Précis

“Welcome culture” – the generosity that has seen Germany embrace more than a million new migrants in the past year – is wearing thin.

If there was a single moment that sowed doubt in the national psyche, it came during New Year’s Eve festivities outside Cologne’s Gothic cathedral.

The whole place in front of the cathedral was full of people and after some moments we realised it was just men. They were pushing and pulling at our clothes. – Michelle, New Year’s Eve reveller

Just as Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered her televised New Year’s speech with a plea for tolerance and integration, hundreds of women in Cologne were being surrounded, sexually assaulted and robbed by rampaging bands of drunken men. Two women were allegedly raped.

"They touched us everywhere they could, between the legs and at our breasts. – Michelle
"The girls pushed them away but they forced themselves on the girls. – Yassin, Moroccan migrant and eyewitness

As Europe Correspondent Barbara Miller reports, police and media initially downplayed the incident. But as days went by, Germans learned that more than 1000 complaints of sexual assault and theft had been lodged, with the alleged assailants being described as North African and Middle Eastern.

So Germany has been plunged into a culture war. Refugee supporters, derided for politically correct “misguided tolerance” of migration, are suddenly on the defensive. The German Right is on the march.

“There has always been a small right wing movement... but a lot smaller than neighbouring countries because Germany really learnt its lesson after the Nazi era. But I am convinced that we have, for the first time since 1945, a growing right wing movement." – veteran magazine editor and feminist Alice Schwarzer

By delving into the New Year’s Eve incident, Barbara Miller explores what some Germans call a “culture of silence”, born of Nazi times, that has long stifled national discussion on race issues. She asks how that one night in Cologne might change Germany. Will it be seen as a trigger for more open debate, or as a convulsion that further divides Germans and stokes the fires of racism?

New Year’s Eve in Cologne

Music

00:00

MICHELLE: “The whole place

00:04

Michelle/NYE

in front of the cathedral was full of people and after some moments we realised it was just men. They were pushing and pulling at our clothes”.

00:05

MILLER: New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany, a celebration degenerates into a mass assault on German women by gangs of foreign men.

00:16

Music

00:26

MICHELLE: “They touched us everywhere they could, between the legs and at our breasts”.

MILLER: Tonight the incident that hardened Germany, blowing

00:30

Pegida rally

open the debate on immigration.

00:37

“Was there a culture of silence around crimes like this committed by people with a migrant background?”

00:42

Tanit

TANIT KOCH: “Yes, you may call it a culture of silence”.

00:49

Rally

Music

00:51

Frauke

FRAUKE PETRY: “It’s time to wake up. That’s what I think”.

00:54

Train carrying asylum seekers enters station. Title fades up:
COLOGNE, GERMANY

Music

01:00

Volunteers greet asylum seekers. Title:
ONE NIGHT IN COLOGNE
Reporter: BARBARA MILLER

01:12

Asylum seekers up stairs

MILLER: In Germany they call this their ‘welcome culture’. More than a million asylum seekers have come in the past year, the numbers swelling when German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared the borders open to Syrians. But this is one of the last migrant trains to arrive here in Cologne. A panicky Europe is now locking down. The migrant route into Germany effectively closed.

Three hundred people here just

01:26

Miller to camera at station

off a train from Pasow on the southern German border, they’re just going in here to this reception centre. They’ll get food, water, medical care if they need it and most importantly for people who have left family behind, there’s free Wi-Fi in there if they want to reach out to those left back home.

02:00

Volunteers provide clothes to asylum seekers

VOLUNTEER #1: [reading from list] “Size 45 shoes?”

VOLUNTEER #2: [Reception Centre] “Shoes?”

VOLUNTEER #1: “Yes, shoes, men’s 45. Yes socks, and underwear if you have any and a huge pullover”.

02:19

TANYA: “This whole clothes depot started in a gravel parking lot, all very makeshift.

02:35

Tanya

There were only three huge piles of clothing in this tent then we, the volunteers, began to develop it into this.

02:40

I’ve been doing this since September 21st, when the first train came. I do it all on a volunteer basis”.

MILLER: “And how do you find the time? Are you really here for every train?”

02:48

TANYA: “Yes, I’ve been here for every train so far”.

03:02

Asylum seekers on to buses/Woman gives thumbs up

MILLER: It’s the final leg of a long, costly and challenging journey but the sense of jubilation may be short-lived. The reality is that many may not qualify for asylum, considered economic migrants rather than genuine refugees.

“Why have you come to Germany?”

