List of mass stabbings in Germany
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an incomplete list of mass stabbings in Germany. The casualty figures of mass stabbings below include violence-related deaths and injuries with a knife, hatchet and spear respectively, casualty inflicted by legal intervention (i.e., deaths caused by law enforcement and other persons with legal authority to use deadly force acting in the line of duty), as well as suicide. As there is no single, widely accepted definition for how many casualties consitutes a mass stabbing, this article follows the general trend of attacks requiring four or more victims being stabbed.[1]
Background on crime statistics
The list is incomplete, because no federal statistics on all stabbings in Germany are available (unlike for example in the United States, FBI Crime statistics).[2]
The Federal Criminal Police Office started to track solely knife attacks in 2020 and knife attacks are defined as either mere threats with a knife or the actual attacks.[3]: 15
Data from the police crime statistics of individual German states show, that in several states the number of stabbings increased from 2013 to 2018 by over 30%.[4] In 2020 alone, there were at least 100 deaths from nearly 20,000 knife attacks. A large proportion of the crimes are related to domestic violence.[5] The overall number of incidents of intentional simple bodily harm increased by 7.4% from 399,699 in 2022 to 429,157 in 2023. The number of non-German suspects increased more (13%) than the number of German suspects (4%). The highest increase of 20% was in immigrants in Germany, even though they perpetrated only 31.830 out of the 430,000 attacks.[3]: 15
As far as knife attacks are concerned: In 2023, 8,951 cases or 5.8 percent of acts of serious bodily harm (assault) were recorded as "knife attack", a rise in absolute numbers but roughly the same proportion as in 2022 (5.6 percent, altogether 8,160 cases). In 2023, 4,893 cases or 10.9 percent of robberies/theft were knife attacks, an increase in absolute numbers, but an unchanged proportion compared to 2022, with 11.0 percent (4,195 cases).[3]: 15
There is evidence that severe injuries have doubled from 2014 to 2023, per the statistics of the trauma registry of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Unfallchirurgie (German Association for Trauma Surgery): From 2014 to 2023, 4,917 people with severe knife stab injuries were admitted to German hospitals out of a total of 212,628 admissions to an ICU due to serious injuries. Here, the overall proportion of knife injuries increased sharply from 2014 to 2023, from just under 2 to over 3 %, even though since 2018, patients have to give their written consent in order to be included in the statistics (which caused a high number of unreported cases).[6]
1920s and earlier
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 September 1913 | Degerloch and Mühlhausen an der Enz, German Reich | 5 | 0 | 5 | 39-year-old Ernst August Wagner killed his wife and 4 children by cutting their throat and chest with a blackjack and dagger. He was a teacher with severe endogenous depression and suicidal ideation, later diagnosed with paranoia. Hours later he shot 20 people, killing nine.[7] |
| 6 June 1925 | Hassenberg and Lindenberg, German Reich | 9 | 1 | 10 | 30-year-old Wilhelm Brückner killed nine family members with an axe and a kitchen knife and afterwards himself. He suffered a lightning injury in childhood and was thought to have had intellectual disability and mental illness given auditory hallucinations.[8] |
1960s
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 June 1964 | Volkhoven in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia | 11 | 22 | 33 | 57-year old Walter Seifert attacked a Catholic elementary school with a home-made flamethrower and a spear, killing eight pupils and two teachers, afterwards himself. Was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1954.[9] |
| 14 December 1968 | Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg | 2 | 5 | 7 | A Yugoslav guest worker stabbed seven people, killing two, at his guest home. He was killed by police gunfire.[10] |
1980s
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 August 1989 | Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg | 2 | 3 | 5 | A 48-year-old failed asylum seeker from Cameroon stabbed five police officers with a bayonet, killing two, before being shot dead by wounded officers.[11] |
1990s
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 August 1999 | Uelzen, Lower Saxony | 2 | 2 | 4 | A convicted murderer fatally stabbed the deputy director of a prison and a chef and wounded two other prison officials before killing himself.[12] |
2000s
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 September 2003 | Pforzheim, Baden-Württemberg | 1 | 3 | 4 | A 24-year-old man killed one person and wounded three others with a sword at a mail-order company.[13] |
| 3 April 2005 | Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg | 1 | 3 | 4 | A 25-year-old Tamil stabbed four people with a sword, killing one, during a church service.[14] |
2010s
