German Community Will No Longer Allow Men to Hunt Down Women and Spank Them with Cow Horn During Christmas Festival

A German community of over 5,000 residents will no longer allow its single men to hunt down women and repeatedly spank them with cow horns, marking the end of a 200-year-old Christmas ritual.

Two reporters with NDR, a public radio and television broadcaster in Hamburg, attended the 2023 Klaasohm festival, which takes place every year from Dec. 5 to Dec. 6 on the North Sea island of Borkum.

While tourists and journalists are allowed to attend the festival daytime activities, which include gathering around young, unmarried men dressed like Klaasohms, another word for the Krampus, Father Christmas' dark sidekick, the rituals gets darker with the night.

After nightfall, the reporters inconspicuously recorded "catchers" chasing women and holding them down while Klaasohms, who are wearing masks made of sheepskin and bird feathers with openings for just their eyes and mouths, hit them with cow horns and onlookers, including children, cheered.

Women who previously took part in the ritual as teenagers told the reporters it was a painful experience. Some Islanders were afraid to speak against the ritual, however, since it is steeped in the island's culture.

"On Borkum, if you talk openly about wanting this to stop, you're told that you don't understand the festival, that you're not honoring the tradition and that you're somehow bowing to pressure from outside [the island]," an anonymous source told the NDR, according to reporting by DW News.

Following the report's release, the association that carries out the Klaasohm tradition released a statement pointing out "numerous journalistic inaccuracies" before conceding that the ritual is controversial.

"We expressly distance ourselves from any form of violence against women and apologize for the historically-based actions of past years. We as a community have clearly decided to leave this aspect of the tradition behind us," the association said in a statement obtained by DW News.

They will, instead, "continue to focus on what really makes the festival: the solidarity of the islanders."