Berlin, November 2nd, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – Germany is supposed to offer nearly 20,000 places for women fleeing domestic violence, as required by the Istanbul Convention. According to the latest statistics, there are only about 7,800. The gap is a reminder of how much remains to be done on the 50th anniversary of the first women’s shelter in the Federal Republic, which opened in the Grunewald district of West Berlin.
Demand is far greater than supply, as German-language media report. Last year, more than 13,000 women and over 15,000 children and teenagers found refuge in German shelters. Nationwide, there are roughly 400 shelters and protective apartments, eleven of them in Berlin.
Rarely Discussed
In the 1970s, violence within marriage was rarely discussed in public. Historian-style accounts such as Franziska Benkel’s book on the history of German women’s shelters describe how abuse was commonly dismissed as a marital quarrel and thus a private matter. Women who left their husbands often lost everything, because they depended on them financially. Opponents of shelters also claimed that such places would only encourage women to abandon their families.
The women’s movement began to shift that view. According to Benkel, the filmmaker Sarah Haffner played a decisive role with a documentary on the subject. Victims appeared alongside medical staff, social workers and law enforcement officials. A Berlin doctor in the film said he had not counted the cases, but that women beaten by their husbands arrived at his hospital once or twice a day. The reaction was strong enough that politicians could no longer ignore the issue.
Model in London
The Berlin activists looked to Chiswick Women’s Aid in London, Europe’s first shelter, as a model, but they insisted on one major difference. They wanted the government to carry the costs, and they wanted the house to be run independently, answering only to the women who lived there. “We wanted the state to pay for it”, a former staff member said.
They found allies in Berlin’s Family Senator Ilse Reichel and Federal Family Minister Katharina Focke, both of the SPD. The federal government agreed to cover 80 percent of the costs and West Berlin the rest. A budget of 450,000 Deutschmarks was set aside for the first three years, on the condition that a sponsoring association be created and that researchers follow the project.
Full Within a Week
The house, a former German Red Cross home, officially opened on November 1st, 1976. Women had been staying there for about three months already. Within a week, it was overcrowded, and at times some 15 people shared a room of 20 square meters (about 215 square feet). Staff were forced to organize everything at once, from furnishing rooms to accompanying women to government offices.
No one was turned away, with the exception of drug-dependent women, who were referred to specialized services. Attacks by former partners, harassment and arson attempts were a recurring danger.
In the first year, 615 women and 730 children sought protection. The reasons for the violence that they cited ranged from drunkenness and jealousy to debts, unemployment and pregnancy. Residents later described the atmosphere as that of a large family, with safety but without anyone telling them what to do. One former employee said she remembered above all how much strength the women showed.
Chance to Rest
The shelter closed in 2000, when its sponsoring association dissolved. Maria Schrammen of the women’s rights group Terre des Femmes was quoted by several German-language media. She calls the shelter a milestone as it was the first publicly funded protected space for women and their children, and it gave them a chance to rest and plan their next steps.
Schrammen said that talking about domestic violence as a human rights violation is now taken for granted, which she attributes to decades of feminist campaigning. Today, she added, reliable funding is as important as accessibility, because women often cannot find a place nearby and are sent to other towns.
She described the Violence Assistance Act, passed in 2025, as historic progress. From January 2027, the federal states must guarantee a nationwide network of protection and counseling services. Schrammen also wants more emphasis on prevention, including mandatory training for police officers, judges and prosecutors, so that warning signs are recognized earlier, as well as more work with perpetrators. “When a woman comes to a shelter, the violence has already escalated”, she said.
