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Hanau (dpa) - It's been a year since the German Tobias R. shot nine people in Hanau for racist motives - and horror and perplexity about the crime in the city are still palpable.
Today, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Hesse’s Prime Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU) will feel this when they take part in the memorial ceremony together with Hanau’s Lord Mayor Claus Kaminsky (SPD) and relatives of the dead.
In addition to grief and pain, the pressing questions of the victims' families will also determine the anniversary.
But whether and which answers politicians will find is open.
In the past twelve months, the relatives had often called for the consequences of the act - above all, a more decisive opposition to the law.
They accused the authorities of not taking “warning signals” seriously enough, most recently Ajla Kurtović, whose brother Hamza was among the nine people killed in the attack.
In addition to pamphlets with conspiracy theories and racist views that the 43-year-old perpetrator had published on the Internet before the crime, this also includes a very confused letter he wrote and which had been received by the Attorney General months earlier.
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Why wasn't this investigated and why was Tobias R. allowed to own weapons?
How can such an act be prevented in the future?
These questions don't just concern families.
The "February 19th Hanau Initiative", an association of Hanau members, puts it more sharply.
In one of the texts on their homepage there is talk of a “failure of the authorities before, during and after the crime”, of “clumsiness of the offices in providing support and help” and of “unforgivable misconduct by the security forces on the night of the crime”.
It shows how deep the wounds and the turmoil in Hanau are still a year after the attack.
This also shapes the work of Helmut Fünfsinn, victim commissioner of the Hessian state government and former Hessian attorney general.
Since February last year, he has been taking care of the concerns of those affected as a personal contact in cooperation with the Federal Victims Commissioner Edgar Franke, the Hanau Victims Commissioner Andreas Jäger and other parties involved and coordinates contacts with contact persons.
A task that requires a great deal of sensitivity, as Fünfsinn makes clear: "It is certainly not easy - I was deliberately appointed by the state government as a state agency - to create a deep relationship of trust."
In addition to financial help and support in dealing with the authorities, Fünfsinn and his colleagues ensure that those affected also receive psychosocial support in coping with trauma and grief, for example through Hanauer Hilfe, advice for victims and witnesses of crimes.
Ultimately, the aim is “to help in such a way that it is possible to come closer to a normal life again,” says Fünfsinn, but also makes it clear: “It will be a long process, but I very much hope that this process will turn out to be larger Sharing will succeed. "
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The former attorney general considers it particularly difficult for the bereaved that there will be no criminal proceedings after this unprecedented racist terrorist attack, as the perpetrator judged himself.
Because even if the investigations of the Federal Prosecutor's Office have not yet been concluded: So far, according to media reports, there should have been no indications that Tobias R. had confidants or helpers.
"Of course it is very, very difficult to bear that the perpetrator is no longer being punished by the state and that one or the other question may not be answered," says Fünfsinn.
It is also understandable that people who have “had their loved one stolen” also look for other guilty parties in this situation.
Most recently, the message from Hesse's Interior Minister Peter Beuth (CDU) that the Hanau police emergency number was overloaded on the night of the crime is likely to have stoked relatives' resentment.
This admission is explosive because one of the victims, the 22-year-old Vili Viorel Păun, is said to have followed the perpetrator with his car after the first shots in order to stop him - and is said to have dialed the emergency number several times in vain.
Shortly afterwards he was shot by Tobias R. in his car.
Even if Beuth now, a year after the fact, blames technical reasons for the bottleneck and points out the quick action of the emergency services, the question remains whether the police would not have been able to stop Păun had he got through to the emergency call.
On the other hand, there were also things that went right after the crime and during the processing, says Fünfsinn.
In addition to the rapid arrival of the police at the scene of the crime, it was important that the Federal Prosecutor General took over the proceedings that night.
Fünfsinn also sees progress in its engagement against right-wing extremism - and refers, for example, to a new fund for projects against extremism, to the Hessian Information and Competence Center against Extremism and to the action program “Hesse against hate speech” - “So you can't say that Hesse has nothing does », says Fünfsinn.
Whether everyday racism, “which cannot be denied”, can be impressed by this is another matter.
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The authorities noticed over 50 hate mail on the night of the crime from February 19 to 20, 2020 alone.
The authors were persecuted and in some cases already convicted, says Fünfsinn, via the central office for the fight against Internet crime, which is located at the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office.
«I mean: We're already doing something.
It may be that the relatives see that as far too little, but one cannot say that the state is looking the other way. "
At the same time, the Hessian victim ombudsman expresses the hope that such acts can be prevented in the future through work in the prevention of extremism - "Unfortunately, one is never safe."
Just last Thursday, the sociologist and right-wing extremism researcher Matthias Quent made it clear with a view to the Hanau attack that, in his view, the whole of society is challenged in the fight against racism and right-wing extremism - and that a long learning process is only at the beginning.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210218-99-489550 / 6