New Year's Eve violence - Quarter of the German arrested has double pass

The processing of the New Year's Eve violence is progressing slowly. It can now be said with certainty that a large majority of the suspects arrested have an immigrant background: at least 111 of the 145 arrested immigrated to Germany themselves or are descendants of immigrants.

Three days after the turn of the year, the Berlin police announced that 45 of the 145 people arrested were German. The Berlin police have now informed WELT on request that eleven of the 45 people with German nationality have another nationality: three have Turkish, two have Lebanese and one each have Tunisian, Romanian, Jordanian, Iraqi and French. In the case of one person, the second nationality was therefore unclear.

Among the 100 people arrested without a German passport, Afghans (27) and Syrians (21) were the largest groups.

So far, there is no information on how many of the people have a migration background. According to the definition of the Federal Statistical Office, all people living in Germany have such a migration background if they were born without German citizenship or if their parents were born without a German passport.

On the one hand, this statistical category provides a good overview of how strongly a phenomenon is influenced by immigration. On the other hand, many politicians perceive this category as exclusionary because it statistically sorts people who were born here or who have long been naturalized here into a group with a migration background.

Hubert Aiwanger, Bavarian Economics Minister, accuses the Berlin politicians in the WELT interview of holding a "protective hand" over the New Year's Eve attackers and instead starting an "absurd ban on firecrackers debate". "Anyone who attacks the police in this way has to go to prison," said Aiwanger.

Source: WORLD | Fanny Fee Werther and Thomas Klug

Against this background, there have long been efforts to abolish the category nationwide; this is already largely the case in government reporting on crime. And so, even after the New Year's Eve riots, the composition of those arrested according to migration background was not disclosed.

In order to get a somewhat better picture of the migrant component of the riots, the CDU parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives asked the Senate for the first names of the suspects.

Many left-wing politicians rated this interest in knowledge as inadmissible. The SPD domestic politician Helge Lindh struck a particularly sharp tone: “The racialization by name stands in the tradition of the Nazi naming policy. We are witnessing a national-racist wave of disinhibition by the CDU," wrote the member of the Bundestag on Twitter regarding the request.

In the past there had already been a number of attempts to gain more insight into the migrant component of crime phenomena by determining first names. For example, the Ministry of the Interior in North Rhine-Westphalia listed all “first names and number of German suspects” with regard to the suspects at Cologne Central Station in the reporting period from January 1, 2021 to November 30, 2021.

Among them were mostly names from non-European cultures. The most common first name of the German suspects was Mohamed (30) followed by Ali (twelve), Mohamad (eleven) and Mohammed (ten). Nine each were Daniel, Hamza, Abdullah and Ahmed, followed by Ahmad, Bilal, Dennis, Michael and Sebastian (eight each). Of course, the vast majority of Mohameds, Sebastians and Bilals in this country do not become criminals, just as almost all Berliners - whether they immigrated recently, a long time ago or not at all - did not commit any crimes on New Year's Eve.

"Kick-off Politics" is WELT's daily news podcast. The most important topic analyzed by WELT editors and the dates of the day. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, among others, or directly via RSS feed.