The number of investigations into antisemitism has fluctuated in Lower Saxony in recent years. This can have different reasons. A guide is intended to make the work of police officers easier.
Lower Saxony’s public prosecutor’s offices initiated more investigations into anti-Jewish activities last year than a year earlier. In 2021 there were 253 procedures, a year earlier 179, as Justice Minister Barbara Havliza (CDU) said in Hanover today. In 2019 there were a total of 225 preliminary investigations.
The minister sees a reason for the rather fluctuating numbers in the willingness to report these acts. “The fact that the numbers in the bright field fluctuate slightly does not mean that the dark field is going up or down accordingly.”
The minister also said that it was particularly important to recognize anti-Semitic crimes as such, to clearly name them and to pursue them consistently. Anti-Semitic references are often not openly propagated.
Katarzyna Miszkiel-Deppe from the Research and Information Center for Anti-Semitism (RIAS) in Lower Saxony said that anti-Semitism can be found in all social classes.
According to the minister, most of the allegations in the past year were incitement to the masses, depictions of violence or the use of symbols belonging to unconstitutional and terrorist organizations. “Anti-Semitic crimes and how they are dealt with have a direct impact on Jewish life here in Lower Saxony.”
One cannot say that Corona has nothing to do with the increase. The public prosecutor’s office in Göttingen has initiated around 30 proceedings since July 2020 because the Star of David with the inscription “unvaccinated” was used on the Internet.
The minister also presented new guidelines intended, among other things, to make the work of the police and judicial authorities easier in connection with anti-Semitic crimes. A key element of this guide is a checklist that is intended to make it easier to classify a possible anti-Semitic motivation for criminal offenses.
This checklist is arranged according to different categories, such as the location of an act or whether symbols were recognizable. Questions include, for example, whether the incident happened near a synagogue, on a Holocaust memorial day, or whether the people who were attacked were clearly identifiable as Jews, for example by wearing a yarmulke. This is intended to make the authorities even more aware of the issue.
