Hamburg’s celebrated City Park is widely regarded as one of the city’s great public spaces, with cycling routes winding through quiet woodland, an outdoor swimming pool, a well-known planetarium, expansive sports facilities and an amphitheatre that hosts concerts and film screenings.
But six years ago, the same park became the scene of a brutal gang rape that deeply unsettled residents of the German port city.
The attack on a 15-year-old girl by a group of young migrants — along with another comparable case in Hamburg in 2016 — has now inspired a contentious new film, Citizen Vigilante, which its makers say has effectively been kept from public screening in Germany through state-backed censorship.
This weekend, however, German viewers were able to watch the film after free-speech advocate Elon Musk made it available at no cost on his social media platform X for 48 hours, in open defiance of German restrictions. According to the report, millions watched worldwide in just 18 hours between Thursday and yesterday, contributing to a total of ten million views over the past week.
In the United States, the film has been climbing paid streaming rankings on platforms including Apple TV, reportedly earning its producers at least £50 million despite being made on a budget of less than £1 million.
Its success suggests that, as Western nations continue to debate the consequences of large-scale irregular migration, there is significant public interest in the film’s provocative themes.
The Daily Mail says it has investigated the film’s origins and the real events that helped shape it, including new details about its connection to a night in September 2020 in Hamburg’s Stadtpark. According to the report, nine young migrants pulled an intoxicated teenage girl into bushes, raped her for nearly three hours and recorded parts of the assault on their phones. Only one attacker, an adult Iranian man, was jailed; in 2023, he received a sentence of under three years.
The other eight were cleared by the judge, who described the assault — after which the group stole the girl’s wallet and mobile phone — as linked to “frustration and anger” arising from migration experiences and what was termed “cultural homelessness.” The case drew further controversy because it was heard behind closed doors in a youth court, as the defendants were under 21 at the time.
An attack on a 15-year-old girl by a gang of young migrants in Hamburg has now sparked a controversial new film called Citizen Vigilante, starring Amie Hammer
The 39-year-old American actor saw his Hollywood career implode in 2021 after unproven accusations of a sexual assault against a former girlfriend
It ran for 68 days and took evidence from 96 people including sympathetic ‘migration experts’ and social workers. An outcry over the non-custodial sentences, later upheld by an appeals court, followed the landmark case. Shockingly, there were even calls on social media for attacks on the presiding judge, a move condemned by the city judiciary as ‘utterly intolerable’.
In a further twist, a 20-year-old Hamburg woman named only as ‘Maja R’ sent one of the migrant attackers a WhatsApp message, calling him a ‘disgraceful racist pig and freak’ who should feel ashamed. Horrifyingly, Maja herself was sent to a youth prison for a weekend in June 2024 as punishment for ‘insulting’ the rapist.
Hamburg, a liberal city, was already reeling from an earlier high-profile case in the working-class suburb of Harburg in February 2016. Several young migrants from Balkan countries had gang-raped a teenage girl at a birthday party, using bottles and other objects during their assault and filming it on their phones.
The half-naked victim was left ‘like a piece of meat’ in the freezing cold which resulted in her being rushed to hospital with hypothermia. This attack also sparked a row over lenient sentencing when three of the perpetrators, aged between 14 and 17, received suspended terms of under two years because they had ‘shown remorse’.
Tens of thousands of Germans signed a petition demanding longer jail terms for the rapists, and a retrial ordered by Germany’s highest criminal court eventually resulted in tougher penalties for the culprits.
Such are the febrile conditions in which Citizen Vigilante was created. German director, producer and writer Uwe Boll has cast the ‘cancelled’ 39-year-old American actor Armie Hammer for the starring role, a decision that has added fuel to the fire.
Hammer, a scion of 20th-century oil tycoon Armand Hammer, saw his Hollywood career implode in 2021 after unproven accusations of a sexual assault against a former girlfriend. Later, leaked text messages, including bizarre references to cannibalism, surfaced which led to his total exile from the film industry.
He has always denied any wrongdoing and after an investigation by police and prosecutors in Los Angeles, no criminal charges were ever filed against him. The actor, who was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2018, has described his experiences as akin to crucifixion.
The working-class suburb of Harburg, where in February 2016 several young migrants from Balkan countries gang-raped a teenage girl at a birthday party
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Hamburg’s Stadtpark, which was the site of a hideous gang rape that shook residents of the German port city to their core
Now he is back as Michael Sanders, a US army veteran and wealthy businessman who stalks the streets of an unnamed European city seeking retribution for migrant crimes. The clunky film sends a powerful, if raw, message that anyone who rapes, robs or murders deserves equal punishment under the law, whatever their background.
Citizen Vigilante sets out to show that the West’s criminal justice system has been hijacked by a Left-wing establishment that protects migrant criminals at the expense of native Europeans.
