Do Germany's politicians understand the magnitude of what is happening there?

New Year's Eve in Germany

The staff of Der Spiegal in Germany report on the events in Cologne on New Year's Eve:

...On New Year's Eve in Cologne, it was -- according to numerous witness reports -- drunk young men from North Africa who formed gangs to go after defenseless individuals. They humiliated and robbed -- and they sexually assaulted women.

...Two months after the attacks in Paris, one can have one's doubts as to whether Cologne represents a "completely new dimension of violence," as has been repeated by both police officials and politicians. What is clear, however, is that the police were unprepared and that they failed. The officers on site were reduced by the circumstances they faced to playing a pitiable role.

...The stories of Lara, Jeanette and Paul, three university students from Bonn, paint a vivid picture of what so many women experienced on New Year's Eve. The trio had traveled to Cologne with two other female friends because the parties there are simply better than they are in Bonn. They arrived at the square in front of the train station just as the police were clearing it. They didn't know what was going on -- all they saw was police officers in helmets pushing people back. They continued on to the banks of the Rhine River, a vantage point from which they could view the fireworks, when Jeanette realized that her money, ID and entry ticket for that night's club had been stolen.

Just the Beginning

At midnight, they shared a bottle of cheap champagne out of plastic cups and then headed back to the central train station. In front of the stairs leading from the cathedral down to the train station, they had to squeeze past a large group of men. They locked hands, letting Jeanette take the lead because she knew judo. Paul tried to provide some cover for the girls. At one point, Lara cried out: "Someone just grabbed my crotch!" That was just the beginning.

Hands seemed to come from every direction to grab the women's bodies. They always went for between the legs. Paul's attempts to protect the women were futile. Providing cover for one left another to fend for herself. "It was one hand after another," Jeanette says. She was able to throw one attacker "really violently to the side" with a judo grip.

None of the three students can say for sure who attacked them. They are, however, all in agreement that all of the men surrounding them were speaking the same language, and that it sounded a lot like Arabic.

What Lara, Jeanette and Paul experienced in Cologne wasn't unique to that city. Police reports indicate that a large group of men also gathered along the famous street in Hamburg's St. Pauli district known as Grosse Freiheit, most of whom were probably of North African descent. These men committed a series of "property thefts with sexual components."

In Stuttgart, a 20-year-old Iraqi has been in custody since the morning of Jan. 1 for allegedly groping two women at the city's Schlossplatz square. Police in Frankfurt am Main have reported similar incidents.

Jeanette and Lara, the two students from Bonn, went to the police six days after New Year's to file complaints for sexual assault. "We want this to be documented," Lara says. It makes them furious to read in the newspaper that what happened in Cologne came from the pickpocket milieu. The way Lara sees it: "We were systematically sexually harassed."
...Cologne's central train station isn't far from the tower where the office of one of Germany's leading feminists, Alice Schwarzer, is located. It is from there that she broadcasts her commentaries on current events out into the world. When it comes to the sexual assaults on New Year's Eve in Cologne, Schwarzer speaks of "war" and "terror."

"Young men of Arab or North African descent are playing war in the middle of Cologne," she writes, describing a "gang-bang party and 1,000 men who were acting as if they were at Tahrir Square in Cairo, dreaming of being heroes like their brothers in the civil wars of North Africa and the Middle East." They are a product, Schwarzer says, of misplaced tolerance in this country.

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