Over 1,000 women were sexually assaulted and raped across Germany’s major cities exactly ten years ago today, in an enormous and apparently coordinated act of violence by recently arrived migrant men, the nature and causes of which are still the subject of attempted obfuscation to this day.
The North African origins of the perpetrators of the infamous mass rapes and sex assaults seen in German cities on New Year’s Eve 2015-16 were not “a criminogenic factor”, a German academic has asserted, but rather were a function of radical “masculinity”. The remarkable comments come as the nation looks back ten years on to an event that both darkened the lives of a huge number of young women and changed the course of political history as it became “a turning point in the debate about refugees”.
The attacks — which were initially unreported in the German national media — were first brought to global attention by Breitbart News and saw women in practically every major German city set upon by gangs of migrant males. There were over 1,300 people targeted in the city of Cologne alone, primarily women. Of them, 600 women were sexually assaulted and 28 raped, while still more were beaten and robbed.
One 18-year-old woman was reported to have had an abortion after falling pregnant from being raped alongside another woman on the floor in the square between the Cologne Cathedral and the city’s central railway station.
Nationwide, over 1,200 women are reported to have been sexually assaulted in just one night. Although there were said to have been over a thousand perpetrators, the vast majority were never traced, and a decade later, just 39 convictions have been secured. Only two of those were for sexual assault, it is reported.
Early eyewitness accounts, which were borne out much later by police investigations and arrests, stated the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of North African origin, mainly of Moroccan and Algerian extraction. Compounding the scandal of the attacks, were Angela Merkel government’s policies, which had brought the perpetrators to the country only months before, and the astonishing failures of the police to even realise what was happening at the time and what was widely claimed to have been an attempted cover-up.
The Cologne police command centre rejected the support of reserve officers held nearby and dismissed them home on the evening of the attacks, even as their own officers struggled to contain the chaos on the Cathedral square. The following morning, the force published a cheerful press release stating the night had passed off “peacefully” and without incident.
Broadcaster WDR notes then-Federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière acknowledged the attacks were “a turning point in the debate about refugees in Germany” and changed the course of German political history, setting migrant-critical party the AfD up for greater successes and ushering support for stricter migration policies in the years that followed. Evidently the narrative created on that night ten years ago remains difficult for left-wing pro-migration politics and activists, and attempts to revise history continue.
As reported by German broadsheet Die Welt, Hamburg-based police researcher Rafael Behr, a former professor of police science at the Hamburg Police Academy, used the anniversary to put forward his particular theories. The paper states he told WDR5 radio that the perpetrators having Arab or North African origins is not from a criminological point of view, “a criminogenic factor”.
Instead, he asserted: “I would summarize it as a radically uprooted masculinity”.
Behr rejected the German police shorthand for “North African Repeat Offender”, ‘NAFRI’, as unhelpful and said instead the Cologne attacks should be seen in the light of “masculinity as the motive and not nationality”. The paper quoted him as saying that the migrants had “endured existential fears” and were then transferred to a society “where they are not allowed to do anything, not even have the prospect of being allowed to stay here.”
On New Year’s Eve, then, “something was being compensated for that night” and this “was released explosively”.
This sudden rush of thousands of sex assaults and rapes taking place simultaneously across Germany was essentially spontaneous, he said he believed, and was not actually “strategically” planned, as has been widely reported.
The policing academic also said the criticism of the police that they failed to intervene on the night had “deeply affected” and “shook” the force, but emphasised that in the years that followed, the police investigated themselves and this allowed them to discard “many stereotypes and prejudices”.
Local Cologne newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger reports the 10th anniversary of the sex assaults was being memorialised on Wednesday night by a vigil in the same square by the Women’s Heroines group, which accuses police of being overwhelmed and that the importance of the attacks have been downplayed.
The Heroines group said in a statement of their motivation:
The consequences of failed migration and integration policies have long disproportionately burdened women: with acts of violence in public spaces, parallel societies that isolate themselves through clothing and behaviour, sprawling concentrations of young men, and an openly displayed rejection of central values of the free democratic order and thus of the hard-won women’s rights in Europe.
The Cologne New Year’s Eve attacks ten years ago were a warning sign of this trend at the expense of women and girls. And the far too late reaction of the city and authorities at the time was a worst-practice example of failed analysis… the acts were not accidental and cannot be explained by alcohol, trauma, or “cultural misunderstandings”… here is a clear motive: contempt for Western civilization. Europeans are seen as weak, their legal system as exploitable, their women as legitimate prey.
The group made 11 demands of the government, including that the government should recognise it has a constitutional duty to protect the life and liberty of women and girls and that this “takes absolute precedence over all considerations related to migration, integration, residency, and perpetrators”.
Violent and sex criminal migrants should have their citizenship stripped and be deported, they said, and big-money NGOs that ” downplay, excuse, or cover up violence” should be defunded.
Failure to deliver means the rule of law loses its legitimacy, they warned.
A persistent question in the wake of Germany’s 2015-16 New Year’s Eve attacks remains whether it could happen again. At the time of the attack, the pattern of behaviour in the mass rapes and sex assaults was compared to the “Taharrush” phenomenon in the Arab world, a “game” where large gangs of men attack women for sport. And given the frequency with which this has been cited over similar attacks since, it seems clear that it has already continued to occur in Europe, if at a slower pace.
“Taharrush” was cited on New Year’s Eve 2024-25, for instance, in the Italian city of Milan, when groups of “North African men” stalked women out partying for the holiday, with an eyewitness account stating: “We were trapped, helpless in the face of such violence! It was a waking nightmare… We were surrounded, and we couldn’t move! We held hands while they touched us all over the clothes and under the clothes! Despite our jackets and scarves. And it lasted 10 minutes, which is a very long time in this kind of situation.”
According to a report from the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, the prosecutor’s office in Milan suspects that the alleged sexual assaults were a manifestation of the “Islamic ritual” known as taharrush gamea, or the “collective sexual harassment in crowds”. The paper said the attacks generally target “insolent women, guilty of showing up in public”.
… The first widely documented ‘taharrush gamea’ incident occurred in Egypt in 2005 when the government allegedly hired gangs of men to assault female protesters and journalists sexually. Amnesty International reported in 2015 that since 2012, “mob sexual assaults, including rape, have become a regular feature of protests in the vicinity of Tahrir Square in Cairo.”
The practice has since spread into Europe, most notably in the 2016 New Year’s Eve Cologne attacks brought to international attention by Breitbart London… Gang sex attacks have also occurred in Italy, including in Milan on New Year’s Eve 2022 in the very same Piazza del Duomo when nine young women fell victim to similar sexual assaults, leading prosecutors to believe that the recent attacks may have been a copy cat of the incidents two years prior.
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