The shots were fired almost exactly ten years ago. On November 4, 2011, Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos put an end to their lives in Eisenach. The date marks the beginning of a horrific and deeply shameful realization: two serial killers had been able to commit their crimes unchallenged for years.

Under the name “National Socialist Underground” (“NSU”), they carried out numerous attacks against people with an immigration background, killing nine of them and a policewoman. Police, the judiciary and politicians dismissed the terror as milieu- or drugs-related crimes, sometimes even targeting the victims’ relatives. To this day, the systemic failure caused by ignorance and incompetence has not been comprehensively dealt with. Even after the conviction of accomplice Beate Zschäpe and some of her helpers, and despite the work of a number of investigative parliamentary committees, the bottom of the brown abyss remains in the dark, with questions unanswered about the extent of the right-wing network, collaborators and terrorist structures …

Over the past 33 years, the CIVIS Media Prize has been awarded to contributions which, in journalistic or artistic formats, have excelled in dealing with right-wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism. A selection of these productions from television, radio, cinema and the Internet can be found here.

It is a crime against humanity that played almost no role in public awareness for a very long, a far too long time: the persecution, deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma during the National Socialist era. The survivors and surviving relatives had to fight until 1982 for the federal government to recognise the genocide of these people and for them to be considered Nazi victims. In 2015, the European Parliament proclaimed August 2 as a day of remembrance for this genocide. T

The official commemoration is both important and overdue. But it must not obscure the circumstances in which many Sinti and Roma in Europe find themselves today. It is often a depressing situation, characterised by political and social discrimination, by prejudice and hostility of the respective majority towards this minority, by systematic exclusion. And last but not least, there is very little knowledge of the rich culture of the Sinti and Roma, their centuries-long history, their extraordinary diversity…

Since 1989, a number of outstanding journalistic and artistic productions on the past and present of Sinti and Roma have been nominated for or awarded the CIVIS Media Prize. They shed light on the lives of them in very different ways. A comprehensive compilation of the contributions for television and radio can be found in the following dossier.

19 February 2021 marks the first anniversary of the attack in Hanau, where a man shot nine people for racist reasons. He then killed his mother and himself. The perpetrator had apparently stoked his hatred in the filter bubbles and echo chambers of the internet before giving it free rein.

Over the past 33 years, the CIVIS Media Prize has been awarded to journalistic and artistic contributions that deal with the topics of right-wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism in an outstanding way. A selection of these programme achievements from television, radio, cinema and the internet can be found here.