Germans are being lied to by their government. By Angela Merkel, by their police force and even by their media. For most of 2015, many suspected as much. Those suspicions were confirmed in the most dramatic possible way in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

That night, a mob of around 1,000 migrants gathered outside Cologne’s central train station and began molesting, robbing and even raping passersby. As of January 14, 652 crimes were reported to Cologne police from that evening. Of those, 331 included alleged sexual offenses, including two rapes.

A leaked police report stated that “[w]omen literally had to run the gauntlet through the mass of drunk men, in a way you can’t describe.” One person talked about how he arrived at the station and saw “countless weeping women.”

Cologne was the worst affected city, but not the only one. Over 100 crimes have been reported for the same evening in Hamburg. Women in Frankfurt, Helsinki, Zurich and Salzburg suffered a similar fate, albeit on a smaller scale.

The impacts of this night on Europe’s future could be just as big as the November 13 terrorist attack in Paris.

Cover-up

Those attacks alone would have been enough to confirm to Germans that their government had been hiding the truth from them—or at least looking at the mass migration to Germany with heavily tinted glasses. But the authorities’ reaction after Cologne was even more damning.

Their first instinct was to cover up everything. The day after the attacks, the Cologne police filed a report describing their city on New Year’s Eve as having “a joyful, party atmosphere.”

“As in years past, we are looking back at a mostly peaceful New Year’s celebration,” they wrote. “Reasons to intervene were mostly physical assault and disturbance of the peace.”

There was nothing in the media either. The attacks occurred Thursday night, but the next day and all weekend almost all the national news media were silent.

The government, the police and the media were afraid of an anti-migrant backlash, so they tried to cover up the mass sexual assault of hundreds of women. zdf, a German public broadcaster, was forced to apologize for being so slow to cover the story.

Of course, something so big could not be kept secret. But even toward the end of the next week, once the truth was out, government officials still tried to cover up part of the story. They insisted that there was no evidence that recent migrants or asylum seekers were involved in the attacks—while leaked police reports and police officers’ statements to the media revealed the exact opposite.

That lie has also completely collapsed. “Those in the focus of criminal police investigations are mostly people from North African countries,” said the police later. “The majority of them are asylum seekers and people who are in Germany illegally.”

Worst of all, the botched Cologne cover-up was just the latest in a long string of cover-ups. There are plenty of examples, although prior to the Cologne attacks you had to search hard to find them in the news media.

A Pattern of Abuse

Tania Kambouri is a police officer in Germany and a bestselling author. In an Oct. 2, 2015, radio interview, Kambouri discussed the migrants and Germany’s deteriorating security situation.

“For weeks, months and years I have noticed that Muslims, mostly young men, do not have even a minimum level of respect for the police,” she said. “When we are out patrolling the streets, we are verbally abused by young Muslims.

“I wish these problems were recognized and clearly addressed! If necessary, laws need to be strengthened. It is also very important that the … judges issue effective rulings. It cannot be that offenders continue to fill the police files, hurt us physically, insult us, whatever, and there are no consequences. Many cases are closed, or offenders are released on probation …. Yes, what is happening in the courts today is a joke. The growing disrespect, the increased violence against police …. We are losing control of the streets.”

Until Cologne, Kambouri was all but a lone voice. Now she has been dramatically proven right. The lack of respect for police that night is well documented. Migrants attacked police and even sexually assaulted a plainclothes female police officer—and got away with it!

A Shocking Government Move

On Nov. 24, 2015, the Gatestone Institute published an article titled “Germans Opposed to Mass Migration Are ‘Free to Leave.’” The title came from a statement by the district president of Kassel, a city in the state of Hesse. He stated that German citizens who disagree with the government’s open-door immigration policy are “free to leave Germany.” The article described a recent proposal by the mayor of Berlin to create emergency legislation that allows local authorities to seize private residences and office buildings to accommodate asylum seekers.

The mayor’s legislation “would effectively suspend Germany’s constitutional guarantee of private property,” according to the Gatestone Institute. It “would authorize police forcibly to enter private homes and apartments without a warrant to determine their suitability as housing for refugees and migrants.” And the mayor tried to keep the proposal secret from the German public!

Gunnar Schopelius, a popular columnist in Germany, didn’t believe this story and decided to investigate it himself. “So I went on a search for the source of this strange report and found it,” he wrote. “There is a ‘proposal,’ which the Senate Chancellery (Senatskanzlei) has apparently circulated among the senators. The Senate Chancellery is another name for the mayor’s office. … The proposal is clear: The police can enter private property without a court order in order to search for housing for refugees when these are threatened with homelessness. You can do that ‘without the consent of the owner.’ And not only should the police be allowed to do this, but also the regulatory agencies” (Nov. 10, 2015).

