Assaults stoke fear among Germany’s migrants

MAGDEBURG, Germany — Just a few hours after a Saudi man drove his car into a crowded Christmas market in this eastern German city in December, killing several and injuring hundreds more, a 13-year-old Syrian boy was in an elevator across town when an adult neighbor grabbed him by the throat.

The attack happened “because of people like you,” the man allegedly told the boy, who had come to Germany as a refugee.

The Magdeburg Christmas market attack helped reshape the campaign ahead of Germany’s Feb. 23 election, putting migration front and center and prompting top politicians to vow to drastically reduce the number of asylum seekers entering the country. But it has also had very real consequences for immigrants and people of color.

The attacker in Magdeburg was an anti-Islam activist who sympathized with far-right ideas, but extreme-right groups have focused on one detail: that he is an immigrant from Saudi Arabia. Since the attack, immigrants — or those perceived as immigrants — have been subject to a fresh wave of violence and racist abuse.

“People are very worried,” said Aras Badr, an anti-discrimination adviser who works for a network of immigrant organizations, known as LAMSA, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where Magdeburg is located. “Many people are now considering leaving … and it’s exactly what the right-wing extremists here hope to accomplish.”

Since the Christmas market attack, organizations that document hate crimes have seen a big increase in violent assaults on migrants. In the six weeks following the market attack, Mobile Opferberatung, a nonprofit organization that works with victims of hate crime — including the 13-year-old Syrian boy — documented 20 such cases, including 15 cases of assault. It’s a considerable rise over the same period in previous years, and experts warn that there could be many more such cases, as they often go unreported.

“For everyone else who belongs to this group, who looks a certain way, who speaks German with an accent, it is a signal: ‘That can happen to me too,’” said Antje Arndt, a project leader at Mobile Opferberatung.

The spate of attacks in Magdeburg comes at a time when mainstream politicians are taking an increasingly tough line on migration in response to a series of high-profile crimes blamed on immigrants. Last month, an Afghan man authorities said had a history of mental illness, was accused of attacking a group of pre-school children in a park in Bavaria with a knife, killing one child and a man who was trying to protect the group.

That attack shocked Germans and prompted Friedrich Merz, the conservative candidate for chancellor, to take a much harder line on migration, vowing to turn asylum seekers away at the border should he come to power. Merz also moved to accept the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to push through tougher migration measures in parliament, breaking a longstanding taboo by weakening the postwar quarantine of the far right.

Migrants’ rights activists say growing anti-immigration sentiment in Germany is having a palpable effect on the ground. In Magdeburg, the Christmas market attack appears to have spurred a series of extremist revenge attacks.

Badr’s organization, LAMSA, documented 30 incidents involving racist attacks and discrimination in the month following the attack, he said. Normally, the organization documents five or six cases per month.

In recent weeks, migrants in Magdeburg have allegedly been spat on, punched in the face, and in once case, sent to the hospital with loose teeth, migrant groups have reported. They’ve had racist epithets flung at them in public transit, swastikas spray-painted on their front doors and letters dropped in their mailboxes telling them to go back to where they came from.

Saxony-Anhalt, like much of the former East Germany, is a stronghold for the AfD. The party is at 31 percent support in the state, according to polls, while on the national level the party is at 22 percent. The local domestic intelligence agency has classified the AfD’s state branch as an extremist organization and AfD campaign posters in the state call for “a country that remains a homeland” — a not-so-subtle call to rid the country of immigrants.

At the AfD’s kickoff campaign rally in the state, party leader and chancellor candidate Alice Weidel vowed to carry out “large-scale repatriations” of immigrants — or as party members euphemistically call it, “re-migration.”

“A lot of people feel frightened in general because of far-right extremism,” said Matthias Quent, an expert on far- and extreme-right movements at the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences. But, he added, those feelings are compounded for immigrants because they get the impression that “there seems to be a broad coalition throughout all political parties to say that migration in general is a problem.”

In Magdeburg, the 13-year-old boy’s family filed a report with the police, according to Mobile Opferberatung, and officers were able to identify his attacker. The police confirmed to POLITICO that the incident had taken place, but would not comment further while the investigation is ongoing.

In the days that followed the Christmas market attack, far-right and extremist groups quickly moved to exploit anti-migrant sentiment. Some 2,000 right-wing extremists took to the streets in Magdeburg the day after the attack, marching behind a giant banner that read “RE-MIGRATION.” Days later, the AfD held an event of its own, at which a crowd of supporters chanted, “Deport! Deport!”

Badr said some migrants have chosen to leave the area — and many more want to leave — given the ever-harsher climate.

“The right-wing extremists want ‘re-migration,’” he said. “And I think here in the east, in Saxony-Anhalt or in Magdeburg, they’ve already partially succeeded.”

This story has been updated.