New data from the Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany (BKA) has revealed that 2023 witnessed an alarming 32% year-over-year increase in knife attacks at train stations. This is nearly double the number of attacks recorded in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Federal Interior Ministry, which oversees all activities of the BKA, released the crime figures in response to an information request from anti-globalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) MP Martin Hess, revealing that 1,160 knife attacks took place in 2023, up from 882 last year.
Foreign nationals made up 51% of the suspects identified in the criminal incidents involving knives, despite comprising 16% of the entire population of Germany. Although German passport holders, meanwhile, constituted 44% of the suspects, it is unclear whether those individuals have migrant backgrounds or not since this information isn’t included in official crime statistics. The nationality of the remaining suspects, those implicated in 270 cases, could not be determined.
Syrian nationals lead the list of non-German suspects, at 40, followed by Poles (34), Turks (21), Afghans (19), Algerians (18), Moroccans (17), Iraqis (15), Romanians (15), Tunisians (15), and Ukrainians (12).
AfD MP Martin Hess, who serves as the AfD Bundestag faction’s deputy domestic policy spokesman, was quick to link the sharp uptick in knife crimes to immigration flows. “This brutal form of crime is largely a direct result of unchecked mass migration,” he said, adding that Interior Minister Faeser is neglecting and endangering “the lives and health of citizens by her backward priorities.”
Therefore, Hess continued, there is a need for “competent staff in the government again who can guarantee an honest approach to the real causes of the constantly increasing knife crime and thus create more transparency in this regard.”
“On this basis, there must then be an immediate and fundamental turnaround in migration policy,” he concluded.
In response to the unsettling figures, Deputy Federal Chairman of the DpolG Federal Police Union Manuel Ostermann (CDU) is advocating for the immediate enforcement of three measures to enhance safety at train stations and to better equip federal police officers for knife attacks:
- Arming officers with Tasers: “The widespread use of distance electrical impulse devices—popularly known as Tasers—would be an absolutely effective measure,” Ostermann said, noting that “with a Taser, a knife attacker can be made incapable of acting and arrest at a medium distance, without endangering colleagues or third parties—and also without the need for potentially life-threatening use of firearms.”
- Using camera systems that can automatically detect unusual situations: “Modern, semi-automated analysis systems recognize when something unusual happens, for example when someone faints or a scuffle breaks out—so the emergency or rescue services are alerted immediately and can intervene or help,” Ostermann told the German news portal NiUS.
- Weapons-free zones in violent hotspots: The Federal Police Union, Ostermann said, is demanding general orders to be issued in and around the hotspot train stations with the most crime so that these are declared “weapons-free zones.”
Weapons-free zones need to be established “in and around the stations so that the state police, who are usually responsible outside the buildings, can intervene, check and seize prohibited items such as knives,” the police union chief said.
