The number of foreign nationals suspected of sexual offences in Germany has risen by 148.2 per cent since the turn of the century, according to a German Government reply to a parliamentary question.
The answer covers the years 2000 to 2025 and was sent to Stephan Brandner, a member of parliament for the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Non-German suspects in homicide cases increased by 77.1 per cent over the same 25 years. Violent crime as a whole recorded a 71.6 per cent rise.
The sharpest movement came in threat offences, at 231.5 per cent, followed by intentional minor assault at 169.3 per cent.
Suspects in pickpocketing cases almost doubled, up 97.9 per cent, while fraud rose by 45.3 per cent and fare evasion by 52 per cent.
Street crime, which covers offences committed in public spaces, was 52.6 per cent higher in 2025 than in 2000. Robbery showed the smallest change, at 22.9 per cent.
Across all offences logged in the Police Criminal Statistics, the number of non-German suspects grew by 39.8 per cent.
Germany’s foreign population expanded sharply in the same period, from 8.8 per cent of residents in 2000 to 14.9 per cent last year. Some 3.7 million foreign nationals were naturalised over those years and are counted as German in the data.
The German Government cautioned that parts of the series could not be compared directly. The so-called true suspect count was introduced only in 2009, meaning a person registered in more than one federal State is now recorded once rather than several times.
That change allowed no robust comparison with suspect numbers from before 2009, the reply said.
A 2016 act overhauling the sexual offences chapter of the criminal code created new offences and widened existing ones. The Government said comparison with earlier years was therefore possible only to a limited extent.
Brandner described the figures as “shocking news” and said the country already had enough to contend with in German offenders. Anyone who arrived claiming to seek protection and then turned to crime had forfeited that protection, he added.
Foreign nationals remain heavily overrepresented in German crime data. The Police Criminal Statistics for 2025, presented in April by German interior minister Alexander Dobrindt, put non-Germans at 43 per cent of all suspects in violent offences.
Criminologists have long argued that the gap reflects age, sex and social conditions rather than nationality, since foreign residents are younger and more often male.
Migration has dominated German politics since the change of government in 2025, with Dobrindt tightening border checks and pressing for faster deportation of convicted foreign offenders.