In the opening scenes, a young mother is fatally stabbed in the throat in front of her son, aged about nine, by a passing migrant.
In graphic footage, we then follow Sanders on his mission to hunt down this and other migrant criminals – and, crucially, ‘corrupt’ judges. He says (as he kills) one such judge who has let off a group of migrant rapists: ‘You are the cancer that is killing society… You used the laws to help people hurt people… You might as well have raped her yourself.’
Sanders goes on to confront the family of a young rapist, asking his father why his son had attacked a girl, apparently because she was wearing a miniskirt. The father responds: ‘I teach him the values of the Koran and this family,’ which shockingly earns him a bullet in the head.
Needless to say, the movie is certainly not without its critics. One calls it ‘the most racist film since D.W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 melodrama The Birth of a Nation’ – which, although a technical cinematic landmark, is today denounced for its offensive portrayal of black characters and sympathy towards the Ku Klux Klan.
Veteran director Uwe Boll tells the Daily Mail that the German authorities have effectively censored him by refusing to give the film a rating, meaning it cannot be publicly shown.
‘When my lawyers complained, I was told the film was “inciting violence” against migrants. No: it’s a film inspired by huge political failures that have absolutely nothing to do with me, that I take absolutely no responsibility for. I do not condone violence against any innocent people.’
He explained to us that the two Hamburg rape cases were the inspiration for his movie, but is anxious to stress that not all migrants are violent by any means. However, he argues, those that do commit rape, robbery and murder are being treated with kid gloves by a criminal justice system that, he says, is ‘acting ridiculously’.
‘If five neo-Nazis raped a 15-year-old migrant girl, they would get 15 years in prison,’ he insists. Yet when a migrant commits the same crime, ‘these people always get off the hook. We’re told they’re under 18, or “traumatised”, or they are getting “psychological evaluation”. Law enforcement, the judges, the media, have become almost crazy.’
He says that Citizen Vigilante represents all those people who have been let down by the system. ‘It doesn’t help them to hear things like the rapists were “traumatised migrants”. I mean, what would you feel if you are the father of that girl [in Hamburg’s Stadtpark], or if you’re the raped girl herself?’
Boll says after the 2020 park-rape case, a seasoned newspaper commentator went on German TV to say the migrant attackers were victims of failed integration: they needed more money, more teachers, more social services and a better environment in Germany.
‘That is where I draw the line. It sends out a view that the victim doesn’t matter at all.’
In the graphic opening scene of his film, in which, as he puts it, a ‘mother gets stabbed and bleeds out in front of her little son’, he says: ‘This was deliberate, as a way of dealing with these random acts of violence, that get sugar-coated in the media. I have had discussions with people here in Germany, and they pointed out there are way more rapes and stabbings inside marriages.
‘My point is that the random violence of being pushed in front of a Tube train, or stabbed from behind in the neck, or being raped because you wear a bikini to the public swimming pool, is way more dangerous.
‘It’s terrible, of course, if a wife gets raped inside a marriage, but that’s not a security risk for anybody else. But if you have daughters or, as a woman, you go on your own to the lake to swim – and then you get grabbed and raped randomly – that’s a huge security risk because you basically cannot go to the pool because you are scared.’
Boll says that when he sent the script to Armie Hammer, they discussed the political landscape. He told the actor: ‘If you don’t believe it is good to do a movie like this, you can’t play Sanders, because I need you to believe what you are doing.’
He stresses that he does not want to instigate violence against anyone. ‘I don’t want migrants getting shot or migrant homes burning, or anything else. But in a fictional movie like this, you can put a warning out; that’s because it is like a cry for help. I think that the European population, especially in Britain and here in Germany, feel left alone. We all know that mass migration is not working, and we don’t want to get an Islamist society, we don’t want the sharia law. I have nothing against Muslims, but they can never be the majority in our countries. It cannot happen. And I tell “the generation of lunatics” who thinks they can live under sharia law, let’s talk again when it is here.’
He adds: ‘The German subsidised [state] system only produces the films where migrants look good, where migrants are successful, where migrants are fully integrated. Not one movie is done in Germany at all where migrants commit a real crime.’
His movie, thanks in part to the notoriety secured by its being banned, was on the way to huge success even before Elon Musk provided a platform for it. As it reaps millions of dollars for Boll, he tells us unemotionally that ‘when I was going around with the script, every streaming service told me I was a Nazi. They despise this idea even of shooting the movie like this. And it’s already topping Apple TV in America.’
At the end of Citizen Vigilante, a controversial statement appears in large letters. It says: ‘This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.’
As things stand today, that is a stark message that German authorities, and perhaps those of other European countries mired in the growing problems wrought by mass migration, would prefer no one sees.
