Assaults a sign of a changed country
As Germany welcomes migrants, sexual attacks point to a new reality
COLOGNE, GERMANY— In early December, the Cologne police made their New Year’s Eve preparations. Drawing on the previous year’s experience, they identified their biggest worries as pickpocketing and fireworks among the crowds. So they increased their holiday deployment to 142 from 88, concentrating on the banks of the Rhine River, where revelers traditionally gather for a giant fireworks display.
As 2016 neared on Dec. 31, however, about 1,500 men, including some newly arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, had instead assembled around Cologne’s train station. Drunk and dismissive of the police, they took advantage of an overwhelmed force to sexually assault and rob hundreds of people, according to police reports, shocking Germany and stoking anxieties over absorbing refugees across Europe.
“We were just pressed on all sides by people,” recalled one victim, Johanna, 18, who agreed to speak by telephone from Lake Constance, Germany, where she lives, only if her last name was not used, fearing hostility, particularly over social media. “I was grabbed continually. I have never experienced such a thing in any German city.”
Much is still hazy about that night. But the police reports and the testimony of officials and victims suggest that the officers failed to anticipate the new realities of a Germany that is now host to as many as one million asylum seekers, most from war-torn Muslim countries unfamiliar with its culture.
The police made a series of miscalculations that, officials acknowledge, allowed the situation to deteriorate. At the same time, both the police and victims say, it was not a situation any of them had encountered before. This was new terrain for all and just one taste of the challenges facing Germany and its leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, as the country at- tempts to assimilate a huge new population in an atmosphere of dwindling tolerance and volatile politics.
Johanna said she and her friends were among those first trapped outside the railway station and then inside it after midnight. Her wallet had been stolen earlier in the night. Now, she said, she was grabbed repeatedly by men all around.
She and two friends — a man and a woman — hid money and cellphones in internal pockets. They eventually boarded a train, she said, but it could not depart the station for 90 minutes because fights erupted “completely out of control.”
“That was really the worst night of my life,” she said. “I would not want to experience this again.”
Another woman who was there, Sara, a 25-year-old from the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg, said the situation was still precarious at 4 a.m., when she arrived at the station with a girlfriend.
“I grabbed my girlfriend — I do social work with women who are affected by violence — and told her: ‘Don’t look any of them in the eyes. Keep hold of your purse.’ Then I got frightened, told them, ‘Leave me in peace’ with a hand gesture — anyone in the world understands that,” she said, agreeing to speak only if her last name was not used, also for fear of being attacked over social media.
Sara said she and her friend decided to seek safety outside the station with police officers, who were themselves helpless. “I never experienced that a policeman says, ‘I would love to help you, but I can’t.’ That was really the worst,” she said. “Who should I turn to as a woman? What should I do?”
While national and international media focused on the terrorism scare that forced the police to clear two stations in Munich on New Year’s Eve, local websites and the local Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper reported women saying that they had been harassed Jan. 1. By late Jan. 2, the police issued an online appeal for people to come forward if they had experienced or witnessed crime.
Even the relatively dry language of the police report issued this week — summarizing at least 90 complaints of sexual harassment — makes the situation graphically clear. It refers repeatedly to victims surrounded by men and “groped in intimate area,” “grabbed by breasts and bottoms” or even “fingers inserted in vagina.”
Ralf Jaeger, the interior minister of North Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, noted that drink and drugs exacerbated the situation.
The hope now is that surveillance videos from the police and state railway cameras in the station, from nearby businesses and hotels, and above all from cellphones will help to identify the perpetrators. The police have 135 officers sifting through 350 hours of video, they say.
Of 19 suspects so far identified by name by the Cologne police, 10 were asylum seekers and the other nine were believed to be in Germany illegally, according to a report by Jaeger, the interior minister.
None were registered as living in Cologne, and four are now in custody for robberies committed during the new year’s events. An additional 32 suspects have been identified by the federal police, including 22 asylum seekers but also three Germans and an American, among others, the report said.