YOUNES: “There are lots

03:06

Younes

of reasons why I came here because Germany is kind of, you know, luxurious and my field of study is industrial management. I was a PhD student in my country and I want to pursue my education in the field of production management and for Iranian people unfortunately we needed to pass off ourselves as Iraqi or Afghans because the border is really closed for Iranian people because they say that Iranian people are not living in war. There was no alternative for people like me”.

03:28

Tanya

MILLER: “How long can this continue on, this ‘Welcome Culture’?”

TANYA: “For a long time, I hope. For as long as people need us. The help will change with time. We are only providing emergency supplies here. But one day our duty will be to integrate these people and then help will be needed too, but in a different way”.

04:04

Asylum seekers into buses

MILLER: But what happened in Cologne on New Year’s Eve would radically alter German attitudes to refugees and threaten to undermine their ‘Welcome Culture’.

04:23

New Years Eve

Music

04:35

MICHELLE: “We had just got out of the station with all my friends

04:50

Michelle

and the whole place in front of the Cathedral was just full with people and after some moments we just realised it was just men”.

04:53

New Years Eve

Music

05:01

Michele

MICHELE: “They were speaking different languages and we knew they hadn’t lived in Germany for long.

05:07

New Years Eve

05:15

There was general confusion and mayhem. We were running through this, and then someone pulled me by my coat.

05:22

Michele and Nina

I was wearing a really long coat, and someone grabbed me on my bottom. Not just grabbed, but really grabbed me like this”.

05:36

New Years Eve

05:47

MILLER: Hundreds of German women were surrounded, sexually assaulted and robbed by a mob of drunk foreign men. Two women were reportedly raped.

MICHELLE: “Around us there were,

05:52

Michelle/New Years Eve

I don’t know, a group of twenty or thirty men that just surrounded us.

06:04

They were pushing and pulling at our clothes and then just men get on left side, on the right side.

06:07

They touched us everywhere they could – between the legs and at our breasts.

06:18

But they really tried hard, they tried to open our clothes and so on”.

06:23

NINA: “Well, they were saying quite insulting words.

06:31

Nina and Michele

For instance ‘fuck, fuck’ and ‘whore’… ‘prostitute’.”

06:34

New Years Eve

MICHELLE: “They were all really tall, black hair, always black beards, so North African people, I think it could be -

06:40

Michelle

could also be Syrian, so refugees but I think they, for us, the Germans, they all look the same”.

06:54

New Years Eve

Music

07:00

Police move in

07:11

MILLER: With the festivities barely over, Cologne Police put out a press statement that would soon come back to haunt them.

07:21

TANIT KOCH: [Editor, Bild newspaper] “That communication afterwards by Cologne Police was just a complete and

07:29

Tanit. Super:
TANIT KOCH
Editor, Bild newspaper

utter failure because at first they pretended that nothing had happened, although they must have known from a very, very early point onwards that things had gone completely out of hand”.

07:33

Police conducting stop and searches

MILLER: The press release issued the morning after declared that the celebrations had passed off ‘peacefully’. Days later the Chief of Police lost his job, Cologne’s new top cop left to shoulder the blame.

07:44

Mathies. Super:
JÜRGEN MATHIES
Police chief, Cologne

JÜRGEN MATHIES: [Police Chief, Cologne] “There is absolutely no doubt that the press statement was unfortunate. It is likely that, at that time, the press office did not have the necessary information. That was a mistake, I stand by that”.

07:56

Police conducting stop and searches

MILLER: “Was there a culture of silence around crimes like this committed by people with a migrant background?”
TANIT KOCH: “Yes, you may call it a culture of silence. It’s because of Germany history, because of the atrocities

08:23

Tanit

Germany has caused to other people, because of the racism in the last century that they caused World War II and the Holocaust. It is an extremely touchy subject in Germany to talk about crime rates amongst foreigners or amongst people with a migration background”.

08:39

New Years Eve

08:57

MILLER: It took two days for the police to publicly acknowledge the scale of what had happened. Over the following days and weeks more than 1100 complaints were lodged for crimes including theft and sexual assault – many of the victims young women. One hundred and twenty five men are now under investigation. The majority of suspects are asylum seekers and illegal immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia. Nine are from Syria.

09:01

Mathies

JÜRGEN MATHIES: “Well, we are under the impression – this is not fully supported yet, but a lot of evidence points to it – that we are dealing to a large extent with young men who hadn’t been in Germany for long. There is evidence that in part they were refugees, who possibly did not know how to behave or who brought their own conduct along with them”.

09:35

Miller with Lindemann

MILLER: Lawyer Ingo Lindemann represents some of the men charged with theft on New Year’s Eve.

