Women gathering in Cologne’s central square to celebrate the countdown to 2016 got a New Year’s Eve they would never forget. A mob of about 1,000 Muslim men, many of them apparently recent immigrants, descended on the crowd and subjected hundreds of women to theft, molestation and rape. Similar attacks on women also took place that night in several other German towns, including Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Frankfurt. These attacks mirror a common occurrence in the Muslim world where women are surrounded by groups of men and suffer molestations and gang-rape. As Corey Charlton reported in the MailOnline on January 12, 2016, there is an Arabic word for it: taharrush or “collective harassment.”

According to the BBC, more than 550 complaints of sexual assault were made by women who had attended the New Year’s gathering in Cologne. Yet both the authorities and journalists tried to cover up the story and it took four days—four whole days—for the news to officially come out. What were these people thinking? It appears that women’s rights are fragile even in apparently free countries, and can easily become a casualty of political expediency.

The authorities were loath to admit that the attackers were Muslim and included new migrants just let in by the German government’s open door policy championed by its leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel. Did the authorities fear that news of the assaults on women would lead to widespread racism and social unrest? Local law enforcement was either unwilling, incompetent or just plain oblivious to the scale of what was happening. Far too few police were on duty in the city center of Cologne to manage the New Year’s Eve celebrations. According to witnesses, Muslim men massed in the town square between Cologne Cathedral and the main railway station. Women trying to enter or leave the station were forced to run the gauntlet of sexual attacks and attempts to steal their belongings. Witnesses reported police idly standing by as Arabic-speaking men threw firecrackers into the crowd.

Less than a week after the New Year’s Eve attacks, I was sitting in a restaurant in Cologne, having lunch with a group of friends—Ernst, Helmut, Gerda and her husband Fritz. They voiced their anger and dismay at their government’s handling of the migrant problem. “Angela Merkel doesn’t care about Germany or human rights,” exclaimed Gerda. “She’s just trying to position herself to be the new Secretary-General of the UN.”

Fritz fretted about the safety of his teenage daughters. He had decided that arming them with pepper spray was a bad idea, as an assailant might simply overpower a girl and aim the spray at her. Instead, Fritz searched the internet and bought the loudest personal alarms he could find. He could barely keep a lid on his anger. “Merkel let in more than one and a half million migrants, many without needing to show papers and many of them single young men, into a country of only 80 million. That’s two percent of our population, and none of these people give a sh*t about Western values. They’re living in the Dark Ages. They have no respect for women. Tolerance isn’t in their vocabulary. Unless a woman is covered up from head to toe, she’s nothing but a whore and deserves everything she gets.”

One place where German women are guaranteed not be covered up is at a swimming pool, and, as Amie Gordon reported in the MailOnline on February 1, 2016,  it seems that some new immigrants have been taking full advantage of all that bare flesh on view. So many women have been sexually harassed by migrants at German swimming pools that authorities have put up cartoon posters in public pools in an attempt to teach the new arrivals appropriate behavior, such as keeping their hands off women’s bottoms. Following sexual assaults on women, some swimming pools in Germany have banned migrants entirely from their premises.

A few months ago, I was waiting for a train at a suburban station in Frankfurt. I sat on a bench next to a young girl who could have done with one of those personal alarms Fritz had ordered. A group of about half a dozen men, who appeared to be of North African origin, were staring at her as she smoked a cigarette. One asked her for a light, which she gave him. Then the guy sleazily sat right next to her, very close, clearly invading her personal space. His companions sniggered and giggled. The girl looked exceedingly uncomfortable. But it was broad daylight, there were other people on the platform, and the train soon arrived, allowing her to escape their attentions. But what if she had been in a deserted station at night? The story could have ended very differently.

