White Terror: A True Story of Murder, Bombings and Germany’s Far Right (Jacob Kushner)

White Terror: A True Story of Murder, Bombings and Germany’s Far Right (Jacob Kushner)Author: Jacob Kushner 'A shocking story of serial killers, twisted idealism and a country that looked away' Rory Carroll, bestselling author of Killing Thatcher In a tour de force of investigative journalism, White Terror tells for the first time the story of the National Socialist Underground in Germany in an engrossing global story that examines violence, modern racism and national trauma. Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, three teenagers became

Author: Jacob Kushner

'A shocking story of serial killers, twisted idealism and a country that looked away' Rory Carroll, bestselling author of Killing Thatcher

In a tour de force of investigative journalism, White Terror tells for the first time the story of the National Socialist Underground in Germany – in an engrossing global story that examines violence, modern racism and national trauma.

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, three teenagers became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of deep uncertainty: some four million East Germans found themselves out of a job. At first the three friends spent their nights wandering the streets, smoking, drinking, looking for trouble. Then they began attending far-right rallies with people who called themselves National Socialists: Nazis. Like the Hitler-led Nazis before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. Believing foreigners were a threat to their homeland, the three friends embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants.

In a tour de force of investigative journalism and novelistic storytelling, White Terror follows the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, from their radicalisation as young skinheads through their transformation into fully fledged terrorists carrying out bombings and assassinations while living on the run. But it’s also about something almost as terrifying: the German police and intelligence services that missed clues, mishandled far-right informants and repeatedly tried to paint the immigrant victims as mafiosos. Once the terror plot was revealed, the authorities shredded documents to cover up their mistakes and refused to acknowledge that their racism had led them astray.

A masterwork of reporting, White Terror reveals how a group of young Germans carried out a shocking spree of white supremacist violence, and how a nation and its government ignored them until it was too late.

About the Author

Jacob Kushner is an international correspondent who writes magazine and other longform stories from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean.

He reports on migration and statelessness, science and global health, history and foreign aid, terrorism and violent extremism, climate change and wildlife.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, National Geographic, VQR, The Atavist, WIRED, Foreign Policy, and VICE. He has photographed for National Geographic and field-produced for VICE on HBO, and PBS NewsHour.

He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books. His forthcoming book, Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, will be published in spring 2024 by Grand Central (Hachette) and HarperCollins UK.

Jacob teaches International Reporting and Migration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Jacob graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a B.A. in journalism and Latin American studies. He holds an M.A. in political journalism from Columbia University. In 2013 he conducted research for the ICIJ on their Offshore Leaks project, a precursor to the Panama Papers. As an Overseas Press Club Fellow in Nairobi he covered the 2013 Westgate Mall terrorist attack for the Associated Press. In 2016 he was named among the world’s leading journalists doing solutions-based reporting by the Solutions Journalism Network. He investigated terrorism against immigrants as a 2017-2018 Fulbright Fellow in Germany, and in 2018 he was named a Finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for Excellence in International Reporting. Jacob was a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good.