Fifty-six years after one of the deadliest attacks on Germany’s post-war Jewish community, German law enforcement has finally named the suspected perpetrator of a 1970 arson attack that left seven Holocaust survivors dead and 15 more injured in Munich.
For decades, the identity of the person who set the deadly fire at the Jewish community center’s on-site retirement home on Reichenbachstrasse remained an unsolved mystery. Now, Munich prosecutors have confirmed they have compelling evidence pointing to a lone 25-year-old neo-Nazi with well-documented antisemitic views as the sole culprit. The suspect, named by German news outlet Der Spiegel as Bernd V, died in 2020, meaning no criminal trial will ever deliver formal justice to the victims’ families.
The attack unfolded on the evening of February 13, 1970, at approximately 8:40 p.m. Prosecutors lay out that the suspect poured gasoline down the wooden stairwell of the retirement home before igniting it. The flames spread rapidly to the building’s top floor, trapping residents inside. While many occupants managed to climb to the roof to await rescue by firefighters, four victims died of smoke inhalation and burns in the stairwell, and a fifth died after jumping from an upper-story window to escape the blaze. All seven killed were Holocaust survivors between the ages of 59 and 71.
The break in the cold case came last year, when a woman came forward with new credible information following the death of a close relative who had known Bernd V well. The witness’s testimony confirmed that the suspect had openly made violent antisemitic threats just 15 minutes before the fire broke out, stating nearby the community center that “the Jews had everything” and that he intended to “set them on fire”. These remarks have been corroborated by other members of the witness’s family.
Additional records and witness accounts paint a picture of the suspect’s long-held extremist views: multiple witnesses recalled he was fixated on Adolf Hitler, and regularly played recordings of the Nazi dictator’s speeches in his youth. A former school headmaster told investigators that the suspect once used a Hitler Youth dagger gifted to him by his father during a violent confrontation. As a young person, he had already been convicted of a juvenile offense for blowing up two public phone kiosks.
Der Spiegel’s reporting adds context to the suspect’s motive on the night of the attack: the female witness’s late relative was part of a burglary gang that carried out a failed raid on a jewelry store in Munich’s nearby Gärtnerplatz district that same evening. The botched robbery left Bernd V enraged, and he channeled that anger into carrying out his antisemitic attack.
The original arson investigation was first closed in 2017 due to a lack of conclusive evidence, but was reopened last year after the new witness testimony emerged. Prosecutors emphasized that even with a deceased suspect, the principle of presumption of innocence still applies to the case, and no credible evidence has been found to indicate any other co-conspirators were involved in the attack.
While authorities have closed the case 56 years on, the investigation is widely expected to be remembered as a historic failure of German law enforcement. Der Spiegel reports that Bernd V’s name was first brought to investigators’ attention as early as the 1970s, by a man who had shared a prison cell with him. At the time, investigators dismissed the tip due to insufficient evidence and dropped all scrutiny of the suspect, leaving the case cold for decades.