A 12 foot wall is being built in Munich to separate a housing estate from a new migrant centre that will house 160 unaccompanied minors.

Locals living in the Neuperlach Süd housing development in Munich, less than 100 metres from the site at which young migrants will be staying, went to court to get the wall built.

Germans living in the area fear bad behaviour among the newcomers, and concern over likely levels of noise when they arrive, will lower the value of their properties if the migrant centre remains for an extended length of time, reports Der Spiegel.

The wall gained attention outside Munich after vice-chairman of the district, and political activist, Guido Bucholtz, made a film charting its construction.

Bucholtz believes “there is no need for a wall” in Munich and says he was driven to document the “monster” of a build after being “frightened” by its size. The local politician, who says his wish is that Germans will “welcome” migrant floods to their neighbourhoods in future, reports having received hate mail since the film went viral.

Speaking to intellectual magazine Merkur on the reaction to his film, Bucholtz characterised much of it as “completely hate-filled, emotional reactions, xenophobia without end, [and a] distortion of facts”.

“I felt like I was the evil one because I was working for refugees,” he lamented.

That, at 12 foot tall, the wall will stand higher than the notorious Communist-era Berlin Wall has been noted by the media. German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year evoked the Berlin Wall as an argument against erecting border controls to protect from mass migration.

Since the arrival of over a million non-European migrants to Germany in 2015 the country has seen a massive increase in street crime and sex attacks.

This week the Catholic community in one town reported that “not a day goes by” without new cases of wilful destruction of Christian statues. Police suspect the attacks, which they believe are carried out with “a pure lust for destruction”, could be religiously motivated.