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 October 2015 | Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia | 0 | 5 | 5 | A 44-year-old man stabbed mayoral candidate Henriette Reker into the neck at a political information stand in the city, injuring four others. The motive was thought in protest of the CDU's pro immigration policies on refugees.[15] |
| 10 May 2016 | Grafing station, near Munich, Bavaria | 1 | 3 | 4 | A 27-year-old mentally disturbed man stabbed four men, one of them fatally at Grafing station, some 32 kilometres (20 mi) from Munich. As he reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" while stabbing the random victims, first reactions of the German and international media as well as the general public suspected an Islamist attack. On his arrest shortly after the attack, he proved to be a mentally disturbed, unemployed carpenter with drug problems and no known ties to Islamist organizations.[16] |
| 18 July 2016 | between Treuchtlingen and Würzburg, Bavaria | 1 (perpetrator) | 5 | 6 | A 17-year-old former unaccompanied child refugee from Afghanistan wanted to avenge the death of a friend in Afghanistan. He had been in contact with the Islamic State.[17] |
| 9 March 2017 | Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia | 0 | 10 | 10 | A 36-year-old asylum seeker from Kosovo, who had arrived in Germany in 2009 and was considered mentally ill attacked nine fellow passengers with an axe aboard a train. He jumped from a nearby bridge while attempting to escape capture, injuring himself severely. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.[18] |
| 28 July 2017 | Barmbek area of Hamburg | 1 | 6 | 7 | 26-year-old Ahmad Alhaw, a Palestinian failed asylum seeker took a 20 cm-long kitchen knife from a supermarket shelf to attack several people, killing one. He was known to have had contacts with Salafists, and had psychological and drug problems.[19] |
| 21 October 2017 | Munich, Bavaria | 0 | 8 | 8 | 34-year-old Patrick H., asked random passers-by if they are clairvoyant and then attacked with a 9 cm-long knife. He was labeled as schizophrenic and was placed in a closed psychiatric clinic.[20] |
| 20 July 2018 | Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein | 0 | 10 | 10 | A 34-year old German from Iran attacked 10 people in a bus in Lübeck with a kitchen knife; he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.[21] |
2020s
| Date | Location | Dead | Injured | Total | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 June 2021 | Würzburg, Bavaria | 3 women | 8 | 11 | 24-year-old homeless Abdirahman Jibril of Somalia killed three civilians with a kitchen knife in a Woolworth store and wounded seven others. The police shot him into his leg. He had arrived in 2015 as asylum seeker and had a history of violent altercations. He had lived in a homeless shelter since 2019. He admitted to Islamist motives. Another refugee accused him to be an al-Shabaab member. He had a questionable history of mental illness.[22] |
| 25 January 2023 | Brokstedt, Schleswig-Holstein | 2 | 7 | 9 | 33-year-old Ibrahim A. of Palestinian origin stabbed nine people on a moving passenger train, killing two. He came to Germany in 2014 and by 2018 he had been convicted for dangerous bodily harm, two fines for theft and one drug offence.[23] |
| 22 February 2024 | Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia | 0 | 5 (including the perpetrator) | 5 | A 17-year-old male student at the Wilhelm-Dörpfeld secondary school went into the school armed with a knife and a pair of scissors and stabbed multiple pupils and one teacher.[24] He was suspected of suffering from mental illness. |
| 31 May 2024 | Mannheim | 1 | 6 (including the perpetrator) | 7 | A 25-year-old refugee from Afghanistan was accused of fatally stabbing a police officer and wounding five other people at an anti-Islam rally.[25] |
| 15 June 2024 | Wolmirstedt, Saxony-Anhalt | 2 (including the perpetrator) | 3 | 4 | An Afghan man stabbed a man to death, then ran into an UEFA Euro 2024 watch party and injured three people before being shot and killed by police.[26] |
| 23 August 2024 | Solingen, North Rhine-Westphalia | 3 | 8 | 11 | A 26-year-old refugee from Syria confessed to stabbing 11 people (three of whom died) during a festival.[27] The Islamic State claimed responsibility.[28] |
| 31 August 2024 | Siegen, North Rhine-Westphalia | 0 | 6 | 6 | A 32-year-old German woman stabbed and injured six people on a bus. No clear motive was reported.[29] |
| 22 January 2025 | Aschaffenburg, Bavaria | 2 | 3 | 5 | A 28-year-old Afghan man attacked people in Bavaria Park, killing a man and a toddler. Two adults were injured when they tried to stop the attacker. A two-year-old girl was also injured in the attack.[30][31] |
| 18 May 2025 | Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia | 0 | 5 | 5 | A man stabbed five people outside a bar in an apparent Islamic terrorist attack before being subdued.[32] |
| 23 May 2025 | Altstadt, Hamburg | 0 | 17 | 17 | Seventeen people were wounded by an attacker at the central train station, with six having life-threatening injuries and another three having heavy injuries.[33] Hamburg Police arrested a German woman with known schizophrenia at the scene.[34][35][36] |