[citation needed] Between the years 2000 and 2007, the NSU perpetrated a series of racially motivated murders throughout Germany, leaving ten people dead and one wounded.

[11] On 13 November 2011, Holger Gerlach [de], a possible fourth member of the NSU, was arrested and brought before a judge at Germany's Federal Court of Justice the following day, who ordered him to be placed in police custody.

Eminger is suspected by the Attorney General of Germany to have produced a propaganda movie[17] mocking the victims of the serial murders and claiming responsibility for the previously unknown NSU.

[20] After the underlying ideological pattern of the crimes became known by the public, Chancellor Angela Merkel stated on 14 November 2011 that she wanted to consider a ban[21] of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) to weaken the power of extremist right-wing groups.

[28] On 23 February 2012, an official state ceremony in commemoration of the victims was broadcast live from Berlin; a nationwide moment of silence was observed and flags were flown at half-mast.

The affair is casting Germany's security apparatus into public disrepute for an obvious, complete failure and is causing sarcastic comments from the press.

[33][34] On 2 July 2012, the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Heinz Fromm, resigned from his post[35] shortly after it was revealed that on 12 November 2011, employees, most notably Axel Minrath (code name: Lothar Lingen[36]), of his agency had destroyed files connected with the NSU case immediately after their role in the murders became public and the agency itself had received a formal request from the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) to forward all information relevant to these crimes.

"[40] Prosecutors deliberately and repeatedly stated that the scope of the trial was only to determine the level of complicity that Zschäpe and her fellow defendants had with the crimes the NSU stands accused of.

[42] One of the more controversial subjects to come to light during the NSU murder trial was the level of cooperation and support that neo-Nazi informants and organizations received from the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany's domestic security agency.

The BfV began cultivating informants from Germany's neo-Nazi groups in the early and mid-1990s to deal with the rise in anti-immigrant crime like the Rostock-Lichtenhagen riots of 1992.

[46] Simultaneously, 10,000 people protested all over Germany against the limited solution of the NSU's crimes and the state's involvement, against the low verdicts for the terrorists and the police's racist investigations against the victims' families.