Germany - Anti-Semitic Attacks in 2008

This page is part of a section on "2008 List of Anti-Semitic Attacks" maintained by PaulaSays. This is only a partial list. If you know of an attack not reported on these pages, please send a note to .

• January: A group of youths in central Berlin shouted anti-Semitic slurs and set a dog on five students who were leaving a Jewish school yesterday, according to police. Two main suspects, age 27 and 31, were to appear in court today after police arrested four "punks'' following the incident, police spokesman Klaus Schubert said. The students, age 15 to 17, were leaving their school on Grosse Hamburger Strasse in Berlin's Mitte district at around 2:45 p.m. local time. As the students approached a nearby corner, the suspects began shouting anti-Semitic words and had a dog chase one of the Jewish students to a local bakery, Schubert said. Witnesses called the police; the students were unhurt.
• January: In Angermuende - A gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Angermuende, near Berlin, was vandalized with a swastika.
• January: In Berlin - In a Jewish cemetery in the eastern part of Berlin, vandals damaged a window of the Lapidarium building, which houses gravestones dating to the 19th and early 20th century.
• January: In Berlin - A window of a Jewish institution in the western part of Berlin was damaged by gunfire, according to police reports.
• February: Unknown perpetrators attacked and vandalized a Jewish nursery school in the German capital. The Jewish community in Berlin is now calling on Germans to join them in a prayer service on Thursday. Representatives from the Gan-Israel Jewish Nursery School in Berlin have invited Germans to join Jewish leaders in prayer for "tolerance and solidarity" on Thursday. The call came after unidentified assailants sprayed swastikas and other Nazi symbols on the school walls and threw a smoke flare into the building at the weekend. "The attempt to burn down and lay waste to a Jewish nursery school is a dangerous escalation of intolerance and right-wing radicalism," the school in the western district of Charlottenburg said in a statement. "This attack was not only aimed at Jews, but against everyone who cherishes freedom and democracy." Gideon Joffe, the head of the Jewish community in Berlin, said the attack was connected to growing anti-Semitism in Germany.
• February: Vandals daubed a swastika on one of the slabs that make up the Holocaust memorial in downtown Berlin towards the end of February, police said. A security service worker found the symbol, and authorities ordered it removed, police said in a statement. There was no immediate word on who might have been responsible.
• March: Unknown perpetrators pulled several gravestones from their foundations and unhinged the cemetery gate in Neustrelitz. The police are investigating the incident.
• March: Unknown perpetrators pulled 15 gravestones from their foundations and smeared memorial plaques with National Socialist symbols in a Jewish cemetery in Thallichtenberg.
• April: Vandals attacked Europe's largest Jewish cemetery for a second time this week, Berlin police reported. Some 20 gravestones and 10 stones from the surrounding wall were found overturned Wednesday in the Weissensee Cemetery in Berlin in what authorities suspect is a politically motivated crime. Numerous grave sites in another section of the cemetery had been found ravaged the previous day.
• April: Malicious graffiti was drawn on a wall of a Jewish center in the town of Cologne.
• June: German police are investigating the vandalism of a synagogue in Pinneberg, near Hamburg. A stone was thrown through a window into the sanctuary. Later, in an anonymous call to the community's office, a male voice said, "The same thing can happen more often. You've got no more peace." He concluded with the Nazi phrase of salute to Hitler, "Sieg Heil."
• July: Vandals toppled twelve tombstones in the Jewish cemetery of Cottbus, a city in Eastern Germany near the German-Czech border. Several of the tombstones as well as some sculptures were damaged. Police are investigating.
• July: On a camping ground near Ückeritz, a village located on the Baltic island of Usedom, two 18 year old men were physically attacked in two separate incidents apparently committed by the same perpetrators. One of the men informed the police that he was beaten and hurt in the face by one man out of a group of at least ten people. Earlier, the victim along with four friends had approached the perpetrator’s group due to their chants and songs such as “Buchenwald is where we off the Jews (Buchenwald, da machen wir die Juden kalt)” – referring to the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald. While investigating the incident, the police learned of a similar attack on another man.
• July: A flyer containing abusive statements was delivered to the Jewish Community Building in Munich. The letter, headed with the logo of The Third Reich, read: “One day our patience will come to an end, and then we will finally shut your lying insolent Jewish mouths for good!” The footnote of the letter read: “The cleansing of Germany from the negative Jewish spirit remains our eternal mission.”
• July: Vandals desecrated eight tombstones in the Jewish cemetery in Gustrow with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.
• July: During the night of July 19/20, four men armed with knives brutally attacked a 17 year old boy of Jewish background in Gummersbach. During a birthday party at a sports field, the perpetrators kicked the boy’s head and neck while screaming: “You dirty Jewish pig"
• August: Anti-Semites scrawled at least 11 swastikas on seven markers at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The huge memorial includes 2,711 slabs memorializing Holocaust victims. The swastikas, scrawled in black and red, measured up to a foot in height.
• November: in Berlin, Germany, when 36-year-old Rabbi Yehuda Teichtel was driving eight of his students in a minivan. Local police reported that two unknown persons in a Mercedes passed the van and blocked it from proceeding, crying insults of an anti-Semitic nature. The driver of the vehicle then threw a molotov cocktail at the van, but luckily it did not explode and rabbi and students remained unharmed.