An inquiry into the qualifications of police applicants in Berlin has yielded results which politicians have called “shocking”.
Out of 10,874 applicants for posts as police officers in the German capital in the past two years, almost 40 per cent – or 4,271 young men and women – failed their German exam.
Even among applicants who had a German high-school diploma, three out of 10 did not have sufficient command of German to enter police service.
“Young people attend school for 10 or 13 years and do not even reach minimum standards. This is a shocking indictment of both Berlin and Germany,” Tommy Tabor, spokesman for education for the Berlin branch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, said yesterday.
Tabor said he had had obtained the numbers from the city’s interior department.
As local newspaper Berliner Zeitung reports, the numbers are almost equally bad for both ethnic Germans and applicants with a migrant background.
Berlin’s state education senator, Katharina Günther-Wünsch (Christian Democratic Union CDU), said the numbers illustrate a long-standing trend. “This alarming downtrend has been going on for years. It clearly reinforces my quality strategy that we need to place even more emphasis on German and mathematics in school,” she said.
The German test is an integral part of the exam for acceptance into the police service.
Applicants sit at a computer and listen to a text of about 200 words read slowly via headphones. They need to write down what they heard. If applicants make 15 mistakes or more they have failed the exam.
The Berlin Police force offers a dictation exercise on its YouTube channel – which has now been viewed 35,000 times in a little more than a year.
The lacking of German skills for applicants may be part of the reason why the force only managed to fill three-quarters of the 1,224 police trainee positions it offered in 2025.
Even those applicants who are taken on as cadets often have subpar German skills.
In September 2025, it was made public that more than half of all Berlin police cadets needed remedial German classes.
Brussels Signal reached out to the Berlin Police for comment but was told any answer would take several days.
