Germany has been repeatedly shocked by the sexual assault of young girls and boys in the nation’s swimming pools by migrants this year, but the head of the German society for bathing has dismissed the concerns.

Berthold Schmitt, chief of Cologne’s swimming baths and CEO of the German Society for Bathing has made the comments in an interview with Die Welt in which he downplayed the importance of migrant sex assault. Instead he said the greater tragedy was the number of migrants who arrived in Germany unable to swim, and devoted the bulk of his interview to discussing that instead.

Moving the focus of the conversation away from sex assault — which he called “isolated incidents” — Mr. Schmitt named the three top problems he faced with migrants. He said: “The ‘new citizens’, as we call them, have mainly three problems: they do not speak German, have no knowledge of German or European bathing culture, and are not powerful swimmers”.

He also insisted migrants were not the main source of sex assault in his Cologne swimming bath. While acknowledging one young girl had been assaulted by a “refugee” recently, he also cited one case of a non-migrant having been discovered masturbating in a toilet, and another case of voyeurism.

Reports of children and adults being assaulted by migrant gangs, often groups of so-called ‘refugees’ visiting pools from nearby asylum housing intensified after the New Year’s Eve Cologne attacks, as the taboo around discussing migrant rape crumbled.

Yet among the attacks, many of which have been reported on by Breitbart London which was first to bring news of the swimming pool rape epidemic to the English-speaking world, the forces of political correctness have been working to change the narrative.

Recasting the migrants as downtrodden victims, a number of well-placed articles in Germany’s top newspapers have courted sympathy for “new citizens” who visit pools but find themselves unable to swim.

Cologne area paper the Rheinische Post has been one of the news outlets which has carried some of these stories. One feature with the headline ‘Lifeguards Save Refugees From Drowning Daily’ emphasised in the introductory paragraph that sexual assault was not a problem.

The article emphasised that in 2015, half of all people in Germany who died while swimming were migrants.

In January, Breitbart London reported on two girls aged 14 and 17 who had been molested by Syrian and Afghan “asylum seekers”. The men had reportedly touched them under their bathing suits, “and possibly raped” them.

Just days later Breitbart reported German police in Dresden had arrested an Afghan man after three girls aged between 11 and 13 complained they had been “touched immorally”. Two days later another report told the story of an Austrian mother who was horrified to discover a gang of six foreigners surrounding her three year old son. One had his hands inside the child’s bathing costume while another performed a “sex act”.

Also in January was the attacks at the Zwickau baths in Saxony, where migrants stormed the ladies changing rooms, masturbated into the Jacuzzi, and defecated in the children’s pool. The bath house then closed its doors to migrant bathers.

In Vienna, a 10 year old boy was raped so viscously by a migrant in a swimming bath he had to be hospitalised for internal injuries. The Iraqi migrant responsible when questioned by police excused his behaviour remarking “I couldn’t stand not having sex as I have excess sexual energy”, and said the fact he hasn’t had sex in months was for him a “sexual emergency”.