More than 130 people were killed in racist street violence in Germany, in the years between 1990 and 2010, according to the German newspaper
Die Zeit.
[6] Only some of the most publicly noted cases are listed below. In particular, after
German reunification in the 1990s a wave of racist street violence claimed numerous lives, with notable incidents including the arson attack of Mölln and the
Riot of Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, the
Solingen arson attack of 1993, and the attack on
Noël Martin in 1996.
Eighty Nazi skinheads went on the rampage, attacking Turkish and African immigrant workers in the German city of
Magdeburg on May 12, 1994. Far from stopping the attack, at one point police joined in, holding down the victims while their attackers beat them.
[7]
In 2006, a black German citizen of Ethiopian descent named as Ermyas M., an engineer was beaten into a coma by two unknown assailants who called him "******" in an unprovoked attack that has reawakened concern about racist violence in eastern Germany.
[8] He was waiting for a tram in
Potsdam, near Berlin, when two people approached him shouting "******". When he objected, they attacked him with a bottle and beat him to the ground.
[9]
Also in 2006, German-Turkish politician
Giyasettin Sayan, a member of Berlin's regional assembly, was attacked by two men who called him a "dirty foreigner". Sayan, who represents the Left party, suffered head injuries and bruising after his attackers struck him with a bottle in a street in his Lichtenberg ward in the East of the city.
[10]
In August 2007, a mob consisting of about 50 Germans attacked 8 Indian street vendors during a town festival in the town of
Muegeln near Leipzig.
[11][12] The victims found shelter in a pizzeria owned by Kulvir Singh, one of those being chased, but the mob broke through the doors and destroyed Singh's car. All eight were injured and it took 70 police to quell the violence
[13]
In 2009, the
murder of Marwa El-Sherbini caused considerable public reaction in Germany and other countries. Al-Sherbini, a 32-year-old Egyptian national, was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom on July 1, 2009 by Alex Wiens, an ethnic German immigrant from Russia. She had been in court to testify against Wiens who had before racially insulted her for wearing a headscarf. Her husband, Egyptian academic Elwy Ali Okaz, was critically wounded in the attack when he tried to take on Wiens, being stabbed by him and shot by court security who thought he was the attacker.
There is evidence that, in 2015, Professor
Annette Beck-Sickinger at the
University of Leipzig in Germany
rejected Indian candidates on the basis of racism and stereotyping. The incidents were so severe - amid shock that they were perpetrated by an apparently 'educated' woman - that Germany's ambassador to India wrote a strongly-worded letter condemning the professor, stating: "Your oversimplifying and discriminating generalization is an offense ... to millions of law-abiding, tolerant, open-minded and hard-working Indians," he wrote. "Lets be clear: India is not a country of rapists."
[14] [15][16] The criticised mail traffic was reviewed by the university and student representatives. Although the student representatives had criticised Prof. Dr. Beck-Sickinger for her behaviour, both the university and the student representatives concluded that the original publication of mail traffic was faked and there were no reasons to conclude that the Indian candidate was denied access to the program for racist reasons.
[17][18]