10:05

INGO LINDEMANN: “Young people who do not have a work permit or a chance to legally obtain some kind of residency status, they are basically waiting to be deported, but this avenue is blocked as their home countries don’t take them back. So they move around in Europe and some of them commit crimes”.

10:11

MILLER: “Can the group of perpetrators be described as refugees? Are they refugees?”

INGO LINDEMANN: “No, not at all, they are not refugees. They don’t have anything in common with the refugees from war areas. It’s simply the economic pressure in their home countries that pushes them towards the promised lands of Europe, as they have no prospects at home”.

10:30

Cologne. Night. Police stop and check

Music

10:53

MILLER: Keeping tabs on the new arrivals is difficult. More than 130,000 of those who came last year have since disappeared. After terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, Europe is increasingly jittery about who it’s letting in and just how porous its borders are.

10:58

Miller with Yassin and others on street

Yassin too is nervous. From Morocco he’s undocumented and is in Germany illegally. He’s worried about getting caught.

YASSIN: “I don’t want to show my face on television”.

MILLER: Yassin came to Germany with the wave of refugees a few months ago. He was there at the train station in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

11:19

YASSIN: “Some guys were stealing and others were touching young girls. The girls pushed them away, but they forced themselves on the girls”.

11:43

MILLER: On camera he won’t admit to committing any crimes himself.

11:56

YASSIN: “I am afraid that after what happened on New Year, they will accuse me of doing something wrong. These people who committed the crimes have left Germany. They’ve gone to Holland, Switzerland, Norway, France, Belgium, to different countries. The people who commit real crimes or have problems with police, won’t stay here”.

12:00

MILLER: “And you know these people, or you just hear these stories that they’re leaving?”

12:26

YASSIN: “No, I don’t know them personally. I used to know some of them from my neighbourhood, but they left”.

12:33

Schwarzer and team around computer

MILLER: For Alice Schwarzer, a magazine publisher in Cologne who led the women’s movement here in the 1970s, what happened on New Year’s Eve threatens the values she fought for.

12:41

Schwarzer

ALICE SCHWARZER: “For me, it’s clearly an Islamist motivation behind this – not an Islamic motivation. I differentiate between the religion and the political strategy. And these Islamists have completely subjugated the women in their countries – they are without any rights, etcetera. And this method of using sexual violence in order to drive women out of the public sphere is widespread in their countries. And I think that now, for the first time, after the Kalashnikovs and suicide belts, the weapon of war of sexual violence against women has arrived in the middle of Europe, in the central station square of Cologne”.

12:57

Schwarzer at meeting

MILLER: Coming from the left, her views seem counter intuitive but Schwarzer says what happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne is the result of years of what she calls ‘misguided tolerance’.

13:41

Schwarzer

ALICE SCHWARZER: “It’s always leaving the foreigners as the foreigners. They are the ‘others’, they are ‘just like that’. They have different customs. Yes, the women don’t get out of the house, the daughters are not allowed to go swimming, the women are covered with the veil, ‘that’s just their way’. But no!”

13:55

MILLER: “Has Germany been looking the other way for too long?”

14:16

ALICE SCHWARZER: “Everyone looked the other way. The parties looked the other way. All of them. The media looked the other way, nobody wanted to admit it. But it has happened in front of our eyes. I’m convinced however, we have, for the first time in Germany since 1945, a growing right-wing movement. There’s always been a small right-wing movement, a few problems too, but a lot smaller than all the neighbouring countries because Germany has really learnt its lesson after the Nazi era. And now, for the very first time, we have growing support for right-wing populists”.

14:19

Pegida rally

[singing]]

14:59

MILLER: The German anti-immigrant movement known as Pegida was flagging last year but it’s been revitalised by the flood of new arrivals.

15:05

PEGIDA RALLY SPEAKER: “We don’t need immigrants to force us to adopt their medieval traditions. We have seen how they treat women. No way. We don’t need these horny ‘rapefugees’ to ruin our culture and we don’t want their vandalism and terrorism here. Shame on you Chancellor Merkel and shame on all your collaborates”.

15:19

PEGIDA RALLY: [crowd chanting] “Merkel must go! Merkel must go!”.

15:46

Woman at rally

PEGIDA RALLY: [German woman] “We don’t support Mrs Merkel’s immigration policies. We want to preserve the culture of our country and the more immigrants who come here, the more our culture and our society will change and we don’t want that”.

15:57

[sign] “Human Rights. No Sharia Worldwide”.

PEGIDA RALLY: [crowd chanting] “Resistance! Resistance!”

