The SPD city councilor Thomas Bäppler-Wolf described a video in which he was outraged about the acts of violence on New Year's Eve and compared the perpetrators with monkeys as a mistake.

In a statement released over the weekend, he apologized to everyone "whom my words have hurt".

The excitement about the attacks on rescue and emergency services on New Year's Eve led to "racist discourses and demands" nationwide, according to the current statement.

Bernhard Biener

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung

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He was also gripped by the excitement about what had happened, especially since a good friend was seriously injured while working as a firefighter in Berlin.

Under this impression, he published a video in which he served racist narratives, writes the SPD city councilor.

"That was wrong.

In doing so, I hurt people, including people very close to me.” To name an actual or supposed migration background of people as the cause of crimes is a racist argument.

The evaluations for New Year's Eve in Berlin had confirmed that origin and violence were not causally connected.

Encouragement from the AfD

Bäppler-Wolf said in the video published on Instagram that the perpetrators were "90 percent of no High German-speaking, educated people from North Rhine-Westphalia".

They should be locked up and, after serving their sentence, "sent to the plane and back where they came from."

He also got upset about "cancel culture" and "stupid political correctness".

He deleted the video shortly thereafter, but the "party" continued to make a copy of it accessible.

The Greens and Volt criticized the social democratic city councilor and their coalition partner SPD for the statements.

The AfD, on the other hand, thought he was saying what many citizens were thinking.

Bäppler-Wolf writes that nothing has changed about the fact that the escalations of violence against emergency services are wrong and that he condemns them in the strongest possible terms.

He will continue to work to ensure that emergency services are better protected.

In practical terms, one could consider in Frankfurt whether firecrackers and rockets really have to be on December 31st.

But the critical conversations with many people about the video would have made him think.

The sub-district executive of the Frankfurt SPD and the Roman faction welcome the statement: "We are aware that racism and prejudice do not stop at our ranks," says the last paragraph.

"Due to our social-democratic values, however, we feel obliged to openly criticize this and to work through it together in solidarity."