White Terror

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.