Six Attacks in Ten Days: Berlin's Anti-Queer Violence Is Not an Anomaly, It's a Trend Line

Between September 2 and roughly September 10, six people were attacked in Berlin for being visibly queer or trans. A young trans woman was asked her gender by a group of men on Sonnenallee, then punched and kicked in the face on the ground. A 62-year-old man was insulted and hit near Nollendorfplatz. A gay couple was attacked. A 17-year-old was beaten and hospitalized. A person was threatened with a gun at Mehringplatz over their transness. Another was attacked by two people on an e-scooter. Days earlier, in Dresden, three men threw a trans woman to the ground and fractured her nose and cheekbone. This is reported by Perspektive Online (12 September 2026), drawing on queer.de's incident log.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Barely a month after the July 25 CSD attack — where a man drove a van into the crowd and then attacked bystanders with a machete, killing one woman and injuring 31 — the memorial bench the city installed was vandalised beyond repair, and a newly planted tree at the same site was nearly ripped out. The sequence tells you what the attackers are actually responding to: not the July attack itself, but the fact that queer people dared to grieve publicly and keep existing publicly afterward.

The BKA's own Lagebild confirms this isn't a Berlin blip. Hate-crime cases in the categories 'sexual orientation' and 'gender-based diversity' rose from 1,188 in 2022 to 1,785 in 2023 — a roughly 50 percent jump in a single year — and the agency itself notes the number has grown nearly tenfold since 2010. The most recent nationwide PMK figures for 2025 put queerfeindliche Straftaten at 2,377, up 12.8 percent again, with a violent-crime share notably higher than the average across all politically motivated offences. These are police-recorded numbers in a country where under-reporting of anti-queer violence is well documented — the real total is certainly higher.

What the statistics can't capture is the tactical shift visible on Berlin's streets right now: attackers escalating from insults to open assault within days of each other, in the same neighbourhoods, against strangers picked out purely by how they look or who they're with. That's not random street violence, it's a permission structure — a sense, however wrong, that queer people are now fair targets, reinforced every time a mainstream party mainstreams AfD talk of 'gender ideology' or a state cuts funding to trans healthcare and counselling. The attackers didn't invent that climate. They're acting on it.

There is no policing solution to a permission structure. More cameras at Nollendorfplatz won't stop a man from deciding a trans woman's existence justifies a beating; it just means the beating gets filmed. What actually protects people is the boring, unglamorous infrastructure the far right wants gone: community safety patrols, legal and medical support networks that don't require trusting a police report, and — bluntly — enough of us in the streets, in bars, at bus stops, that an attacker has to reckon with more than one victim standing alone. Solidarity isn't a slogan on a CSD banner. Right now, in Berlin, it's the only thing between a slur and a hospital visit.

Sources

Perspektive Online: Zunehmende Gewalt: Sechs LGBTI-feindliche Angriffe in Berlin in zehn Tagen (12 Sept 2026)

tagesschau.de: BKA vermeldet starken Anstieg queerfeindlicher Straftaten

LSVD: Queerfeindliche Gewalt — Zahlen/Statistik

BKA: Lagebericht zur Sicherheit von LSBTIQ