Icon: enlarge
Flowers in front of the synagogue in Halle (archive): The perpetrator was sentenced to life imprisonment
Photo: Hendrik Schmidt / picture alliance / dpa / dpa-Zentralbild
Shortly after eleven o'clock in the morning, the presiding judge Ursula Mertens begins: "In the name of the people, the following judgment is issued ..." It is the people, in whose supposed "defense" the defendant Stephan Balliet, 28 years old, on October 9, 2019 wanted to kill as many Jews as possible in the synagogue of Halle.
His act is considered to be one of the worst anti-Semitic attacks since World War II.
"We looked into the depths of humanity," Mertens will say at the end of the process.
The former chemistry student from Benndorf near Halle failed at the door to the synagogue with his self-made arsenal.
Out of annoyance, he shot the passer-by Jana L., who happened to be passing by, and then in a kebab shop, the painter's journeyman Kevin S., whom he thought was a Muslim.
While fleeing from the police, he ran into a man from Somalia on the street and injured several people, some seriously.
Not once does the defendant look at the bench
Balliet filmed his campaign with a helmet camera and posted the video as a live stream on the Internet, along with a pamphlet with the headline: "Kill all Jews".
There is no other choice when it comes to the sentence, says the presiding judge: two murders and 66 attempts to murder, dangerous bodily harm, Holocaust denial, sedition, predatory extortion, forbidden car racing and more, all committed with unprecedented coldness and inhumanity - the court speaks for a lifetime Imprisonment and determines the particular gravity of the guilt.
In addition, the Senate imposes preventive detention on Stephan Balliet.
While the chairman announces the sentence, the defendant in his dark anorak does not even look at the bench.
The court heard for 26 days, 73 witnesses and 8 experts had their say.
Balliet expressed his anti-Semitic, racist and misogynist views in court.
He grinned when the chairman played the video of the crime in the hall; he raised his eyebrows in contempt when joint plaintiffs from the synagogue reported how his attack had evoked the Shoah family trauma in them.
"As a judge I have already experienced a lot of unbearable things," Mertens addressed the defendant, "but this trial, Mr. Balliet, blows everything up."
"You left the apartment as a bad, black man"
The chairwoman recalls how meticulously Balliet prepared his deed, how he secretly built firearms and explosives over the years and stored them in the bed box, how he put on his gloomy combat gear on the day of the act - helmet, protective vest, boots.
Mertens to Balliet: "You left the apartment as a bad, black man, as children would say."
The defendant, "who was still sitting at his computer in his mother's room in Benndorf's children's room at the age of 28," said the chairman, had, guided by abstruse conspiracy theories, developed a deep-seated racial hatred over the years, which led him to his heinous, inhuman act I had "hatred of people who had done nothing to him, who he also didn't know." But who he blamed for his personal failure.
Icon: enlarge
Defendant Balliet, Security Forces: An incredible act
Photo: POOL / REUTERS
And then Mertens did what was important to her during the entire process in the announcement of the verdict: she turned to the victims.
Even a state security procedure, one can interpret it, is not only there to determine the guilt of the accused.
It should and maybe can also help heal wounds.
Many of those affected were scared to death, remained traumatized because they were suddenly targeted in the middle of life.
Some are still unable to work today, struggling with fears and sleeping problems: a young woman who missed Balliet's shots on the street, a man and a woman he shot because they did not want to let him have their car, the Somali man, Balliet almost knocked over the heap on the run.
Mertens finds words of sympathy for him, but it has not been possible to prove to the accused that he wanted to kill him.
Icon: enlarge
Presiding judge Mertens: "I have no words"
Photo: POOL / REUTERS
The chairman also spoke directly to the operator of the »Kiez-Döner«; he was caught in the hail of bullets on the street when Balliet was engaged in a firefight with the police.
For a long time, the federal prosecutor's office did not want to admit him as a co-plaintiff: "You were a victim, your life was in danger, Mr. Tekin," says Mertens.
"The problem is that we cannot prove that he even noticed you."
Quite different with the murder of Kevin S., the journeyman painter, who was waiting for his kebab in the snack bar when Balliet's explosive device missed the door.
"You executed Kevin S. that day," Mertens argues, against the accused, "incredibly cruel, cowardly and without a trace of human emotion."
Kevin S. suffered from a mental and physical disability, his father had told in court about his son with tears.
The chairwoman has often shown control in this process, but now her voice is almost impossible: "Unlike you, Kevin S. did not retire to his children's room," says Mertens to Balliet, but instead has his life in his own hands taken: "Profession, football, friends, the defendant has not managed all of that in 27 years."
"I have no words here to assess this objectively, as it is my task."
Mertens recalls how Balliet shot at close range the young man crouched behind a refrigerator pleading for his life.
How he went out again to arm himself: "He would have had the opportunity to stop, but then he really started." Mertens pauses for a moment, then she says: "Mr. Balliet, I have no words, this to assess objectively how this is my job. "She had never prepared a reason in writing before, but here she had to force herself to write down the sentences, on almost 35 pages," so that you can keep your composure. "
It is true that the expert attested that the defendant had a serious personality disorder, with paranoid, schizoid and self-insecure features.
Alone he had attached absurd conspiracy theories in his children's room.
But there is no doubt about his culpability.
"They are dangerous to humanity," Mertens turns once more to the defendant, who looks at them apparently indifferently.
"We have to protect society from you," the chairwoman tells him.
If he doesn't change his mind, he'll never be free again.
Balliet hurls a red something across the hall
Finally, Mertens thanks everyone involved in the proceedings, the security officers and the demonstration service, and wishes everyone a pleasant Christmas.
The chairman is just pushing her manuscript together, when Balliet jumps up and without a word hurls an elongated red object across the room, it lands between the co-plaintiffs' tables.
A brief commotion, then it's clear it was a rolled-up folder.
Judicial officers wrestle the convict and take him out of the room.
Icon: The mirror