German police crime statistics presented in April grossly undercounted the number of knife attacks perpetrated in the country. The statistics presented by the President of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) Holger Münch and the Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) counted 8,160 knife attacks. Official figures from Germany’s federal states and state criminal investigation offices have revealed that the real number of knife attacks is significantly higher.
If one takes into account figures recorded and published by the state criminal police offices in Germany’s 16 federal states, the total number of knife attacks across the entire country exceeded 21,000 in 2022, which amounts to a staggering 60 attacks every single day, the German online magazine Tichy’s Einblick reports.
The magazine cites a report published by the Conference of Interior Ministers on police crime statistics for 2022 which mentions another knife attack figure, namely, “knife attacks in robbery crimes,” which amounted to 4,195 in 2022. Adding this figure to the number of knife attacks presented by the BKA chief and interior minister brings the number of attacks to 12,355, more than 30 per day.
Furthermore, individual federal states and their state criminal investigations have recorded their own figures on knife attacks, and while these numbers are not complete everywhere, based on the data that has been released, which Tichy’s Einblick meticulously counted, 21,000 knife attacks took place in Germany in 2022—a number far larger than the 8,000 purported by the federal government.
The magazine writes that the 21,000 figure is “the lower limit of the phenomenon” since some federal states have ambiguous definitions for what constitutes a “knife act” versus a “knife attack.”
Figures from the various State Criminal Police Offices, which Tichy’s Einblick cites in its report, revealed that knife attacks were the most prevalent in Berlin, at 90 per 100,000 inhabitants (a total of 3,317 in 2022). After Berlin, Lower Saxony recorded the highest number of knife attacks per inhabitant, at 35 per 100,000 (a total of 2,377 in 2022), while North Rhine Westphalia was next on the list, having recorded 5,100 knife attacks in 2022, or 28 per 100,000 inhabitants. Fourth on the list is Baden-Württemberg, which recorded 2,727 knife attacks, or 25 per 100,00 inhabitants.
When asked by Tichy’s Einblick why such a massive discrepancy between the figures recorded by the state criminal police offices and those provided by the federal crime statistics and interior ministry exists, the BKA confirmed that “categories were omitted” and “could not be named.”
The news comes months after Ibrahim. A., a 34-year-old Palestinian, carried out a deadly knife rampage on a regional train to Hamburg that resulted in the untimely deaths of two young people and saw five others injured. In 2022, knife attacks on trains and at train stations in Germany more than doubled.
In France, which in terms of its multicultural trajectory is slightly ahead of Germany, knife attacks are even more widespread, with a 2020 study by the National Observatory of Delinquency and Criminal Responses (ONDRP) revealing that more than 120 people are victims of knife crimes each day.
