Police Violence in Berlin

In the last six months human rights officials at both the Council of Europe and the United Nations have written to the German authorities to remind them of their obligation to protect, rather than suppress, freedom of expression and assembly for those engaged in what the UN called Palestine solidarity activism. ‘No circumstances can justify unnecessary and excessive police violence or unjust criminalisation for exercising fundamental freedoms,’ the UN experts wrote.

Germany denies there is a problem. The measures taken against protesters are ‘grounded in the principles of proportionality and non-discrimination’, a senior civil servant at the Interior Ministry replied to the Council of Europe. ‘I do not see any specific details in your letter to support your assessment.’

He needn’t look far. There are dozens of videos showing ‘unnecessary and excessive police violence’ to be found on social media. For example:

While kettling protesters, police punch one of them in the face three times, breaking their nose. They drag them out of the crowd, twisting their arm behind their back and breaking a bone. (Police later told the press that they arrested the demonstrator for using insulting language towards them.)

A woman is walking alone along a pavement on the edges of a demonstration. An officer runs up from behind and pushes her hard: she goes flying and falls to the ground.

Lea Reisner, a Die Linke member of the Bundestag, is at a demonstration wearing a red high-vis vest identifying her as a parliamentary observer. As she walks towards a group of officers, one steps forward and punches her in the face.

A man is being dragged along by two officers. A third reaches around his waist from behind, grabs at his crotch, squeezes his fist and pulls downwards. ‘My balls!’ the man screams in pain as he falls forward.

Similar incidents are described by activists in a report published in July, are recorded in the hundreds of hours of footage preserved by an activist project called the Palestine Solidarity Archive, and have been recounted to me by the more than two dozen people I spoke to while researching this piece.

I asked the Berlin police and the Senate Department for the Interior if they believed that the police have, on any occasion in the last two years, used excessive force against Palestine demonstrators. Both replied in general terms that the police conduct themselves according to the law, meaning that they use force when necessary, as a last resort, in a proportionate manner, and always while prioritising de-escalation. (The Berlin mayor’s office directed my queries to the police; the Federal Interior Ministry did not respond.)

When speaking to the media, the police point to the arrests made at demonstrations and the number of live criminal investigations – more than ten thousand – as evidence of protesters’ lawlessness. ‘If the principle of peacefulness … is abused by participants,’ a police spokesman told me, ‘they could forfeit their constitutionally guaranteed rights … in whole or in part.’

Many arrests are made for speech acts. Germany has designated the phrase ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ as a Hamas slogan: anyone uttering it may be guilty of ‘using [a] sign of an unconstitutional or terrorist organisation’. (Some defendants in Berlin have been convicted of the offence at trial; others have been acquitted.) Germany has some of the most restrictive speech laws in Europe: other offences include insulting a police officer.

A group of five to ten officers will charge into a crowd to snatch a target. The arrestee is grabbed around the head or neck, and anyone in the way will be shoved aside and may be kicked or punched. ‘They put their eye on one target,’ an activist told me, ‘and do whatever they want to get there.’ An arrestee may be punched while being marched to a police van. Pain grips are often applied – nominally a means to secure compliance – whether or not they are necessary. Such arrests are a ‘constant feature’ of demonstrations, according to an activist who has worked with the Arrestee Documentation Unit, which maintains a database on arrests and provides information to defence lawyers. ‘We are surprised when there aren’t violent arrests on a given day.’

Grabbing onto a friend as they are seized by police, or making any physical contact with an officer, can be construed as an aggressive act. Police point to the resulting arrests and subsequent charges for resistance or assault of an officer as proof that violence originates from protesters. (In the absence of video, an officer’s word is often enough to secure a conviction.) Mohamed Amjahid is an investigative journalist who published a book on police violence in Germany last year. ‘In newspapers you are told that police were attacked by antisemitic demonstrators,’ he told me, ‘but online you can see video clips, sometimes ten seconds long, but often several minutes, of police just attacking people.’