Undoubtedly, many women feel less safe in Germany than they did before the migrants arrived. Hard-earned rights for women to move about freely without fear of harassment, unavailable in many Muslim countries, appear to be under threat in Europe. Some young German girls told me that they now feel uncomfortable about wearing revealing clothing, and have concerns about going out on their own in the evening. One 20-year-old said, “I prefer to be accompanied by a male friend. He can act as bodyguard to protect me from being robbed or molested.”

Germany, spurred by Holocaust guilt, has for years worked on its good guy image. Laudably, the country has refused to brush its unpleasant history under the carpet. Learning about the Holocaust is part of the curriculum in schools and children are taught that racism and intolerance are unacceptable. But now things are changing. German Nationalism is on the rise, and right-wing factions want to remove not only the Muslim migrants, but the country’s remaining Jews too. Thus attacks on Muslims by right-wingers, and on Jews, by both Muslims and German Neo-Nazis, are sharply on the rise.

Immigration and the European refugee crisis have created deep rifts in German society. On April 30 in Stuttgart, left-wing protesters, burning tires and hurling firecrackers, clashed with police outside the annual conference of the AfD—Alternative for Germany—a far-right anti-immigration political party that has been gaining ground in recent elections. The AfD has achieved notoriety in the international media for policies that are highly critical of Islam. The rise of the AfD seems an inevitable outcome of what I saw brewing when I visited Germany earlier this year.

Ironically, considerably more police were deployed in Cologne the weekend after New Year’s Eve than for New Year’s Eve, to manage a rally in the central square by the controversial far-right group Pegida and counter-demonstrations against them. Pegida—Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West—has been building links with the AfD.

Cologne has the reputation of being one of the most liberal towns in Germany. It’s a bastion of gay rights and ethnic tolerance. Unlike most of Germany, the Cologne area is Catholic and sees itself as somewhat different from the rest of the country. During the Nazi era, Cologne was considerably less enamored with Hitler than many other regions, and became a stronghold of the Edelweiss Pirates, a youth group opposed to the lack of freedom in Nazi Germany. Cologne suffered heavy bombing by the Allies, with most of its town center reduced to rubble. One of the few structures to survive was its magnificent cathedral, in the shadow of which the ill-fated 2016 New Year’s Celebrations were held.

The evidence continues to mount of concerted attempts by Cologne’s police and government officials to cover-up the New Year’s Eve attacks. CCTV footage of the mayhem was allegedly deliberately destroyed. Local police were told to remove the word “rape” from their incident reports. The media and official reports by the authorities omitted mentioning the ethnicity of the assailants. The scale and coordinated nature of the attacks were heavily downplayed. Cologne’s Police Chief, 60-year-old Wolfgang Albers, faced severe criticism for his handling of the incident and was given early retirement. However, it was more of a slap on the wrist than a firing, and he still kept his pension. Yet Germany is not alone in such cover-ups of migrant mayhem. Eva Arpi in The Spectator writes that Sweden’s record is just as shameful.

My friends in Cologne were beside themselves with scorn for the city’s pro-immigration mayor, Henriette Reker, who following the New Year’s Eve assaults, appeared on TV advising women to protect themselves from such attacks in future by keeping “more than an arm’s length away” from strangers and “sticking together in groups.” She appeared to be blaming the victims rather than the perpetrators. It is a grim irony that on October 2015, while campaigning the day before the mayoral election in Cologne, Reker herself was the victim of a life-threatening assault. She was stabbed in the neck by a German nationalist angry at the country’s immigration policy. Here was a stranger that she was clearly unable to keep at arm’s length.

Today, Germany remains torn by deep divisions and extremism is on the rise across Europe. “Merkel is trying to cut off our German roots,” declared my friend Helmut, darkly. “Our society is becoming more and more polarized. I can see civil war coming to Germany as well as war in other parts of Europe.” Was he being overly melodramatic? I sincerely hope so. However, across the continent, riding on a wave of anti-immigration anger, right-wing politicians are gaining ground while centrists and moderates are losing power. The voice of reason seems to be in short supply.