Constructing the enemy – hating refugees in Überalldorf

Posted by Thomas Klikauer

Despite the romantic-idyllic image in which the East-German town of Überalldorf prefers to present itself, not all is good at the remote, 2,100 people strong, rural hamlet located somewhere along the Czech-Polish border – in deep Dunkeldeutschland. 

There has been violence against a local refugee shelter – in 2023, 2024 and most recently, in 2025.

The yet to be identified perpetrators might either come from East-Germany’s diehard Neo-Nazis or the rather common xenophobic mob – colloquially known as Wutbürger or angry people. 

Many of them hang on to the xenophobic misbelieve that non-German refugees are strange, dodgy, untrustworthy, and need to be viewed with suspicion and resentment – or a mixture of all of that. 

There are 35 young refugees living in the remote fictional town of Überalldorf – a town that can be everywhere in Saxony and, indeed, in East-Germany.

Überalldorf is a normal town with normal xenophobic locals, normal racism, and with normal Neo-Nazi assaults. 

After “an explosion” (read: a Neo-Nazi bomb) in front of the local refugee accommodation and other attacks in Überalldorf, prejudiced locals want to get rid of the juvenile refugees. 

The bomb was a long-awaited and welcomed excuse to blame the victims and to act against the refugees – not the Neo-Nazis. 

One of the refugees – Aisha – crosses her arms in front of his chest and sinks deeper into her chair. When people come and ask questions about everyday racism in East-Germany, “it’s usually not a good thing”, she says. 

It is at the end of June 2025 and Aisha with long hair and wearing blue sneakers – is sitting in the common room of a refugee shelter in Überalldorf, Saxony – a state not unknown for Neo-Nazi violence. 

Perhaps not by accident, the East-German state of Saxony was the place where Germany’s most lethal Neo-Nazi killer commando – the NSU – lived (read: undetected by the state police and others). 

They survived in the “underground”. In reality, they lived rather open lives – some had daytime jobs. 

Conceivably, it was the East-German state of Saxony that gave the “U” in NS”U”. The “U” stands for “underground”. 

All in all, the state of Saxony allowed the NSU the have the space to conjure up its killing spree murdering ten people. 

Back in Überalldorf, next to Aisha on the sofa, the other youngsters, who still live here, are huddling close to each other. 

Two years ago, Aisha fled from the Syrian capital Damascus to Germany. Upon arriving in Germany, its Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has sent her to the out-of-the-way region at the eastern end of Saxony. 

While the region is an AfD stronghold where almost half the population voted for the xenophobic party in the last federal election, Überalldorf’s local council also feature members of the neo-fascist AfD. Meanwhile, at the regional parliament – the Kreistag – the AfD sports plenty of members. 

State-wide, 40 members of the neo-fascism AfD are represented in Saxony’s state parliament. Despite the AfD fancying to present itself as a democratic party, the opposite is the case. 

A democratically elected political party is not necessary democratic. Hitler’s Nazi party was elected to German parliaments. It was not a democratic party. It destroyed democracy. 

Not without reason, Aisha says, “everyone in Überalldorf is a racist.“ The home of the young refugee people was attacked in 2023, twice in 2024, and then in 2025. 

At least none of this Neo-Nazi assaults were at the level of one of the most significant racist riots, East-Germany had seen. 

Since then, Hoyerswerda became a metaphor for xenophobic riots against refugees. In June a bomb-like device exploded in front of a window and in December armed Neo-Nazis storm the accommodation and beat the underage children. 

Since then, there have been fewer girls and boys living at the refugee centre. Parts of the accommodation already were closed at the end of June 2025. 

It came at the request of the local council. With all non-Germans gone from Überalldorf, the remaining locals can carry on inbreeding for their beloved “white power only” Volksgemeinschaft. 

Yet, the young people themselves aren’t the problem. The hostile surrounding is. Their accommodation is encircled by the dense forests of Saxony. The bus from the next regional city takes an hour. 

Thanks to post-socialist decline in jobs, infrastructure, and social facilities, Überalldorf has one “sausage-take-away” left, a newspaper kiosk and a sports clubhouse and fields. This is it. The next supermarket – EDEKA – is in the neighbouring town of Tannersburg. 

The seniors residence at Überalldorf’s Forest Road or Waldstraße was previously used as a nursing home for seniors – until 2021. 

In 2022, it became the accommodation for refugee teenagers. It is a simple grey building with three floors. 

35 Young people lived in residential groups. They were between 12 and 17 years old. The institution is operated by a Christian Mission. Social workers are present. 

Nowadays, Aisha is only visiting Überalldorf as she had recently moved out to live in a neighbouring village. 

Her friend, Yasmin, who, like Aisha, fled from Syria, still lives in Überalldorf. Aisha and Yasmin actually have different names. In a locality where natives tend towards xenophobic attitudes, the AfD is strongly supported, and Neo-Nazis rampaging [almost] free, they are avoiding giving their real names. 

