New Year’s youth aggression in Berlin: we must let them know – "you are yours"

Investigation and political discussions do not stop in Germany over the New Year’s pogroms in Berlin.

How to write German press agency dpa, the authorities are facing a new kind of violence. During the riots that took place on New Year’s Eve, emergency services were targeted. Numerous attacks on them took place in Berlin and other cities. Berlin Mayor Franziska Giffey and Interior Minister Nancy Feather spoke to firefighters. Karsten Homrighausen, head of the Berlin fire brigades, said:

“This is a new phenomenon. Our firefighters talk about how they are, for example, lured into a trap and attacked.”

Aggressive-minded teenagers attacked the firefighters in the first place. The authorities of the German capital are still at a loss to draw a collective portrait of these people. The head of the German Interior Ministry believes that the police should reveal the nationality of the attackers:

“One cannot remain silent about the fact that many people had foreign origins. But it should also not be abused for political discussions. Many people living here in Neukoelln have foreign origins, and they are the ones who are most upset and require a strong reaction from the state” .

Katharina Nivedzial, Berlin Commissioner for Integration and Migration, is convinced that punishing migrants will further alienate them from society:

“We give young people a perspective and we see them as our compatriots. They are not strangers. We have to let them know: ‘You are yours’. If we stigmatize them and make them strangers, then we will exacerbate this feeling and the danger that the group more. And we must prevent it at all costs.”