Claudia Vosen and her 15-year-old daughter were among the women caught in the crowd outside Cologne’s central train station on New Year’s Eve 2015. In roughly 30 minutes, a group of migrant men passed them from one to another, groping and sexually assaulting them from all sides. They were just two victims among 1,200 women who were assaulted on that fateful New Year’s Eve.
Vosen is speaking out about the incident that happened a decade ago.
“They tried to penetrate every opening of our bodies. Fortunatel,y it was winter and we were wearing pants,” Vosen has told German magazine EMMA. Her daughter was behind her during the assaults and was also targeted.
🇩🇪🔴This German teen was one of nearly 600 German women who were sexually assaulted in just one night, on New Year’s Eve in 2015/16.
The role of North Africans and Middle Eastern men in the sexual assaults and rapes was not reported by authorities until pressure built days later.
Notably, this female victim from Cologne never got to share her story on German public broadcasters such as ARD and ZDF.
Only the UK’s BBC interviewed her — the only broadcaster to give her a voice.
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) April 6, 2026When the group finished with them, the women were pushed out. Claudia Vosen said her husband had become separated from them in the chaos and only found them after the sexual assaults. Vosen described it as being “spat out.” Vosen filed a complaint that night; she was one of 627 women who did so across Germany.
None of the men who assaulted her and her daughter was ever convicted.
In fact, the phenomenon of Arabs surrounding women and sexually assaulting them in large crowds of men in concentric circles is so common that it has a term, called “Taharrush.”
What followed, she said, was almost as damaging as the attack. At work, colleagues accused her of harboring anti-foreigner views when she described what had happened.
“When I arrived at work in January and told everyone what had happened to me, they said: You’re crazy. They really messed me up. What are you saying… that’s not true. Otherwise we would have heard or read something. You have something against foreigners.” said Vosen. “Everything was swept under the rug. That was the worst part. It was denied, covered up.”
🇩🇪 AfD co-leader @Alice_Weidel asks German MPs, "What have you done to our country?" after exposing the migrant grooming gangs taking underage German girls as sex slaves in Nuremberg.
She’s met with laughter from politicians of the legacy parties. https://t.co/uR9NfEScSt
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) June 11, 2026Famously, the mass sexual assaults of women across Germany faced a concerted cover up, with police authorities and politicians seeking to block or downplay information about the mass assaults, or neglect to mention the involvement of Arab and North African men. Considering it turned out to be the worst mass sexual assault in German history since the modern republic, there has never been real accountability for the incident, either from the government or for the perpetrators.
Only the scale of rapes at the end of the Second World War by the Soviet army is of any comparable scale, and that was during wartime between fiercely bitter enemies after years of fighting that killed millions. The migrants who committed these mass sexual assaults had just been taken into Germany after allegedly fleeing their countries to seek asylum and safety.
Vosen’s daughter also suffered. On the schoolyard, her daughter heard, “Be glad you weren’t raped.” Vosen’s daughter began avoiding groups of young men who appeared Arab.
“Young women don’t defend themselves the way we used to,” says the mother. “They no longer dare to laugh in the face of a group of boys who cause them problems. They answer cautiously. They are afraid.”
For her, that night marked a before and an after.
“New Year’s Eve opened my eyes,” said Claudia Vosen. “For me, there is a before and an after.“
“You think twice before you walk out the door in the dark. And what you wear. You simply don’t do certain things anymore. You avoid that,” she noted.
In fact, the incident helped end her marriage, as her husband did not understand her anger over the experience.
She also stated that afterwards, the demonstrations were not against the mass sexual assaults and rapes but instead had a focus against “racism.”
She said these protesters did not do it out of solidarity with the victims but with the migrants. She pointed to the mottos like: “Against sexualized violence and racism.” There was no addressing the fact that the vast majority of the perpetrators were Arabs.
Claudia said that she felt even more restricted at the time than she does now when it came to naming the true perpetrators.
“Instead of simply saying who the perpetrators are. Whether right or left. We weren’t allowed to say back then: Those were Arabs. All that remained was: people with a foreign appearance,” she noted.
Still, she laments that even during recent attacks like the CSD parade in Berlin, there were demonstrations against the right-wing instead of against migrant violence.
The historic Cologne attacks
Police and media investigations established that the mass sexual assaults that night were not isolated events. Groups of men, described by witnesses and police as almost all North African and Arab in appearance, surrounded and mobbed women at Cologne’s station plaza and cathedral steps.
Approximately 650 women in Cologne alone reported sexual offenses, while the figures reached 1,200 nationwide, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. Estimates indicated the number of men involved at more than 2,000.
Cologne Police President Wolfgang Albers initially called the night largely peaceful in what critics said appeared to be evidence of a cover up of the mass sexual assaults.
Days later he admitted, as reported by the BBC, that a “very large number of sexual assaults” had been committed by groups of young men “with an appearance largely from the North African or Arab world.”
An internal federal police report revealed that women ran a “gauntlet” through masses of heavily intoxicated foreign men “that words cannot describe.” The report labeled the scene as “chaotic and shameful.”
Officers claimed they could not manage the volume of attacks all occurring at the same time in what was a total breakdown of legal authority in Germany.
North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Ralf Jäger later told a state parliamentary committee that the perpetrators were “almost exclusively” people with a migration background.
“All signs point to these being north Africans and people from the Arab world,” he said, adding that asylum seekers who had arrived just months earlier were among the suspects.
He described the progression as intoxication followed by “the acting out of fantasies of sexual omnipotence.” Of early identified suspects, 14 of the 19 were Moroccans or Algerians.
Federal Criminal Police Office President Holger Münch later stated there was “a clear relationship between the occurrence of this phenomenon and the heavy immigration in 2015.”
He said authorities must presume “many of those crimes will never be fully investigated.”
Of 153 suspects identified in Cologne for offenses that night, about two-thirds were from Morocco or Algeria; roughly 44 percent were asylum seekers and another 12 percent were believed to be in Germany illegally. However, actual convictions were almost non-existent due to the chaos and the lack of footage, which means hundreds of women went without justice.
Two suspects, a 21-year-old Iraqi and a 26-year-old Algerian, received suspended one-year sentences.
Victims and police reports described a pattern in which groups of men encircled women, groped them, and stole phones and wallets.
Another Islamist terror attack was planned against a German Christmas market, this time with the 2 foreign suspects planning to "burn infidels" and ram a truck into market attendees in #Cologne.
European Christmas markets now look feature police with machine guns and security barriers.
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) December 1, 2023One police report recorded a man telling officers, “I’m a Syrian! You have to treat me kindly! Ms. Merkel invited me.”
Since the fateful night in Cologne approximately ten years ago, tens of thousands of women across Germany have been raped, gang raped, and sexually assaulted, while tens of thousands more have been sexually harassed by foreigners.
