The victim counseling center EZRA presented its annual statistics for the independent monitoring of right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic violence in Thuringia for the year 2021 on Wednesday. A total of 119 right-wing, racist and antisemitic violent crimes were registered in Bavaria, directly affecting at least 177 people. Including 27 children. The most common motive remains racism (80 cases / 67 percent), followed by attacks on alleged political opponents (19 cases / 16 percent) and journalists (8 cases / 7 percent). The majority of attacks involve bodily harm offenses (84 cases / 71 percent) including the attempt. Most attacks were again counted in Erfurt (28 cases) and Jena (16 cases). A total of 234 people were supported by EZRA in 2021.
“Racist violence increased in Thuringia last year and has thus returned to the level of 2015,” EZRA project coordinator Franz Zobel makes clear. The year 2015 marked the beginning of a wave of racist violence, which also led to numerous attacks on refugee accommodation. A current study by the Gera-Eisenach Cooperative State University also confirms what those affected and specialist victim counseling centers like EZRA have been saying for years, Zobel emphasizes: “Racial experiences are part of everyday life in Thuringia and are only insufficiently recorded by existing statistics. In fact, we are dealing with an enormous number of unreported cases.” Only recently, the MDR Thuringia reported on the representative survey of the university, according to which nine out of ten respondents from Gera with an immigrant background have experienced racism in the past five years.
For the first time in 2021, attacks in the context of the corona pandemic were registered as right-wing violent crimes. A total of 14 cases are related to corona. In another 13 cases, further information was missing to classify them as right-wing violence or a threat. “In many of these cases, however, we also assume that ideologies such as conspiracy narratives, anti-Semitism or right-wing threat myths are behind the acts,” explains victim advisor and sociologist Theresa Lauß, who is responsible for statistical recording at EZRA. She emphasizes: “In connection with the corona pandemic, we have seen a significant increase in right-wing attacks on journalists, including at the ‘lateral thinking’ demonstrations, which are also an expression of years of enemy marking by extreme right-wing actors such as the AfD are.”
“Looking ahead to 2022, we consider the risk of a further escalation of racism, such as racist terrorist attacks, to be extremely high. We see the reasons for this in particular in the racist debates in public, such as about ‘real’ and ‘fake’ refugees, in widespread racism and in the high mobilization potential of the extreme right,” warns the project coordinator of the Thuringian victim advice center. He attests that state politics failed to implement measures that would have resulted from the two NSU investigative committees and the racism commission of inquiry in order to take decisive action against racism, antisemitism and neo-Nazism. “Moreover, the majority of non-affected society must take responsibility. This also includes social actors:
Only those cases are included in the statistics in which, based on fixed criteria set as quality standards by the Association of Counseling Centers for Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence eV (VBRG) and which are based on the Federal Criminal Police Office’s definition of “politically motivated crime – right” orientate yourself, a right-wing motive for the crime is recognizable. Not all cases published in the EZRA chronicle are included in the statistics and vice versa.
EZRA is sponsored by the Evangelical Church in Central Germany (EKM) . Since April 2011, the counseling center has been supporting people who are being attacked because perpetrators assign them to a group of people they reject. The victim counseling center is financed by the federal program “Live democracy! ” and the Thuringian state program for democracy, tolerance and cosmopolitanism “DenkBunt” .
