At 8:57 a.m. on the morning of January 1, the Cologne police department's press department released a statement under the heading: "Festive Atmosphere -- Celebrations Largely Peaceful." But that isn't how Cologne police officer Hermann Wohlfahrt had experienced the previous evening.
Wohlfahrt has been a police officer for almost 20 years and has seen a lot: hooligan battles and melees between neo-Nazis and anarchists, for example. When speaking with SPIEGEL about New Year's Eve, he asked that his real name not be used. Wohlfahrt is a pseudonym.
His street shift began at 10 p.m. and he had been assigned the area around the cathedral and some of the main streets nearby. Some 80 riot police from the 14th Company were on duty that night, which was twice as many as had been patrolling the streets the previous year -- an increase that was largely due to fears of terrorist attacks. The Cologne police station had requested the full complement of 124 riot police, but the state police headquarters denied the request.
In the preparatory meeting at 9 p.m., just prior to his deployment, Wohlfahrt learned that there was an unexpected situation at the main train station. In a statement issued later, the police summarized the situation as: "400 to 500 apparently intoxicated persons engaging in conspicuously aggressive behavior. The majority are male and they are firing off firecrackers and rockets in an uncontrolled manner." In an internal report from Jan. 2, these men were surprisingly quickly, and without any confirmation whatsoever, described as "refugees." Shortly before 11 p.m., the police began speaking of more than 1,000 people, mostly men and mostly of "North African or Arab origin."
At the taxi stand on the square, two young women climbed into Lucia Keller's vehicle and asked her to take them to Breslauer Square, located on the other side of the train station. Keller had been waiting for a fare for an hour and didn't know what was going on in the area, so she asked the two women why they didn't just walk through the train station to the other side. "We don't want to go through there," was the response. They had already seen what was going on inside.
Hermann Wohlfahrt arrived in front of the train station at around 10:50 p.m. His estimate for the number of men in the square in front of the station and on the stairs leading up to the cathedral is between 1,000 and 1,500. He watched as some of them aimed fireworks at others. And he was surprised that the men seemed completely unimpressed by the police presence.
A Policewoman Under Attack
Wohlfahrt doesn't know where the men were from. He recalls that some of them kept shouting the French phrase "Pas de problème!", which means "no problem," and then continued lighting off their fireworks. "We had no effect on the atmosphere whatsoever," Wohlfahrt says. Colleagues of his reported seeing two Moroccans trying to take a mobile phone from an Iranian refugee, but it is impossible to confirm that story. It is neither clear that the attackers were from Morocco nor that their victim was from Iran, much less a refugee from Iran.
Wohlfahrt first heard reports of sexual assaults over his police radio. He also heard that a female colleague had become a victim of violence. She had been together with two other officers dressed in civilian clothes in order to track down pickpockets and petty thieves when she was surrounded and indecently touched while others tried to steal her bag. From a police report, Wohlfahrt later learned that, because of the "complexity of the situation as a whole," the "deployment of uniformed officers" to protect the policewoman "had not been possible."
By a quarter past 11, all officers belonging to the 14th Company had arrived at the main train station and began clearing the square shortly thereafter, with federal police officers blocking the entrances and exits to the main train station. The operation lasted 40 minutes, whereupon parts of the 14th Company were ordered to deploy to other parts of the Cologne city center. Around 40 officers remained behind at the cathedral and they watched as the area once again began to fill with people. The police established two corridors: One on the narrow area between the top of the stairs and the cathedral, and the other at the entrance to the train station. Several people asked police for an escort, including, as the police report makes clear, many who themselves had "immigration backgrounds."
One of them stopped Hermann Wohlfahrt not long after midnight and asked him if such events are typical for New Year's celebrations in Germany.
It took four days before an officer with the federal police force put into writing what, from Wohlfahrt's perspective, really happened that night. The author makes it clear that the escalation that took place prior to the clearing of the square was caused by "persons with migration backgrounds." Later on in the "deployment report," it says that an identification of the perpetrators "was unfortunately not possible."
'Serious Injuries or Even Deaths'
His report reads like the protocol of a massacre. "Upon arrival," it begins, "we were informed of the conditions in and around the station by agitated citizens with crying and shocked children." Many "upset passersby" ran to the arriving police to tell them about fights, thefts and sexual attacks against women.
Regarding the situation on the square in front of the train station: "Women, accompanied or not, had to run a literal 'gauntlet' of heavily intoxicated masses of men of a kind that is impossible to describe." There were fears that "the situation we were confronted with (chaos) could have led to serious injuries or even to deaths."
Chaos and Violence: How New Year's Eve in Cologne Has Changed Germany - SPIEGEL ONLINE
rather than an offshoot of war breakdown of law and order and normal behaviour.
