More than half of new police recruits in Berlin require remedial German lessons—yet another sign that successive German governments have promoted large-scale immigration without ensuring proper integration.
According to figures released by the Berlin police, 132 of the 240 officer cadets who began their training in spring 2025 need extra German tuition—a staggering 55%.
Police officials said that written language skills have steadily declined in Germany and are not a police-specific problem but a “societal issue.”
They cited the lack of qualified teaching staff and “heterogeneity in classes” in Berlin schools as underlying causes.
Officers must meet the highest standards of written and spoken German, with recruits required to reach C2 level—the equivalent of a native speaker. Failure to do so leads to dismissal.
The trend is not confined to the capital. In Hamburg, nearly two-thirds of applicants to the police force failed the entrance language test in late 2024. The city’s police blamed homeschooling during the pandemic and a broader shift in communication habits in the digital age.
However, the fact remains that more than one in three police trainees in the capital has a migrant background, and there are more and more reports of children who cannot understand basic German.
Germany has welcomed millions of migrants over the past two decades while doing little to secure their integration.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, a teacher recently reported that classes were nearly impossible to conduct because 98% of pupils had migrant roots, many arriving with no German at all.
Zoltán Kottász is a journalist for europeanconservative.com, based in Budapest. He worked for many years as a journalist and as the editor of the foreign desk at the Hungarian daily, Magyar Nemzet. He focuses primarily on European politics.