16:13

Alternative for Germany Party conference. Applause for Frauke

16:22

MILLER: And this is the other woman in German politics alongside the Chancellor making political

16:30

headlines now. Frauke Petry head of the Alternative for Germany Party. The party is experiencing a huge surge in popularity and that’s partly because it’s tapping into concerns among a growing number of Germans that their voice is not being heard on the refugee issue –

16:35

many people here telling us they think the Chancellor has simply got it wrong.

16:52

Frauke. Super:
FRAUKE PETRY
Leader, Alternative for Germany

FRAUKE PETRY: [Leader, Alternative Party for Germany] Cologne was an accident that waited to happen but it was not a singular event, because at the same time we had similar incidents going on in the north, in the south of Germany, but they were not as well published as the Cologne events. They symbolise a development in Germany that clearly has to do with migration, that clearly has to do with failures in integration policies over the past five decades I would say. So it’s time to wake up that’s what I think Germans now do - and especially women I think now realise that it’s not their classical representatives, such as the Greens, who take action, but it’s us, the Alternative.

16:57

Alternative for Germany Party conference. Applause for Frauke

MILLER: Frauke Petry’s party won between 13% and 24% of the vote in state elections here in March. She’s adored by her own party, but also has many detractors.

17:43

Anti-Frauke demonstrators/performers

Wherever she goes, they turn up too.

17:59

GERMAN WOMAN: “The people that are I there, they are right-wings.

18:12

Woman at protest

They are so right-wing that some of us, me included think they should be forbidden as a party. They are a party and they work with a lot of frightening messages, like any other fascist would do, and so we are here to tell them not all Germany is opposed against refugees. We welcome the refugees and we try to make the best out of the situation. We’re no fascists”.

18:14

Miller with Frauke interview

MILLER: “You were put on the front page of Der Spiegel magazine. The title was, The Hate Preacher. What’s your reaction to that? Are you a preacher of hate?”

FRAUKE PETRY: I’m neither a preacher, nor one of hate. I think looking at this

18:43

De Spiegel cover

Der Spiegel cover makes clear how anxious the other parties are. Yes, in a way it hurts to see oneself presented as that, but I know it’s not true so I’m fairly

18:58

Frauke interview

relaxed about that because I think that citizens start to notice what tendency there is in many German media when it comes to representing or presenting the AFD”.

19:11

Copies of Bild newspaper

19:26

Miller and Tanit looking at newspapers

MILLER: Tanit Koch took over as editor of the Bild Newspaper at the beginning of the year, the first woman to head Europe’s biggest selling daily.

TANIT KOCH: “New Year’s Eve changed a lot among those people who felt they couldn’t

19:35

Tanit. Super:
TANIT KOCH
Editor, Bild Newspaper

openly talk about certain challenges and problems and now feel they can. I think it’s important that Germany finally opens up to a more liberal debating culture because some subjects simply were tabooed.

19:50

Photographs on digital light box

By not talking about certain inconvenient truths, such as lack of integration among some, we’ve allowed populist and more extreme parties and groups to gain followers and traction

20:06

Tanit

because they could always say, ‘Listen, we’re the ones that tell you the truth and all the others, the establishment, they lie to you’.”

20:24

Mario and Miller in Mercedes driving past refugee housing

Music

20:34

MILLER: The migrant influx is costing Germany billions of Euros but Chancellor Merkel is urging her countrymen to see it as less of a burden and more of an opportunity. That’s been heard loud and clear by some in Cologne.

20:39

MARIO ASCANI: “This is a building put up by the city of Cologne. It is a container building for 70 residents. This is also a privately run refugee home, the former sports hotel Flehburg. It can house up to 96 people. It’s exclusively for men travelling alone”.

20:57

MILLER: Mario Ascani volunteers helping refugees. He also owns a refugee hostel in a middle class suburb of Bruke – for that the government pays him up to 35 Euros a day per refugee.

MARIO ASCANI: “During my career so far, thank God, I have been very successful.

21:22

That’s why I can drive an S-class car. Definitely not from working with refugees.

21:44

Mario’s refugee hostel

For the government it’s so hard to find new buildings and to give some rooms to refugees and they ask us, can you please before you have built/complete can you take some refugees. We decide okay we do this”.

21:56

MILLER: At the moment, there are about 70 people staying at Mario’s hostel – when renovations are finished it will house up to 130.

22:12

MARIO ASCANI: “This is a complete kitchen. They can cook here by six people and do their fresh meat - because they have to do their food themselves. There’s no company coming and give food to them. They get some little money and they have to do their food themselves. Like he do” [points to man in kitchen].

MILLER: How much do they get each day?”

22:21

MARIO ASCANI: “About 320 Euros per month”.

