Longlisted for the Gordon¿Burn¿Prize 2025 '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.
