Mehmet Daimagüler: On the NSU trial

Conversation with Mehmet Daimagüler and Antonia von der Behrens

Over the course of 10 years Germany’s security services, politicians and media failed to link a series of murders to the right wing extremist group, the NSU. The alleged neo-Nazi terrorist Beate Zschäpe and her four co-accused are currently on trail in Munich, a trial followed by international media attention.

Mehmet Gürcan Daimagüler is a lawyer representing families of two of the of the NSU’s victims – the right wing terrorist group National Socialist Underground. Mehmet G. Daimagüler was born in 1968 in West Germany and is the son of Turkish immigrants. He studied law, economics and philosophy at German and American universities. He was selected as one of Yale University’s World Fellows and as a Litauer Fellow at Harvard. He worked in the offices of two members of the German Bundestag and was the first person of Turkish origin to be voted into the executive board of a German political party when he was elected to the federal executive committee of the liberal FDP. He resigned from the party in 2007. Daimagüler has also worked for Boston Consulting Group. He is the author of a book on identity and he also spearheads inter-religious dialogue in Germany, bridging, in particular, the Muslim-Jewish divide.