Michèle Kiesewetter
† 25.4.2007 • Heilbronn, Baden-Württemberg
The victim
Michèle Kiesewetter was born on October 10, 1984 in Neuhaus in Thuringia. She grew up in Oberweißbach and began training with the police in Baden-Württemberg on March 1, 2003, for which she moved to Nufringen. She actively pursued cross-country skiing and biathlon. She was buried in Oberweißbach on May 2, 2007.
The crime
On April 25, 2007, at around 2 p.m., the two riot police officers, 22-year-old Michèle Kiesewetter and 24-year-old Martin A., parked their patrol car on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn for a short break when two perpetrators approached the vehicle from behind and shot the two victims each in the head. The victims were then robbed of their service weapons, HK P2000 pistols, and their handcuffs. The cartridge cases and projectile parts found at the scene of the crime showed that the murder weapons were two pistols, a Tokarev TT-33 and Radom VIS 35. Martin A. was in a coma for several weeks after the crime, but survived the crime. He still carries part of the projectile in his head to this day.[^1]
The investigation
At the crime scene was initially found the DNA trace of an unknown woman, which was found at more than 40 other crime scenes in Germany and other neighboring countries. At the end of 2019, it turned out that contaminated cotton swabs were used in the evidence recovery and that the DNA came from a female employee involved in the packaging.
On November 4, 2011, the stolen service weapons were found in the NSU's mobile home in Eisenach.
The background
Unlike the other NSU murders, the motive for the crime initially remained unknown. Due to the discovery of the service weapons of Michèle Kiesewetter and Martin A., the Federal Criminal Police Office announced in December 2011 that they assumed the motive to be weapons procurement.
In contrast to this, however, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that points to an act of relationship in right-wing circles. For example, it became known in September 2012 that a Thuringian policewoman who had covered up for and supported other neo-Nazis knew Kiesewetter. Furthermore, she was friends with Kiesewetter's godfather, also a policeman. Eight days after the crime, the godfather had said that the crime was connected to the "Turkish murders". The policewoman who covered for the neo-Nazis later testified before the Thuringia NSU committee that men had threatened her at her home and advised her not to remember "certain things" regarding the crime. In addition, several witnesses, some of them several years after the crime, independently stated that they had seen several people covered in blood fleeing from the Theresienwiese.
In addition, a documentary published by ARD in April 2017 revealed that graffiti with the letters NSU was found on a transformer building in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene. In May 2017, the Federal Prosecutor's Office announced that it saw no connection with the NSU.
In addition, Michèle Kiesewetter had belonged to the Böblingen riot police, BFE 523, since 2005, whose platoon leader, and thus Kiesewetter's superior, was a member of the European "Ku Klux Klan" (KKK) offshoot "European White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" (EWKK). Another member of the EWKKK was the undercover agent Thomas Richter - code name "Corelli" - who had been involved with the NSU core trio since at least 1995. In addition, he appeared on an address list found in 1998 in a garage in Jena, which was used by the NSU as a bomb workshop.