Close Quarters: Asylum Shelters in Germany Struggle with Violence

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/asylum-shelters-in-germany-struggle-with-refugee-violence-a-1056393.html



There has been a rising number of violent incidents in German refugee hostels in recent weeks and concern is growing among officials. But some communities are finding creative ways to make life more tolerable in the asylum homes.

Close Quarters: Asylum Shelters in Germany Struggle with Violence
October 06, 2015 – 06:23 PM

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Mounting Tensions

There have been other violent outbreaks at hostels in Ellwangen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Suhl in Thuringia, Bramsche in Lower Saxony, Trier in Rhineland-Palatinate, Heidenau in Saxony, as well as in Dresden and Leipzig. Indeed, an explosive mood is developing in many of the refugee camps across Germany, most of which have become overcrowded. Police situation reports from across the country describe a growing propensity to violence in the hostels.

In one refugee hostel in the town of Königsbrunn in Bavaria, police claim to have found machetes constructed using bed frames -- "two approximately one-meter-long (three-foot-long) pipes with knives attached to them," as well as a "chair leg whose tip had been shaped into a club and four iron pipes, each about one meter in length."

At the beginning of September, inside a trade fair exhibition hall that had been converted into a refugee hostel in the town of Sinsheim in Baden-Württemberg, 200 to 300 asylum-seekers began fighting. A police report notes that security guards were so frightened after a man accused of participating in the brawl pulled a knife on them that they fled the scene.

In August alone, police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia were dispatched 926 times to refugee accommodations -- far more frequently than in previous months. Often they are responding to reports of bodily injury, but other times it's as simple as someone having pulled the fire alarm. Rainer Wendt, the head of DPolG, Germany's second-largest police union, says that officials are "facing the greatest challenge in postwar history."