Why wouldn’t more mainstream media outlets report on this? It’s a blockbuster story—the mayor of Berlin wanted to illegally change German law in order to invade the homes of German people in search of accommodation for migrants. Why wasn’t this addressed by Chancellor Merkel or her government?

As Schopelius noted, “This delicate ‘proposal’ attracted little public attention. Only Berlin fdp General Secretary Sebastian Czaja spoke up and warned of an ‘open preparation for breach of the Constitution.’ Internally, there should have been protests.”

This is the trend across the country. The stories are there. But until the mainstream media were forced to confront the problem in Cologne, they have been hard to find—covered sporadically and often only in local papers.

Migrant Criminals

In Bad Tolz, Bavaria, local government officials recently condemned a nightclub owner after he banned male migrants from his club when female patrons complained they were being harassed. Local politicians and media branded the manager a “Nazi” and a “racist.” Incidents like this are happening daily in towns and cities across Germany, yet local and federal authorities simply refuse to talk about it. Worse still, they are attacking those who do express alarm and concern.

In Baden-Württemberg at least one hospital was forced to hire armed guards to protect its nurses from refugees.

A women’s council in Hesse wrote an open letter to the state parliament saying it had substantial evidence of sexual abuse and forced prostitution in refugee shelters.

In North Rhine-Westphalia in August, a local paper received news about the rape of a 13-year-old Muslim girl by a refugee. So it went to the police and asked for crime statistics in refugee centers. The police came back and said there was no rape or sexual assault. They made either a serious clerical error, or they flat-out lied.

The migrants are proving to be a significant burden on Germany’s health-care system. Yet, as the Gatestone Institute reported, “German media outlets are downplaying the extent of the health-care problem, apparently to avoid spreading fear or provoking anti-immigrant sentiments” (Nov. 8, 2015).

In October, Die Welt reported on a government document leaked to the paper by German intelligence officials. The document warned, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.” The document also warned that integrating hundreds of thousands of “illegal migrants” would be “impossible.” This dramatic document garnered very little attention inside Germany, either from the media or from the government.

Instead, the message emanating from Germany’s chancellor and many others is: “We can do this!”

In October, police union chief Rainer Wendt warned, “There is a lot of glossing over going on.”

“[T]his doesn’t represent reality,” he said.

A study by Cologne police in 2014 revealed that 40 percent of migrants from North Africa are committing crimes within their first year of arriving in Germany! That is a huge level of crime. Spiegel published the results of a confidential study by police in Düsseldorf showing that a North African migrant commits a crime every 3½ hours in that city. Because these migrants have no fixed abode and have multiple identities, they are rarely punished.

The problem goes even further than mere deception. German authorities have so far proved incapable or unwilling to do anything to prevent the migrant crime wave.

Backlash

After the Cologne attack, the anti-immigrant group pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, held a protest. About 1,700 police were deployed to the streets of Cologne. But during the News Year’s Eve attacks, the police had only 143 officers on duty.

In Leipzig, far-right extremists went on a rampage to protest the Cologne attacks. The police arrested 211 of them. Yet barely any of the 1,000-strong mob that assaulted women in Cologne were arrested; police have just 21 suspects.

That’s not to say the German police are wrong to arrest far-right thugs who smash shop windows—far from it. But it exposes how little they are doing to fight migrant crime.

Wendt said, “It is highly uncertain whether in the case of the Cologne attacks even one conviction will be made.” The vast majority of these attackers are unpunished, at large and could try the same thing again.

No wonder Germans are angry. Cologne marked the moment when all of the government‘s lies started being exposed. Many now see its potential as a major turning point for Germany.

Both police officers and politicians have said what happened in Cologne is a “completely new dimension of crime.”

“The pressure built up by the images and stories from Cologne make it virtually impossible to continue on as before,” wrote Spiegel Online, January 8. This article was titled “How New Year’s Eve in Cologne Has Changed Germany.”

“Cologne has changed everything; people now are doubting,” said the vice president of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, Volker Bouffier.

“Europe in Crisis Over Sex Attacks by Migrants Amid Calls for Emergency EU Meeting” was the Telegraph’s January 8 headline.

As that title says, the repercussions go beyond Germany. “The idea of multicultural Europe has failed,” said Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, as he called for an emergency European Union summit to discuss the attacks. “The migrants cannot be integrated, it’s simply impossible,” he said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called for a complete stop to all immigration. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło said the attack “should shake up public opinion at last.”

Clearly these events are triggering a backlash against immigrants similar in scale to the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Nearly 40 percent of German women plan to avoid large gatherings after the attacks, according to a recent poll. That is the kind of fear that is spreading.

