But even the events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015 leaked out slowly. To begin with, the mainstream media did not report the events, and only after several days and thanks to the blogosphere did the continent, let alone the rest of the world, learn what had gone on. On one of the busiest nights of the year, as the city was celebrating, crowds of up to 2,000 men sexually assaulted and robbed something in the region of 1,200 women in the main square outside the central railway station and cathedral of Cologne and in the adjoining streets. Soon it transpired that similar assaults had occurred in other German cities, from Hamburg in the north all the way to Stuttgart in the south. In the days after the attacks, as the scale and seriousness of the events sunk in, the police in Cologne and elsewhere strenuously attempted to conceal the identities of the culprits. Only when video and photographic evidence from the scenes were shared on social media and confirmed in the mass media did the police admit that the suspects were all of North African and Middle Eastern appearance. In Germany in 2016 as in Britain in the early 2000s, a fear of the consequences of identifying the racial origins of the assailants took priority over the police force’s commitment to doing their job.

It was all part of a pattern that would be ongoing and seemingly interminable. Throughout 2016 the spate of rapes and sexual assaults spread to every single one of Germany’s sixteen federal states. There were attacks literally every day, with most of the perpetrators never found. According to the German Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, just a tenth of rapes in Germany are reported and of those that reach trial only 8 per cent result in a conviction. Moreover, several additional problems emerged from these cases, not least that there appeared to be a concerted official effort to suppress data about crimes where the suspects might be migrants. It was, as Die Welt finally admitted, a ‘Germany-wide phenomenon’.3 Just as in Britain a decade earlier, it transpired that German ‘anti-racism’ groups had been involved. In this case they had pressured the German police to remove racial identifiers from all suspect appeals for risk of ‘stigmatising’ whole groups of people.

There was also the curious problem – not confined to Germany – of some women and even girls who had been assaulted trying to conceal the identities of their attackers. One of the most striking cases involved a 24-year-old woman who was raped by three migrants in Mannheim in January 2016. She was herself half-Turkish and had claimed at the time of her attack that her assailants were German nationals. Only later did the woman – who was also a spokesperson for a German left-wing youth movement – admit that she had lied about the identities of her attackers because she did not want to ‘help fuel aggressive racism’. In an open letter to her attackers she apologised to them and wrote: