film’s participants told DW during the Berlinale.
“That’s the way it is. And we have to live with that.”
Edited by: Brenda Haas
Interviews: Andrea Horakh
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