Sachsen-Anhalt's Victim Counselors Say Attacks Are Down 20 Percent. They're Also Warning Nobody Cares.

Every spring the Mobile Opferberatung in Sachsen-Anhalt publishes its yearly count, and every spring the number gets read the same lazy way: up means crisis, down means relief. This year it's down. 229 attacks documented in 2025, against 290 the year before, a roughly 20 percent drop. Anyone tempted to file that under good news should read what the counselors actually said when they released it: a warning about a "dangerous habituation" to racism and far-right violence, four to five attacks a week, and a third more violence against political opponents than the year before.

The math behind the headline figure is not comforting once you sit with it. 135 documented assaults, 82 threats and coercion cases, seven arsons, five cases of serious property destruction with intent to intimidate. 307 people directly harmed. Nearly a quarter of the victims of racist violence were minors - among them a twelve-year-old girl with a Syrian family background, beaten in the face by a stranger in Magdeburg's Neustädter See neighbourhood in February, in front of her younger siblings. That detail alone tells you what a falling annual total obscures: it is not evenly distributed relief, it is violence still landing hardest on kids who had no say in where they were born.

Fifty-seven percent of all attacks were racially motivated. And this comes in a state where the AfD, a party its own domestic intelligence service classifies as confirmed right-wing extremist, took roughly 44 percent of the vote in this year's state election - not a fringe protest vote, a plurality. The counselors are blunt about the connection: the decline in raw numbers is happening inside a climate where victims increasingly report indifference and rejection rather than solidarity when they come forward, and where far-right narratives are treated as unremarkable background noise rather than the threat they are.

None of this is abstract to the people doing the counting. Mobile Opferberatung isn't a police statistic - it's built from direct contact with survivors, which is precisely why its numbers usually diverge from official crime figures and why they matter more, not less. A falling count from an organisation whose entire caseload is built on trust and disclosure should worry you more when the same report says fewer people feel safe reporting at all, and when a party built on excluding the people in these case files just won a state election on the strength of exactly that constituency it terrorises.

There's no comfortable antifascist takeaway here beyond the obvious one: numbers going down don't mean the ground is safer, they mean the fight to keep naming what's happening - specifically, individually, one twelve-year-old at a time - is getting harder in a political climate built to make that naming feel unnecessary. Solidarity work doesn't get to take a year off because a percentage dropped.

Sources

Mobile Opferberatung: Jahresbilanz 2025

Zeit: Mobile Opferberatung registriert weniger rechte Gewalt

netzpolitik.org: Omas gegen Rechts nach der Landtagswahl