New Year’s Eve again comes as a wake-up call to Germans, as violent migrant gangs fought pitched street battles with police and firefighters in Berlin, Munich, and other cities across the country.
In the German capital Berlin, masked men in migrant-dominated areas were seen erecting road barricades and setting them on fire. Police officers and first responders were hurled with firecrackers and rockets as they tried to clear the streets.
“Nationwide, young men in particular fought pitched battles with emergency services on the New Year’s Eve. Who are these anarchists who are destroying our country?” German newspaper Die Bild Zeitung asked.
The answer is easy. These are migrant men who have been swarming the country since former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s border to mass migration in 2015.
German police confirmed the identity of the attackers. “For many in the emergency services, the prevailing impression is that groups of young men with a migration background are far overrepresented in these riots,” said Rainer Wendt, the head of the German Police Union.
“In German cities, largely migrant [gangs] attack the police and fire brigade with firecrackers and illegal round-shell bombs,” the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche reported.
Describing the scenes resembling those from a warzone, the Swiss publication added:
In Berlin, the police and fire department was called in 3,943 times, which resulted in 15 firefighters and 18 police officers getting injured. Particularly in the districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, which have a high proportion of migrants, there were serious attacks: In Kreuzberg, 200 hooded men attacked firefighters who wanted to extinguish [burning] barricades, whereas in Neukölln 50 miscreants fired rockets at the emergency services and even threw an illegal round-shell bomb at an occupied police vehicle. [The Police] made 103 arrests.
Attacks were also reported in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart.
Detailing the New Year’s Eve mayhem, Germany’s state-run DW TV noted:
On New Year’s Eve in Berlin, the fire department reported 38 separate incidents, including 14 cases where firetrucks were supposedly “lured into ambushes” and shot at with fireworks and pelted with beer crates.The level of aggression toward emergency service staff was completely unexpected, Berlin fire department spokesman Thomas Kirstein told public radio RBB. A total of 15 emergency responders were injured in Berlin, with one requiring hospital treatment. The police department said 18 of its officers had been injured.Berlin’s fire department said it was “shocked and saddened” by the incidents, which left many asking what lies behind the apparent increase in violence toward emergency service staff and why they in particular have become a target.
DW TV didn’t reveal the identity of the miscreants but speculated if the attacks were “linked to display of masculinity?”
The German news website Heise called for a “critique of patriarchy instead of ethnicization,” a made-up word that refers to focusing on the ethnicity of the attackers. “The right-wingers … blame the misconduct on migrants. But most of the perpetrators were men,” the news outlet claimed.
The latest wave of attacks shows that Germany has learned nothing from the events of New Year’s Eve of 2016, where some 2,000 migrant men raped and assaulted around 1200 women.
Since Germany opened its doors to illegal migrants in the autumn of 2015, it has seen a surge in migrant crimes, including murders, rapes, and other violent crimes. Seven years on, Germans have lost control over their streets. Once idyllic German cities resemble warzones as the country enters 2023.
[Excerpts from German media reports translated by the author]
Raw video footage of street battles in Berlin:
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