A respected violence researcher has declared that the Cologne sex attacks show German men have forgotten how to fight, and it’s a good thing.

Jörg Baberowski gave a speech recently at the Philosophy Festival in Cologne on Thursday night saying that the New Years Eve sex attacks in Cologne prove that German males have forgotten how to stand up for themselves. He said the fact that the German men had not come to the aid of the women being sexually assaulted by large gangs of migrants showed a reluctance to be violent and commented: “We see that men in Germany no longer know how to deal with violence,” Stern reports.

However, immediately following the remark Baberowski, who is a historian at the Humboldt University in Berlin, said “thank god” that German men no longer know how to stand up for themselves or face violent conflict. He claimed that is was good that German men relied solely on the state to take care of them and protect them. He claimed that the New Years’ attacks were a failure of the state to protect its citizens and that if the government can’t guarantee that safety then the confidence the citizens have it it will be shaken.

The Cologne New Years’ Eve sex attacks, Baberowski claimed, were nothing to do with Islam but rather evidence of a lack of state control in the migrant camps. He said that if the state had more control over the migrant camps then the migrants would respect the law, not commit crimes and be more docile, as he describes the average German man.

Claiming that a lack of state authority in migrant camps led to the creation of gangs, he said that the solution was simple: “These people should have been immediately put in jail, then they would have learned something for life.”

Reaction on social media was highly negative of the academic’s remarks though some Germans expressed a desire to attend self defence classes. German right wing magazine Contra called the comments absurd in an editorial on the subject. The author asked how any Germans could have expected that the Tarrarush phenomenon would ever occur on German streets when they had no experience with it.

They also pointed out that the attacks often happen with gangs of many assaulting very few, often armed with knives and other weapons. They claimed that the “western code of honour”, which includes not striking people on the ground, doesn’t apply with migrants and a fight with migrants can often result not in a beating, but death as was the case of 17-year-old ‘Niklas P.’ last month.

Baberowski made headlines in December when he claimed that mass migration could change Germany forever saying: “The Germany that we know it will disappear by mass immigration.”