When ‘no-go’ areas are mentioned in Germany, it is usually in connection with foreign mafia families. But a UN fact-finding team have warned there are areas black men fear to enter.

“When I have to go to Brandenburg for work, I go – but I wouldn’t bring my daughter with me,” said Yonas Endrias, an adoptive Berliner.

Endrias, originally from Eritrea, has been involved for years in associations that fight discrimination against black people in Germany, and is one of dozens of people of African heritage consulted by a three-person team sent by the UN to look into racism.

“Racism is particularly bad in Saxony,” Endrias said, adding that working with Saxon law enforcement posed a real problem “because the police there don’t really know what racism is”. Even the deputy leader of Saxony admitted last year that the state’s police had a racism problem.

The Eritrean’s comments formed part of a preliminary report by the UN team on their week-long visit to Germany, presented at a press conference in Berlin on Monday.

The UN group  – two lawyers and a human rights expert – visited Berlin, Dessau, Dresden, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Hamburg from February 20th to 27th. Even after their first visit, the team were clear that they saw systemic problems with racism in Germany, and an “incomplete understanding of history” that makes the situation largely invisible to the rest of the population.

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