Public Outreach

What does it do to parents when their children become IS terrorists? Sarah Klosterkamp spent six years attending trials of Syrian returnees and analysed them for her doctoral thesis. The case of the S. family stood out from the crowd because, for the first time, parents who supported their children in the war were in the dock. They helped them procure weapons and equipment for the "Islamic State" in Syria, where the two held high positions. Together with SPIEGEL reporters Özlem Gezer and Timofey Neshitov, Klosterkamp sifted through almost 60,000 pages of files. The team read interrogations and wiretap transcripts, analysed expert opinions and bank statements in order to trace the system that had led to this indictment. They sat for many hours in the father's living room in Cologne and talked to him. He showed them his diaries, family photos, mails and messages that his sons had written to him, photos and videos of his visit to Syria. The team also researched the family's surroundings, visited a former employer and a Cologne pensioner who had adopted the mother in the meantime. The team met almost only interlocutors who were not aware of any guilt.

Abo Dieb entered Germany in 2015 as one of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. He is assigned to the city of Münster and lives there for some time. It then turns out: he is said to have tortured and killed people in Syria - people like Abo Abdo. A few months later, a German judge sits in front of them and tries to understand what happened in this distant war that these two men brought with them, to the Europe they praised, to his courtroom. The story of these two Syrians is one that has always existed in every war, in Rwanda, in the Congo, in Yugoslavia, in the Third Reich, where perpetrators and victims fled along the same paths and to the same countries. Yet war crimes have rarely been tried in courts in recent decades because evidence is hard to come by or victims impossible to find. This story is the first major documentary on war crimes that have occurred in Syria in recent years and are now also the subject of court proceedings in Germany. Özlem Gezer, Asia Haidar and Sarah Klosterkamp went on a journey across Europe for this story. They sifted through 36,000 wiretapped telephone conversations and more than 20,000 pages of investigation files and court transcripts. These materials show that there are no clear-cut perpetrators and victims in this context, but that the boundaries are fluid.

At the age of 21, the SS guard Johann R. allegedly helped to murder hundreds of prisoners in the Stutthof concentration camp. When Johann R. finally had to answer for his deeds before the Münster Regional Court, he was very old. To this day, the long-term consequences of concealed perpetration on the one hand and victims' fates acknowledged far too late on the other overshadow numerous family stories. The relatives of the murdered continue to hope for justice - can the trial bring it?

A completely different case: A man from Syria flees the civil war, applies for asylum under a false name and lives inconspicuously in Münster for a while. But then he is recognised: He is Abu Dieb, the "Wolf of Aleppo", who is accused of having tortured and murdered people in a bestial way. Once again, the question arises: Will justice be done? And how is it that German courts actually dispense justice for Syrian war crimes?

In dialogue with academic speakers, we want to discuss the political and ethical significance of historical and current judicial proceedings against war crimes. How do such trials proceed? How would we personally decide? The starting point for our debate will be the performance of "Der Ordner" (The Folder), a play that deals with the question of whether the chapter of (co-)perpetration by our grandfathers and great-grandfathers can ever be closed, or whether Germany's Nazi past - especially in times of growing right-wing extremism - places a special responsibility on us today.

speakers & performances: Cornelia Kupferschmid, Stephanie Borgert, Hannes Demming, Sarah Klosterkamp & Rainer Stoye