Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

CRIME

Xenophobia widespread among German youth

A new study released this week shows xenophobic attitudes are widespread among German youth and many of the country’s teenagers have far-right extremist and anti-Semitic leanings.

Published: 18 March 2009 07:42 CET
Xenophobia widespread among German youth
A rally in Berlin for far-right youth centre in 2008. Photo: DPA

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said he was “shocked” by the findings of a survey on youth violence, even though the survey showed it to be on the decline.

Presented by Christian Pfeiffer from Lower Saxony’s institute for criminology, the study found 14.4 percent – or roughly one in seven of the German 15-year-olds surveyed – held strongly xenophobic views. Nearly five percent of the boys and 2.6 percent of the girls even admitted to belonging to a far-right extremist group.

“This has to wake us up to the fact that a higher percentage of boys in west and east Germany have been pulled into the wake of the far-right,” Pfeiffer said at a press conference in Berlin on Tuesday.

Almost a third of German youth agreed with the statement: “There are too many foreigners in Germany.” And nearly 40 percent believed most foreigners were criminals.

More than five percent of those surveyed showed strongly anti-Semitic attitudes.

The study polled some 45,000 youths with an average age of 15 in 2007 and 2008 across Germany.

CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

SHOW COMMENTS