A German school whose student body is made up almost entirely of migrants has been dubbed 'the most dangerous in the country'.

Karolina-Burger-Realschule, a secondary in the south-western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, has been at the centre of a national frenzy over the country's relationship with migrants. 

Around 90 per cent of the roughly 760 pupils there are migrants, while roughly 40 per cent of the residents in the town it is based in, Ludwigshafen, are also non-German. 

The school regularly sees brutal fights between students, wanton destruction of property and violent threats against teachers. 

Fire alarms are regularly pulled, forcing the town's firefighters to respond to wasted call-outs, and fake emergency calls are made to police by students who falsely report shootings. 

In one particularly harrowing incident last May, a 16-year-old female student threatened a teacher with a pocket knife, before she was later committed to a psychiatric hospital after she was initially charged with attempted manslaughter. 

Education experts, who describe the school as being a 'magnifying glass of failed integration policy', are unsure how to tackle the ever-growing problem. One suggested simply closing down the school completely. 

The ongoing chaos is so bad that parents are desperate to pull their children out, with one father bluntly telling a German media outlet: 'I want my son to change schools. I'm very pessimistic about this school.'

And they aren't the only ones. Teachers at Karolina-Burger have been calling in sick to avoid the chaos. German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that a third of the school's 53 teachers called in sick last week. 

Many of the teachers said that they did so in protest at the headmaster and supervising authorities. 

A state education ministry spokesman told the outlet that if this is true, the teachers could face disciplinary action. 

The May 2025 knife incident was the last straw for many of the teachers, who signed an open letter to the authorities.

The letter, reported by local paper Mannheimer Morgen in November 2025, detailed horrific teaching conditions, which included teachers being pelted with books, sexualised insults, physical assaults, and students creating fake social media profiles of teachers to trash their reputations. 

According to one teacher, a pupil told them and the rest of the class: 'I'll shoot you all.'

Another said a student asked her if she wasn't afraid that 'someone would stab [her] in the back'. 

On top of this, teachers claimed in the open letter, pupils would regularly destroy furniture, punch holes in walls and set off firecrackers in classrooms.

Teachers also reported that the hygiene conditions at the school are appalling. Toilets are often flooded, with their walls covered in graffiti. Puddles of urine sit uncleaned in the hallways. 

German outlet SWR also reported that older pupils would often bully juniors into giving them their food and money. 

One young local in Ludwigshafen told the outlet that she is now too scared to walk past the school, as she has been menaced and pushed around by students. 

Local media reported that between 2022 and 2024, police were called to the school 121 times. Shockingly, 118 of these calls resulted in criminal charges. 

In one 2018 callout, SWAT police were forced to go to the school amid reports of a teenager carrying a pistol. 

Teachers demanded in the letter that the authorities install lockable classroom doors, CCTV cameras in hallways and the schoolyard and that class sizes be reduced. 

But these concerns weren't properly addressed until earlier this year during state elections. 

In an attempt to keep hold of Rhineland-Palatinate, the Left-wing Social Democratic Party (SPD) promised a swathe of measures to support the school. 

But this was too little, too late for the SPD, who were ousted by the Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) in March. 

The school, already long infamous for its shocking state, became a flashpoint for immigration issues in the region and the nation.   

Germany is currently grappling with a long-term migrant crisis that has been plaguing the country for more than a decade and has led to deepening anxieties around migration.

It was sparked in the 2010s when the then chancellor Angela Merkel allowed more than a million refugees into the country. 

The crisis has led to the rise of groups such as AfD, the hard-Right party so extreme that last year Germany's president hinted he was considering banning it. 

Despite growing controversy, Germany said in February that it would extend its border controls for another six months after turning 46,000 people away and seeing a dramatic drop in asylum applications.

While the measures were due to expire March 15, they will now be extended until at least September 2026, with security concerns cited as the reason.

Amid all of these anxieties, Rhineland-Palatinate's interior ministry – also led by the SPD – said in January that it would be sending daily police patrols to Karolina-Burger. 

Following its victory in March, the CDU took decisive action this week and sacked the school's head, 56-year-old Oliver Kästel.

Mr Kästel had previously run to be mayor of Meckenheim, a town in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, for the socialist SPD. 

Ute Eiling-Hütig, the new minister for education in Rhineland-Palatinate, said his sacking represents a 'fresh start' for the school. 

She added that the aim is now to 'to resolve conflicts and refocus attention on what matters: good education, successful [academic] work, and reliable cooperation with a focus on students'.

But even with this supposed fresh start, many of the issues have not gone away.

On Wednesday, cops were called to the school when two pupils – one former and one current – got into an argument that rapidly escalated. 

Several students told SWR that a teacher needed to intervene before police arrived. Authorities are now investigating the incident as a case of assault. 

That same day, two fire alarms were falsely pulled – forcing the fire department to send firefighters and waste time. 

No one in Germany is quite sure how to solve the problem at the heart of Ludwigshafen.

Migration expert Ahmad Mansour told Bild: 'I would close the school completely and distribute the students to other schools.' 

He added: 'This cannot continue. A school must not become a place where violence is commonplace.'

He believes the escalation in violence at the school has been caused by a number of systemic problems, including 'violence within families, the influence of social media, insecure teachers, and a lack of political backbone towards teachers and school principals'.

Social scientist Susanne Schröter, meanwhile, told the newspaper that the conditions at Karolina-Burger are a 'magnifying glass of failed integration policy'.

She criticised local politicians: 'This is not the first time a school with a high percentage of students from immigrant backgrounds has made negative headlines; rather, it is symptomatic of a larger problem.'

Heinz-Peter Meidinger, the honorary president of the German Teachers' Association, told Bild he believes some pupils from migrant backgrounds have a lower threshold for violence. 

He said: 'Many mistakes were made at the school, and the school administration clearly didn't support the teachers. 

'The students didn't become like that at school; they brought their potential for conflict and their problems with them. The teachers are the ones who suffer most here.'

But he sees the main problem with Karolina-Burger being that it has an excessively high percentage of students from a non-German background and that they have not been properly integrated into German society, saying: 'We very frequently have problems at schools with a high percentage of students with a migration background; these are considered problem schools.'

He says German schools ought to distribute potentially problematic students across different schools, as German parents are fleeing institutions that are failing their children. 

He said: 'German parents are fleeing such schools, which exacerbates the problem. We have hundreds of schools with such problems in Germany.

'Such conditions accelerate the decline of the German school system.'