This paper presents a case study on the National Socialist Underground, a German group that carried out ten killings and three bomb attacks undiscovered within a decade until 2011. Adopting a social movement perspective, it applies a multi-level framework to explain the radicalization processes that lead to the emergence of the group. Utilizing political opportunity structure, resource mobilization and framing approaches, it explores the social processes in radical milieus inside the neo-Nazi movement and the relational dynamics that foster them.
On a macro-level, institutional and discursive opportunity structures highlight exogenous factors such as the German discourse on migration and asylum in the 1990ies and the ban of neo-Nazi organizations. These affected protest mobilizations as well as movement resources and frames.
The movements’ resources in contrast show how organizational developments on a meso-level shaped collective radicalization processes. The NSU emerged in a radical milieu where militant actions were common and in a time when the terrorist option was highly controversial. Their operations were dependent on the support of a large network of activists as well.
In addition to these structural dimensions, to understand how these dynamics affected the groups’ radicalization, I analyzed framing processes in the movement and how they affected the radical milieu. Using movement texts directly linked to the NSU and its supporters, I can identify diagnostic frames that explain why they chose their victims, prognostic frames that correspond with the kind they carried out their terrorist campaign and motivational frames that served as a call for political violence.