Both have already have already experienced trouble in Überalldorf. At the beginning of the placement, the local mayor – Horst Sindermann – was still enthusiastic – state funding came with the refugees. 

But when asked what they do in their spare time, they both look at each other and shrug their shoulders. 

What Überalldorf offers is rather meagre – a fishing and soccer club and the local voluntary fire brigade. 

At the end of Überalldorf, there is a very clean and tidy park to the right. From here, it is only a few meters to a sports field. 

The young refugees say that they are there sometimes, but even this “sometimes” seems to be too much for some people in the village. At the municipal council meeting of Überalldorf in May 2025, Peter-Klaus Budig proposed to limit the opening hours of the sports ground for the young refugees. 

Meanwhile, the manager of the refugee accommodation – Gabi Schimanski – sits in her office on the accommodation’s third floor. Her door is open when she is talking to colleagues. She smiles a lot when she talks, she offers coffee. 

She interrupts the official narrative again and again to defend the young refugees. She says, “from the very beginning, we never had a chance in Überalldorf”. 

The life of the young refugees in the village “is really not easy.“ Early in spring of 2024, Überalldorf’s mayor was still enthusiastic about Gabi Schimanski. 

“She is doing an admirable job”, the mayor of Überalldorf said, once, in a council meeting. His statements are recorded in the minutes of the meetings of the municipal council, which are publicly available. 

The mayor is independent of any political party. But avoids speaking to “outsiders”, such as, for example, newspapers or investigative journalists, e-mails are left unanswered. 

When the district council requested him about a racist attack on the refugee home, he reluctantly wrote that “the events occurred far back … he had nothing to add”. 

Simultaneously, his municipal administration also does not respond to inquiries. Yet, at the beginning of 2024 – according to the minutes that are publicly accessible – the local council was still discussing how the situation of the young people could be improved. 

“Bridges should be built,” a member of the local council said. The proposed bridges are between the xenophobic locals and the young refugees. 

Even then, others in Überalldorf saw it rather differently. A note with the inscription “Asylschlampe” – asylum slut – was stuck on Gabi Schimanski’s car windshield shortly after the council meeting. 

On another occasion, a Neo Nazi rang at the doorbell of the accommodation to say that he would “light-up the place“ – a Neo-Nazi arson plan announced as „die Bude anzünden.“ 

Schimanski says that there were definitely problems. Some young refugees were stressed, confused, alone, placed in an alien environment, and far away from home. 

One incident was about a petty crime. One teenager was even on trial for theft. Yet, Schimanski cannot give details as Germany’s juvenile code demands non-disclosure. 

The regional police department stated in an e-mail that it was about property damage, handbag robbery and burglary. 

A total of 27 “crimes” are “attributed” to young people in the period from January 2023 to June 2025 – 1,5 years in the region. Just five of them occurred in Überalldorf. There were investigations against four teenagers and one child. 

Meanwhile, the local police also noted, that the refugee accommodation was temporarily occupied by up to 35 people, it cannot be established that the majority of delinquent children and adolescents were staying at the refugee house. 

In some cases, state supported carers at the home were overwhelmed with the task. Yet, the way the people of Überalldorf are dealing with the refugees since the attacks, has turned towards resentment. 

During a night in August 2024, an explosive device, which someone from the outside had attached to a window of the refugee accommodation, exploded. 

The force of the explosion destroys the window on the ground floor and scatters the glass. Fragments were blown into a room where a teenage refugee, fleeing from war, was sleeping. 

Not much seems to be left from Merkel’s “welcome culture” – particularly in her very own East-Germany. 

Luckily, the sleeping refugees remained unharmed. Some youngsters who lived in the accommodation say that they saw a young man running away. 

The state’s crime-investigation office took up the investigation and then handed it over to the local public prosecutor’s office. It went nowhere. 

The investigation was discontinued after three months – without a result. That a bomb-throwing Neo-Nazi gets off scot free is not that uncommon in Germany. 

Six months after the first attack, armed Neo-Nazis stormed the accommodation and injured several young people. It is not clear from police reports that this second attack even exists. 

In the messages that the local police department published on its very own website, no information about the Neo-Nazi attack can be found. 

It is buried between “a container was broken into” and “a parking ticket machine was damaged”. Virtually, the same goes for all Neo-Nazi assaults on the refugees in Überalldorf – no photos, no film, next to no records, no TV crew ever turned up to investigate – nothing. 

It is as if nothing had ever happened in Überalldorf. Evil heretics might claim that it is a reminder of Hitlers’ Nazism for which Germany’s officialdom still prefers to have just blank pages for the years 1993 to 1945 and/or a half-baked statement on facts that can no longer be denied. 

