Photo Gallery Sole Survivor
Now 38, Beate Zschäpe will face trial in Munich starting on Monday, May 6. This image shows her on holiday on the Baltic island of Fehmarn in summer 2011.
Zschäpe's trial will take place in this Munich court. On Monday, April 15, it was announced that the start of the trial, due to begin on Wednesday, April 17, had been postponed for three weeks because media accreditation for the proceedings had to start from scratch following a row over foreign press access.
The Federal Constitutional Court ruled on Friday, April 12, that the Munich court handling Beate Zschäpe's trial must grant access to foreign media after no Turkish journalists had been able to obtain accreditation under a first-come, first-served applications procedure.
Beate Zschäpe is an alleged member of the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a terrorist group accused of murdering nine Turkish and Greek immigrants and a policewoman from 2000 to 2007. She went underground for almost 14 years.
Beate Zschäpe never knew her father and had a troubled relationship with her mother. "My daughter's political views were not the only reason for our estrangement, but they were a major cause," her mother told the Federal Criminal Police Office.
Thuringia's far-right scene became Zschäpe's ersatz family.
After police raided a garage that she rented with Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt in 1998, Beate Zschäpe went underground after asking her grandmother for money.
Böhnhardt (left), Mundlos (right) and Beate Zschäpe went on regular camping holidays. Acquaintances described the young woman as outgoing and likeable.
Investigators established that while Mundlos (left) and Böhnhardt (right) often aroused suspicions, Zschäpe gave the terror cell a veneer of respectability.
During her years underground, Zschäpe assumed over ten different identities with apparent ease.
Zschäpe's trial will offer a chance to rebuild faith in the German justice system after authorities botched their investigation into the killings carried about the NSU over a period of seven years.
This image shows Beate Zschäpe in 1990, two years before she met Uwe Mundlos and began immersing herself in the far-right scene.
Here, a still from a video taken by German federal police shows the defendant in pre-trial detention.
Beate Zschäpe's defense team consists of Wolfgang Stahl (left), Anja Sturm and Wolfgang Heer.