22:44

Refugee around hostel

MILLER: Asylum seekers are given somewhere to live and money to live on, while their refugee applications are being processed. It’s a gamble Germany hopes will one day pay off. With the lowest birth rate in the world, the country is in desperate need of workers.

MARIO ASCANI: “Something about 1 million people coming to Germany

22:49

it’s a lot of money you have to pay for. Maybe it’s also good for Germany and for Europe, because the people coming

23:12

Mario

are also human capital. You can build them, you can grow them up to, you can teach them to be really, really useful workers”.

23:22

Miller with Mario and Matins at hostel

MATINS: [at Mario’s hostel] “This is our boss. He is so wonderful”.

MARIO ASCANI: “I’m not a boss. I’m just giving you the space…”.

MATINS: “… they are doing the best for us”.

23:36

MARIO ASCANI: “I know many refugees coming from African countries like these two guys and they are sometimes lazy, they are lazy and they need a woman or someone who tells them every day to do something. But these two guys do by themselves. They ask me can you give me more cleaning material, we want to do this, we want to do that”.

23:47

MILLER: Matins is Nigerian. He’s been living in Germany for the past eight months but he’s been in Europe much longer than that. Before he came here he says he was given asylum in Greece but when the economy there crashed, he headed to Germany believing he too was welcome.

24:18

Matins

MATINS: “I worked in Greece for a good seven years, I paid tax, I paid everything. But the government didn’t recognise you. So that is why I decided when I lost my job that’s when I decided to leave the country for Germany. So when I wanted to leave, because I don’t have document to travel, so the United Nation and the German Government said it’s opened the border”.

24:40

Cologne carnival parade

25:06

MILLER: “The people of Cologne have been celebrating Carnival for centuries.

25:24

Miller to camera at carnival

It is a really big deal in this city - probably the most important day of the year. The city closes down essentially. But this year’s a little bit different and not just because bad weather almost saw it called off.

25:28

Police presence at carnival

There’s a heightened security presence here because of the events of New Year’s Eve,

25:41

Miller to camera at carnival

and ahead of Carnival people have been handing out leaflets, some of them in Arabic, trying to explain this event to the many refugees who have come to this city over the past year. One of the questions on those leaflets, “Do you have to drink to come to a Carnival?” The answer “No, but it might help”.

25:47

Carnival

26:07

Michele and Nina at Carnival

I catch up again with Michele and Nina, two of the victims of the assaults on New Year’s Eve. They’ve come into the city for Carnival, but not without reservations.

26:15

Michele

MICHELE: “Since New Year’s Eve, especially for the people of Cologne, the mood has changed. It feels a bit tense here”.

26:26

Nina

NINA: “Maybe I don’t know in one month or two months I will go more, every weekend outside - but now it’s better to stay at home. It’s more trouble, so it’s better, yeah”.

26:39

New Years Eve

Music

26:51

TANIT KOCH: “Cologne,

27:07

Tanit

it was a wake-up call I think for many”.

MILLER: “A wake up call for the Left in particular?”

TANIT KOCH: “Yes”.

27:08

New Years Eve

Music

27:14

MILLER: “Is there then a Germany before New Year’s Eve and a Germany after New Year’s Eve?”

ALICE SCHWARZER: “I would say yes, I would even say there is a Western Europe before New Year’s Eve and after New Year’s Eve. The Islamists have wanted to disrupt our so-called ‘Welcome Culture’, because it doesn’t fit into the Islamists’ world view.

27:20

Schwarzer

The West has to be cold and the enemy. It can’t be a good friend. And they have succeeded in that “.

27:46

Bell ringing and chanting at end of Carnival

27:55

MILLER: The end of Carnival in Cologne. Six days of drinking, partying and dressing up.

28:08

CROWD: [chanting] “Death to the straw man!”

28:13

Burning of the straw man

MILLER: Before the bonfire is lit, the straw man is ritually blamed for the city’s woes, the high student rents, trouble with the mayor, and the events of New Year’s Eve.

28:25

CARNIVAL MAN: “Whose fault is that we had all that racket at central station on New Year’s Eve?”

CROWD: “It was the straw man!”

CARNIVAL MAN: “Again, louder! 1, 2, 3…”

CROWD: “It was the straw man!”

28:40

MILLER: And then the straw man goes up in flames and with him the sins and the troubles of the past days and weeks. Life in Cologne, according to tradition, returns to normal. Only this year it won’t be that easy.

29:07

Reporter: Barbara Miller

Producer: Sashka Koloff

Camera: David Martin

Research:

Stefan Kunze

Anne Eutin

Jana Bohlmann

Editor: Stuart Miller

Executive producer: Marianne Leitch

abc.net.au/foreign

© 2016

29:55