Yet, for one Überalldorf municipal council meeting, the protocol notes that the regional police commander reported (February 2025) that, “a brawl of 20 people had occurred”. It did not originate from the facility (read: the refugee house). 

The Neo-Nazi attack was classified by the police “as a breach of the peace.“ It is not unusual to see that East-German police “classifies” Neo-Nazis attacks as “local brawls”. 

In one incident in East-Germany, a local Neo-Nazi had cranked up his Neo-Nazi music. When a neighbour complained, the Neo-Nazi stabbed the man to death. The police noted, “neighbourhood brawl” as the reason for the murder. 

Some might wrongfully claim that a pattern has been established – seemingly: What? Neo-Nazis? There are no Neo-Nazis here! 

Meanwhile back in Überalldorf, Aisha and Yasmin tell the story in more detail. It all began when a man of the security company guarding the accommodation wanted to question a teenager. 

The teenager refused. As a result, the security guard – being a security guard is a preferred occupation of East-German Neo-Nazis and adjacent no-gooders – announced that he would, “bring his friends from the city” , says Frau Schimanski. 

Two hours later, a thuggish squadron of about 20 men showed up and entered the lower floor of the refugee home. Armed with iron bars and wooden clubs, they wanted to beat up the minors. 

Yasmin showed a video of this evening. Ten seconds of shaky pictures, screams. Yasmin says she was on the second floor when it became loud, “I took a broom and ran down. I tried to help the others.“ 

Meanwhile, the carers and social workers had called the police. Three boys from the refugee home were admitted to the hospital after the attack, Schimanski says. 

She has medical papers documenting the injuries. The boy, who did not want to be body-searched by the thuggish doorman, had a severe concussion after the Neo-Nazi attack. 

Others suffered bruises, cuts and swellings. “We didn’t go to school in the nearby city the next day,” says Yasmin, “the attackers came from there.” 

Schimanski says that after the assault, the police were increasingly patrolling in front of the accommodation because the men had threatened to come back. 

Unsurprisingly, Wotan S. whose company was entrusted with the protection of the refugee home, did not want to talk about the attack. He quickly refers to the police on the phone. 

Yet, he says that the “security employee” who let the Neo-Nazi attackers into the accommodation was not employed by him. 

The police investigation into the Neo-Nazi assault is still on-going. Therefore, the police’s PR-officer – Jürgen Kleditzsch – claimed that it cannot make any statements about the course of events. 

And further, “a group of about eight people was identified as suspects.“ And that includes the so-called “security employee”. 

At the refugee home, there were very motivated young people. Many wanted to go to school, but were not allowed. Now some were in hospital, others injured. 

The Neo-Nazi attacks in Überalldorf were part of 255 racist attacks on refugee shelters in Germany in 2024 – the highest number since 2017. 

The number of unreported cases and cases framed as “a simple brawl” is higher. Meanwhile, a Neo-Nazi outfit called “The German Revolt” has been active in the region around Überalldorf since early-2023. 

Saxony’s secret police – officially known as Office for the Protection of the Constitution – documents the activities of the Neo-Nazi squad. 

Beyond that, others have been documenting racist, right-wing-motivated and anti-Semitic incidents in the region since 2024. 

The region has become more relevant to the Neo-Nazis due to the influx of several far-right families in the past ten years. 

It is just as the case of the AfD’s unofficial Führer – Björn Höcke – who is a west-import to East-Germany but sees East-Germany as the promised land of Neo-Nazism. 

Meanwhile, the official minutes of the Ellefeld Municipal Council show how the tone in the village changed after the attacks. 

Four days after the Neo-Nazi raid, the local council met for its monthly meeting. Überalldorf’s 13 local councils were consulting for an hour and a half. Largely, it was about the “Überalldorf Citizen Prize”. 

In other words, nothing to report here on Neo-Nazis. Yet, towards the very end, the mayor – seemingly uncomfortable with it, quickly mentions the refugee accommodation. 

But unsurprisingly, he does not report about the brutal Neo-Nazi attack. Instead of the platoon of 20 Neo-Nazis assaulting the home, he is only concerned with the 3-4, as he said, “troublemakers” among the young refugees – it is the blame the victim strategy in full motion. 

Worse, the mayor considers it “urgently necessary” to remove the “troublemakers” from the “facility”, as the written protocol notes. 

The mayor claimed that – not because of the Neo-Nazi assault – but the neighbours of the “institution” (read: the home of the refugees) were “very worried”. 

They are afraid to have close contact with “them”. Because of those locals (read: not the Neo-Nazis), he felt “obliged to bring about a change in the unacceptable situation”. 

In other words, unacceptable in Germany are young people and children fleeing from war but not Neo-Nazis. Unsurprisingly, the municipal council wants the closure of the accommodation. 

