In January, tens of thousands gathered in Hamburg to demonstrate against the right. How many exactly – the numbers are initially mixed up. Now it turns out that there were a lot more than expected.
Significantly more people took part in the large demonstration against the right in mid-January in downtown Hamburg, which was canceled due to overcrowding, than previously stated.
An investigation by the interior authorities that he requested showed that at least 180,000 people were estimated to have gathered on Jungfernstieg and in the surrounding streets on January 19th, said the co-organizer of the rally, the SPD citizen representative and managing director of the Entrepreneurs Without Borders association, Kazim Abaci , the German Press Agency.
New number has been calculated
On the day of the “Hamburg stands up – against right-wing extremism and neo-Nazi networks” rally, the police only said there were 50,000 participants. Abaci initially spoke of 130,000 demonstrators at the rally; The organizers later revised the number down to 80,000 participants in light of police information. Due to the large crowds, the event was canceled shortly after it began due to safety concerns.
In the response letter that the dpa has received, the authority assumes a meeting area of around 60,000 square meters based on the analysis of publicly available images. “Based on an empirical value of three people per square meter, this results in an order of magnitude of 180,000 meeting participants,” it says in the letter.
A special case
The interior authority pointed out that the review was only carried out as an exception and “due to the special character, the special size and the public interest in the number of participants”. “A subsequent calculation, as shown above – based on area sizes – is not normally planned by the police.”
The demonstration was organized after research by the media company Correctiv became known about a meeting of radical right-wingers with individual politicians from the AfD, CDU and Values Union in Potsdam. There, the former head of the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement in Austria, Martin Sellner, said he spoke about the concept of “remigration”. When right-wing extremists use the term, they usually mean that large numbers of people of foreign origin should leave the country – even under duress.
Source: Stern
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