In the early hours of the morning on Saturday, March 8, just south of Berlin in the town of Stahnsdorf, a local resident reported seeing six or seven men approach a refugee shelter – the temporary home of 300 people, including 95 children. The group knew exactly where they were headed. Chanting slogans – including “Heil Hitler!” – they attempted to break in through a fire door at the rear of the building, but failed. They then began hurling projectiles, smashing a bathroom window with a bottle, before retreating. Some time later, a security guard from the refugee shelter encountered the group at a nearby bus stop – where they attacked him, beating him so severely that he had to be hospitalised.
The Ausländerbehörde sends you a letter saying you must stay in your room. But it’s a trick.
This incident is just the latest in a string of assaults targeting asylum seekers in and around Berlin. This growing hostility towards migrants has led some protestors to organise in response. Under the slogan “Oplatz lebt!”, activists declared March a “month of resistance” and established a protest camp last month on Oranienplatz. With their tents in the centre of Kreuzberg, they aimed to create a space for education, mobilisation and community building – including organising regular visits to speak with residents of Lagers and Heims, the camps and refugee housing set up on the outskirts of the city.
Napuli Langa has a history at Oplatz. She was there in 2012, when 200 activists from across Germany gathered to demand recognition for refugees following a series of suicides in remote and isolated housing facilities. That protest camp remained in place for a year and a half, from October 2012 to April 2014, before being forcibly evicted in a massive police operation. For Langa, one of the central aims of the 2025 protest is to expose the desperate and uncertain fate of those living in refugee housing, many of whom face travel restrictions or institutional persecution.
“One of our demands is to abolish the residency requirement,” she explains, sitting on a bench beside the large central tent of Oranienplatz encampment. In front of us, two activists are setting up an extra table with information pamphlets about the dangers of militarised borders; others are sitting around a table, holding a meeting. A large dish of pasta waits for any hungry people in the neighbourhood who would like a meal. “The rules are very restrictive for people with refugee status, and the residency requirement can limit people to a certain city, or even a district, like Friedrichshain, and mean you are unable to travel across the rest of Berlin.”
The state treats you like criminals, criminals treat you like an enemy.
Germany’s residency requirement for refugees came into effect in 2016. It determines that even after someone has been recognised as needing protection, they will not be able to choose their place of residence for three years, but must remain in whatever district they are first assigned. Quite often, this law prevents refugees from moving to large urban areas – and it can lead to migrants avoiding any official registration so that they do not become trapped in a certain locality.
Often, Langa points out, there is good reason for refugees to be mistrustful of the authorities. “Sometimes the Ausländerbehörde sends you a letter saying you must stay in your room every night. But it’s a trick. The authorities tell you this, and in the next few days or weeks, they come to deport you.”
Another demand listed by the protest camp is the abolition of the controversial payment card, whose introduction the Berlin government approved last December. Already in use in other parts of Germany, this customised credit card limits every asylum seeker, including children, to withdrawing just €50 of their monthly benefits in cash, with the remaining sum restricted to card transactions. As anyone who has tried paying with a card in Berlin knows, this would be an inconvenience at the best of times – but users of the card have reported additional fees, minimum payment requirements, and technical issues such as the failure of direct debits. The project, which claims to “reduce the administrative burden of providing help to refugees”, is expected to cost Berlin taxpayers €5 million – a sum the city government is apparently willing to pay simply to make the lives of asylum seekers even more difficult.
During the recent election campaign, the situation for migrants in Germany was seized upon by the CDU, who used a handful of violent crimes to try and push through a restrictive and controversial five-point plan on migration, accepting the backing of the AfD in hopes of passing it. That attempt failed – but similar manoeuvres will undoubtedly return. These political attacks are part of a continuum that includes all the indignities to which refugees are subject: being forced to live in precarious housing, having their movement monitored, being forced to pay for their living costs in an inconvenient and stigmatised way, having to maintain a curfew, and the uncertainty of knowing that the authorities may come to deport you in the middle of the night – or, if they don’t, that some local thugs may attempt to target you and your children. The state treats you like criminals, criminals treat you like an enemy.
Yet, if the brutal attacks in Stahnsdorf showed one strain of German society, the camp at Oranienplatz last month demonstrated the opposite reality: that Berlin is still home to people who reject a politics of fear and exclusion. The attack in Stahnsdorf does not define the city – but it also can’t be ignored.