In the most prominent case to date of an officer sustaining a serious injury at a demonstration, which received enormous attention from politicians and the media, the police version of events turned out to be untrue: Forensis found after an investigation of video evidence that ‘the [hand] injury suffered by officer 24111 was most likely caused by the officer repeatedly punching protesters in the head.’

Many people have described to me being beaten while pinned on the ground, having their faces ground into the asphalt while being handcuffed or their heads banged against van doors. Cem Ince, a Die Linke member of the Bundestag arrested at a demo a few days after his colleague Reisner, says he was beaten in a police van; several similar incidents have been partially caught on camera before van doors close. There are reports of beatings in police station cells.

Demonstrators are often attacked without being arrested. Searching for evidence against an officer who had kicked her in the crotch, a woman found video of him attacking at least six people in the previous three minutes: kicking, punching, pulling hair, wielding his helmet as a weapon. One man described being put in a headlock and repeatedly punched in the head; the officer only released him when he vomited. Several protesters have been beaten unconscious. A paramedic who volunteers at demonstrations described concussions, broken arms, torn ligaments, chipped teeth, broken noses and cuts that needed stitches.

Most people I spoke to agreed that Arab men are the most at risk of police violence, though others thought that women – of all backgrounds – are more often targeted. One Palestinian who described himself as ‘kind of white passing’ remarked that when police charge at a crowd, ‘whether I’m going to get hit depends on who I am with. When I’m with a group of white blond people, the police would come and hit me; when I’m with a group of Arabs they would pass me and go to the more stereotypical looking Arabs.’

Violence against Arabs and other groups identified as Muslim accords with a logic the police are willing to commit to paper. In justifying the ban of a 2023 Nakba Day protest, they wrote:

The majority of the participants in the demonstration will be younger people from the Arab diaspora, particularly those with a Palestinian background. In addition, other Muslim-influenced groups, primarily from the Lebanese, Turkish and Syrian diasporas, are also expected to take part … Experience shows that this clientele currently has a distinctly aggressive attitude and is not averse to violent acts.

There is no effective system of police accountability. Though some protesters make formal complaints, none of the activists I have spoken to thought these were taken seriously, and they may trigger a retaliatory criminal charge – a view shared by Yaşar Ohle, a criminal defence lawyer who tends to advise his clients against making complaints. As Amjahid lays out in his book, fewer than 2 per cent of complaints lead to a court trial, and fewer than 1 per cent of these trials end in a criminal conviction for the accused officer. In other words, only one complaint in five thousand has the desired effect.

Police violence against demonstrators of course isn’t new. At a Mayday demo in Hamburg in 2023, Benjamin R. suffered a severe brain injury when his head hit the asphalt after he was pushed to the ground. (The police who handed him over to paramedics said he had jumped into a riot shield, even though no shields were in use.) Two weeks ago, police attacked anti-fascist protesters in Gießen, near Frankfurt. Even the use of migration controls against Palestine activists mirrors the treatment of Kurdish activists. Ohle, who also has a migration practice, draws parallels between the criminalisation of slogans relating to Palestine and the way that certain references to Abdullah Öcalan are construed as expressions of support for terrorism.

What is distinct in the Palestine case, however, is the consistent and cumulative use of almost weekly violence for more than two years, in service of a cause central to the German state. The Berlin government has repeatedly shown its willingness to break the law to suppress Palestine activism. The violence is the logical outcome of this political climate. Indeed when filtered through a sympathetic media it may function to make the government’s argument to the public: look at what these people make us do to them.

‘The police got carte blanche,’ Amjahid told me. They ‘were finally liberated from everything to just beat people up’. This accusation is met with official denial, but the frequency, the intensity and the visibility of the violence leave only two possible conclusions: either the Berlin police operate beyond democratic control, or the city’s government wants them to behave like this.