It’s a strange season to talk about forgiveness. While streets glow with fairy lights and shop windows promise that compassion is only a gift-box away, Germany is once again confronted with the unresolved wounds of its recent past. The trap of the season is this: believing that every gesture of regret must be met with mercy. As if forgiveness was a resource available to anyone who is reasonable enough to move on, no matter how atrociously they have been treated.

It is certainly not that simple for the families of the victims of the National Socialist Underground (NSU). During the 2000s, the neo-Nazi terror organisation killed 10 people, nine of them immigrants, mostly small business owners, and one policewoman. Because investigators focused on probing the victims’ families and communities rather than on Nazis, the NSU was able to continue murdering without interference. German media reported on the atrocities as die Dönermorde the kebab murders, as if it was some exotic true-crime phenomenon.

In 2011, when the NSU outed itself in a video in which it claimed responsibility for the murders and several nailbomb attacks, it also exposed profound structural failures in the German state’s approach to rightwing terrorism.

Subsequent inquiries revealed that security agencies had informants in close proximity to the perpetrators, overlooked relevant intelligence, and in some cases

© The Guardian