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.
Author
Jacob Kushner is an author, educator, and international correspondent who writes magazine and other longform stories from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. He reports on migration and human rights, foreign aid and investment, terrorism and violent extremism, science and global health, climate change and wildlife, and press freedom. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, National Geographic, The Nation, VQR, The Atavist, WIRED, Foreign Policy, and VICE. He has photographed for National Geographic and field-produced for VICE on HBO, and PBS NewsHour. He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, and Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, was published in 2024 by Grand Central (Hachette). Both were favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books. He has taught International Reporting and Migration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he is currently a visiting professor at Columbia Journalism School in New York. A former Fulbright Scholar, Max Planck Journalist in Residence, and Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, Jacob was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He speaks Dominican Spanish, Haitian Creole, conversational German, and basic French.
