Monday, June 16
Masked men attack Brandenburg diversity festival
The event had not even started when the attack began. Around a dozen masked men, armed with blunt instruments, gained access to the area on Karl-Marx-Straße in Bad Freienwalde — a small town about an hour and a half outside Berlin — where a festival promoting diversity was being set up.
The event was organised by a local initiative called Bad Freienwalde ist Bunt (Bad Freienwalde is colourful), and aimed to give families and children an opportunity to celebrate diversity in the centre of their town of around 12,000 residents, not far from the Polish border. Unfortunately, this modest aim appears to have provoked violent aggression from the perpetrators.
“We were setting up, and ten minutes before the event began, about a dozen masked men with quartz sand gloves and batons ran towards us, started hitting people, and injured three individuals,” said one witness. “One had a really big bruise, one had a bleeding injury to his mouth, and one had a bruise on his face.”
Following the attack, all the perpetrators — described as young and athletic — were able to flee. Police are investigating a political motive for the crime. At the election in February, more than 40 percent of voters in the area supported the far-right AfD. This is just the latest in a series of violent attacks in and around Berlin, believed to be carried out by far-right groups. In July 2024, masked radicals suspected to belong to the neo-Nazi group The Third Way attacked a protest in Ostkreuz. Later that month, police took around 30 members of a far-right group into preventative custody to thwart a suspected attack on the CSD Pride parade.
