German victims group warns about underreporting of racist violence

A counselling group that supports victims of right-wing violence warned on Monday that German police and investigators are underreporting such incidences at a much higher rate, reported dpa.

"We have to assume from the experience of the last two years that the extent of underreporting of right-wing violence by the police and investigating authorities has increased dramatically," according to Robert Kusche, a board member of the Association of Counselling Centres for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence (VBRG).

He made his comments to the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland news outlet. The group is scheduled to make a presentation on the nationwide statistics on politically motivated crime on Tuesday.

Kusche said the extent of politically motivated crime, which is supposedly unclassifiable, has "virtually tripled in just two years."

According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), there was an increase of more than 147% in 2021 in crimes that were not assigned to any specific ideology by the police. BKA President Holger Münch saw a connection with the protests against government measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

There could only be two reasons for the drastic increase in "unattributable" offences "and both are dramatic," Kusche said.

"Either the law enforcement agencies are unable to recognize that modern right-wing extremism has only changed garb, but not ideology. Because at the core of the conspiracy narratives lies anti-Semitism and racism," he said.

Or, in the minds of the investigating authorities, right-wing perpetrators of violence are "still the Nazi skinheads of the 1990s - and not the family men who vote for the [right-wing Alternative for Germany] AfD, listen to right-wing rock and have a house, a child and a middle-class job, and in their free time join, for example, Corona deniers' demonstrations or racist mobilizations."

The suspicion is that right-wing acts of violence are deliberately depoliticized by moving them into the category of "unclassifiable," said Kusche.