A Lie With Consequences

Think about the consequences of German officials’ deception. It is destroying the trust between Germany’s government and the public. What happens when the majority of Germans realize they have been deceived? What happens when the majority of Germans lose confidence and trust in mainstream leaders? Frustrated and angry, the German people, as any people would, will seek an individual, a political party, willing to heed their concerns and solve Germany’s migrant crisis. This trend is already evident in the dramatic rise of pegida and the AfD, a right-wing political party whose popularity is at all-time highs.

Many of the Germans becoming disillusioned with mainstream politics and turning to these groups are not hardcore neo-Nazis. They don’t want to persecute the migrants or see them imprisoned, beaten up or killed. They are not extremists seeking genocide. They are regular, sound-thinking, rational people, many of whom have terrific empathy for those suffering in Syria and elsewhere. These people are simply concerned about the impact millions of migrants will have on their nation, its institutions, its infrastructure, its economy, its culture and on the German people. They are concerned about Germany’s future. But Angela Merkel’s government refuses to give serious attention to these concerns and refuses to tell the truth about the impact the migrants are having and will have on the nation.

If she continues to do this, Germany’s chancellor risks helping transform the German people—and Germany itself—into something very different and much more frightening than the democratic, peaceful, friendly nation we see today.

The Merkel government’s handling of this situation is turning the German people into a ticking time bomb! The more disillusioned, frustrated and angry the German people become, the more vulnerable they will be to radical politics and radical leaders with radical solutions.

Don’t be deceived by the images of Germans embracing the migrants or Germany’s chancellor making the cover of Time magazine as its “Person of the Year.” All is not well in Germany. Growing numbers of people are becoming unhappier by the month, not just with the migrants, but with Chancellor Merkel and her pro-migrant friends in the government and the media.

Watch for a Change

Common sense alone tells us an explosion is coming. But the Bible specifically warns us what will be the result: a radical change in German leadership.

The book of Daniel is written specifically for the “time of the end” (Daniel 8:17; 12:4, 9). In passage after passage, it talks about a powerful leader who will shake the world. He will be the “king of the north” (Daniel 11:40), ruling over a united European power. Most likely he will be the leader of Germany, which controls the rest of the EU.

What type of man is this new leader? The Bible says that “the king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god” (verse 36). He will be a “king of fierce countenance” (Daniel 8:23). He is assertive, aggressive and ambitious. He is a strong leader!

This leader shall come “understanding dark sentences” (verse 23)—or, as Clarke’s Commentary puts it, he is “very learned and skillful in all things relating to government and its intrigues.”

He is also very different from Germany’s current leader.

Angela Merkel has been one of the most popular and successful postwar German chancellors. During 2013, 2014 and the first half of 2015, her approval level generally hovered around 70 percent. She has been exactly the leader Germans have wanted. For Germans to desire this new stronger leader, there will have to be some big changes. This means more than simply being fed up with Ms. Merkel. They will begin desiring some radically different characteristics in their leaders.

Daniel 11 says that this strongman comes into power through “flatteries” (verse 21). The Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary says that “the nation shall not, by a public act, confer the kingdom on him, but he shall obtain it by artifice, ‘flattering.’” Daniel’s prophecy also says that the people “shall not give the honour of the kingdom” to this person. All this indicates that he may not come to power through normal democratic processes.

By autumn 2015, Ms. Merkel’s approval ratings had dropped to just under 50 percent. By itself that’s not terrible, but it’s a huge drop in a very short time.

The migrant crisis is creating a desire for a strong leader.

The irony is, this change in attitude is exactly what Ms. Merkel, the police and the liberal media want to avoid. Jörg Luyken noted in the Local, “Newsrooms are at one and the same time scared of appearing racist and terrified of stirring up a latent racism they believe still exists in German society” (January 5).

Nigel Jones made the same point in the Telegraph. Since the copyright of Mein Kampf expired in January, German officials have worked hard to keep the book out of people’s hands. Anyone publishing the unedited original faces prosecution on hate-crime laws. Instead, only a heavily annotated 2,000-page version is available.

“It [is] as if Germany’s rulers do not trust their own people with the ability to handle uncomfortable truths,” wrote Jones. “Whether those truths are the poisonous doctrines that once entranced the nation and led to the Holocaust and the devastation of Europe in the Second World War, or the more immediately dismaying reality that parts of German cities are no longer safe for German women to walk in because of their own government’s policies, the instinct to suppress the truth remains the same” (January 12).

Ms. Merkel and those like her see the capacity for this transformation in the German people. That is why all the cover-ups have occurred in the first place. But in trying to suppress the truth, they’re undermining Germans’ confidence in just about every part of their government, creating an even bigger backlash, and paving the way for their own destruction.