The National Socialist Underground, or NSU, was a far-right German neo-Nazi terrorist group which was uncovered in November 2011. The NSU is mostly associated with Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, who lived together under false identities. Between 100 and 150 further associates were identified who supported the core trio in their decade-long underground life and provided them with money, false identities and weapons. Unlike other terror groups, the NSU had not claimed responsibility for their actions. The group's existence was discovered only after the deaths of Böhnhardt and Mundlos, and the subsequent arrest of Zschäpe.
During the 2015–2016 celebrations of New Year's Eve in Germany, approximately 1,200 women were reported to have been sexually assaulted, especially in the city of Cologne. In many of the incidents, while these women were in public spaces, they were surrounded and assaulted by large groups of men. The Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed in July 2016 that 1,200 women had been sexually assaulted on that night.
In the Rupperswil murder case, four people were found killed on December 21, 2015, after a house fire in Rupperswil, Aargau in Switzerland, one of the worst crimes in Swiss history. The perpetrator was found guilty in March 2018 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
On 24 July 2016, a Syrian asylum seeker armed with a döner knife attacked his girlfriend and bystanders in Reutlingen, Germany, killing his girlfriend, a Polish woman, and wounding two other people in the forearm and head, before being struck accidentally by a car and arrested by police.
Maria Ladenburger was a 19-year-old medical student from Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, who was found raped and drowned on 16 October 2016 in the river Dreisam. On 3 December 2016, Freiburg police arrested Hussein Khavari, who had been identified by a hair found at the crime scene, and a CCTV recording from inside a tram. DNA evidence linked him to the crime scene and he was ultimately convicted.
On 19 December 2016, a truck was deliberately driven into the Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, leaving 12 people dead and 56 others injured. One of the victims was the truck's original driver, Łukasz Urban, who was found shot dead in the passenger seat. The truck was eventually stopped by its automatic brakes. The perpetrator was Anis Amri, an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia. Four days after the attack, he was killed in a shootout with police near Milan in Italy. An initial suspect was arrested and later released due to lack of evidence. Nearly five years after the attack, a man who was critically injured during the attack died from complications related to his wounds, becoming the 13th victim.
The Murder of Mia Valentin was a fatal stabbing on 27 December 2017 in the town of Kandel in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. An Afghan asylum seeker, who had been denied refugee status, was charged with the murder of his 15-year-old German former girlfriend, allegedly after she ended the relationship. The case was reported in the national and international press and sparked a political debate about the German refugee policies, especially how to deal with underage unaccompanied refugees.
On 25 March 2018, a 24-year-old woman, Vivien K was stabbed by a Syrian migrant in Burgwedel, Germany. She received life-threatening injuries and was put into an induced coma. She woke up three days later, with broken ribs and part of her pancreas as well as her spleen removed.
On 7 April 2018, a man drove a van into people seated outside restaurants in a pedestrianised square in the old part of the German city of Münster. He killed four people and injured about 20 others, six of them seriously, before committing suicide.
Susanna Maria Feldmann was a 14-year-old German girl who was raped and killed on the night of 22 May 2018 in Wiesbaden. Ali Bashar Ahmad Zebari, a 21-year-old asylum seeker from Iraqi Kurdistan, confessed to the murder and was found guilty in July 2019 at a trial in Landgericht Wiesbaden.
On 2 April 2017, a young woman was raped by a stranger at the Siegaue nature reserve in the Rhein-Sieg-Kreis, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The case received a lot of media coverage because of the perpetrator's status as an illegal immigrant and failed asylum seeker.
The 2018 Cologne terrorist plot was foiled when, on 13 June 2018, police arrested Sief Allah H. in Cologne as he was manufacturing an explosive device which incorporated the highly toxic substance ricin. He was arrested for having breached the Kriegswaffenkontrollgesetz.
The Göhrde murders were two double murders which took place in the summer of 1989 near Göhrde in Lower Saxony, West Germany. Within the space of a few weeks, two couples were found dead in the Göhrde State Forest, deemed by police to have been victims of the same killer. Although the murders remain unresolved, police announced in December 2017 that Kurt-Werner Wichmann, a suspected serial killer who committed suicide in 1993, was their prime suspect. Investigators have also speculated that another unknown person may be linked to the killings. The murders were widely reported on in the German press, and the area where they took place was largely avoided by members of the public for nearly thirty years.
The 2018 Chemnitz protests took place in Chemnitz, in the German state of Saxony. In the early morning of 26 August, after a festival celebrating the city's founding, a fight broke out resulting in the death of a German man and serious injuries to two other people. Two Kurdish immigrants, one from Iraq and the other from Syria, were named as suspects. The incident reignited the tensions surrounding immigration to Germany, which had been ongoing since 2015, and the European migrant crisis. In response, mass protests against immigration were ignited by far-right groups. The protests spawned riots and were followed by counter-demonstrations.
On 31 December 2018 and 1 January 2019, a car was intentionally driven into crowds of people in the cities of Bottrop and Essen in Germany, injuring ten people. First media reports suspected a terrorist background. Later, the perpetrator was admitted to psychiatry and a surveyor certified that he is probably not guilty by reason of mental disease.
The 2020 Stuttgart riot took place during the night of 21 June 2020 when hundreds fought street battles with police in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. During the riots numerous shops were looted.
The 2020 Dresden knife attack occurred on 4 October 2020, when a man was killed and another injured during a knife attack in Dresden, Germany. After two weeks, the 20-year-old perpetrator was arrested, Abdullah al-H. H., a Syrian national who arrived in Germany in 2015 to seek asylum. He had been sentenced in November 2018 to two years and nine months for supporting a terrorist organization and planning an attack with contacts with a militant in Yemen and working on the construction of suicide belts. He had been released from prison in September 2020. Europol classified the attack as jihadist terrorism.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, two police officers were fatally shot at a traffic stop on 31 January 2022. The Public prosecutor's office believes that the two arrested suspects were attempting to cover up their poaching.