It also became clear from the same protocol that the mayor – Horst Sindermann – had already spoken to the regional council as early as September 2024, calling for the closure of the accommodation, “if the situation does not improve.“ 

On 3rd March, 2025, a local gave a “lecture” at the municipal council meeting on the “security situation for our children in Ellefeld”. It was not about the young people of the accommodation.

Instead, it was about the German children who would be harassed by the so-called troublemakers. A member of Überalldorf’s municipal council – Manfred Bochmann – emphasizes at the meeting that “the goal of closing the facility continues to be a priority”. 

Rudolf Rost, the deputy district administrator of the county, described the Neo-Nazi attacks on Yasmin and her roommates in Ellefeld as “isolated cases”. 

Neo-Nazism is Germany and in particular East-Germany are nearly always “isolated cases” – just as the NSU network only consisted of three Neo-Nazis, no more. 

It was claimed that, in the accommodation, tensions had developed among the young people. “In my perception, the incident was triggered by tensions among different nationalities”, Rudolf Rost announced. Nothing to do with Neo-Nazis. 

The so-called “security guard” at the refugee home, who allegedly initiated the attack, is from Chechnya. Foreigners are to blame – not German Neo-Nazis. 

Rudolf Rost was concerned about the image of the municipality – not because of the fact that Neo-Nazis run berserk in Überalldorf but because of the young refugees. 

“I do not share in any way the impression that the young people in Überalldorf were not well received,” said Rudolf Rost. This is exactly what had happened in Überalldorf. 

From the very beginning of the refugee placement, some locals had shown great interest in taking the young people. 

Ms Schimanski noted that her youngsters were motivated to go to school, but were not allowed as the school’s registration office in Überalldorf had delayed the registration of the young people. 

In typical administrative Catch-22, without the registration certificate, the authority did not issue a residence permit and without that title, the boys could not be registered for school. 

Only two out of 36 young people actually went to school in spring 2024. Social workers at the refugee centre had to organise lessons at the refugee house for the students. 

At the time, the mayor said at the municipal council that there were no school places for the young people. 

Naturally, there are no school places for refugees in a region that is defined by the movement of young people to western Germany and by a rapidly declining birth rate. 

In the midst of all this, Yasmin says in Überalldorf in June 2025, that she would have been happy “if someone had come and asked what we needed.“ 

Yet, she has been able to go to school since autumn 2024, but she has been staying at home since the Neo-Nazi attack. Of course, there are no Hitler’s salutes and racist jokes in East-German school yards. 

She would have to go to the city. Just like her friend Sana who no longer dares to get on the bus. “Yes, we are scared”, says Yasmin. 

She also gets stressed by simply going to Tannersburg, the next bigger town. So she prefers to stay in the refugee dorm. 

To make matters worse, the young people did not receive any psychological support after the Neo-Nazi attacks. 

Schimanski sees the shock that the violence has caused to Yasmin and the others, noting, “these men have invaded your home”. 

Yasmin and others were also attacked by people who were supposed to protect them. The Neo-Nazi attacks are not alone, small racist hostilities of everyday life still exist in Überalldorf.

Schimanski tells the story of a local man who ran after a boy from the accommodation and threatened him with beatings if he would strike his child over the head again. 

She also noted that “the girls and boys just miss their families with no end … the little children here do remind you of your siblings.“ 

Towards the end of May 2025, what the mayor called for in Überalldorf’s council happened. The refugee accommodation was reduced – some of the young refugees would have to leave Überalldorf. 

Some refugees were transferred to neighbouring villages – including in shared apartments for minors. 

Meanwhile, the financial resources for the accommodation in Überalldorf had been exhausted. At the same time, the numbers of newly arriving, unaccompanied, underage refugees had decreased.

Just ten underage people continued to live on the 3rd floor of the refugee house. The rest of the house is empty. Like all of the remaining friends, they count the days until they come of age and can move away. 

“I want to get out of Überalldorf,” Rashid says. At a farewell party, one of his friends insists on walking with him the way back to the bus stop together. For safety. 

For months there has been no security for the refuge accommodation. 

None of the Neo-Nazi attackers was ever caught. 

As for the xenophobic people of Überalldorf, they succeed in eliminating – over time – all non-German aliens. 

Racism and Neo-Nazism had won in the little town of Überalldorf where the local hotel – “The Star” – offers comfortable accommodation in a stylish ambience that meets the individual needs of every guest. Just don’t be a refugee fleeing from war. 

To add insult to injury, Germany’s constitution alludes to the country’s willingness to fulfil its historical and humanitarian obligation to admit refugees. 

One is tempted to add, “and unwelcomes them, mistreats them, allows Neo-Nazi thugs to beat them up, and gets rid of them”.

Photo: (source: screenshot – German public TV: https://www.zdf.de/video/dokus/terra-x-history-102/im-osten-ganz-rechts-von-den-skinheads-zur-afd-100)

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