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Police officers at one of the crime scenes in Hanau (archive).
Photo: Uwe Anspach / dpa
The Hanau attacker suffered from a mental illness that was fatally mixed with racial madness.
According to information from SPIEGEL, this emerges from a new report that the forensic psychiatrist Henning Saß prepared on behalf of the federal prosecutor's office.
According to the approximately 140-page long report, the expert sees clear signs of paranoid schizophrenia in the 43-year-old perpetrator.
However, a "right-wing extremist ideology" was attached to the mental disorder, which contained "xenophobic, racist and ethnic elements".
The expert Saß describes the perpetrator's world of thought as a "peculiar amalgamation" in which "illness-related fantasies" and "political-ideological fanaticism" were inseparably interwoven.
The Hanau attacker murdered nine people in and in front of bars and a kiosk on February 19.
All victims had a migration background.
He then killed his mother and himself.
"Morbidly deformed worldview"
In the posthumous analysis, the expert evaluated pamphlets and videos that the assassin had left behind.
For years he saw himself as a victim of a large-scale conspiracy.
According to the report, the delusions were accompanied by increasingly pronounced racism and "fantasies about the extermination of entire peoples and cultures".
Saß comes to the conclusion that the assassin was severely restricted in his ability to "reflect on his own pathologically deformed worldview".
Despite limited control, he had prepared the racist murders “systematically”.
After the Hanau attack, the federal government set up a cabinet committee to combat racism and right-wing extremism.
It included Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) and Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD).
This week the committee presented a paper with 89 measures.
The federal government wants to make more than one billion euros available for these projects between 2021 and 2024.
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