The exquisite sound of Cologne’s cathedral choir drifted out into the cool night air of the city’s main square on Wednesday evening. A Holy mass, celebrating the visit of the Wise Men to Jesus’s cribside, was packed with worshippers marking the 12th day of Christmas in this fiercely Christian part of Germany.

As the service ended and families poured out onto the pavement, an 18-year-old German girl called Michelle stood under bright arc lights nearby giving an interview to a television crew.

She and a group of friends had been sexually attacked in the same cathedral square by gangs of marauding men a few days before, on New Year’s Eve. The girls were chased, cornered and intimately groped before their mobiles and wallets were stolen.

‘The men were all foreigners, and when we protested, in German, they did not understand us,’ said Michelle during the interview.

She is just one of 120 women who were abused that horrific night in the square, which is dotted with bars, nightclubs and coffee shops, and is where Cologne locals have seen in the New Year for centuries.

The men, speaking Arabic and seemingly either drunk or high on drugs, moved around in large groups among a gathering of around 1,000 male migrants and deliberately targeted women. The men easily outnumbered the 190 police officers on duty, who were quickly overwhelmed.

In other cities across Germany, including Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, where a tourist was sexually assaulted by five men right in front of the famous Brandenburg Gate, it was the same disturbing story.

Nearly 50 women in Hamburg complained to police about sexual harassment by ‘North African’ men, who called them ‘bitches’, shouted ‘Fikki, fikki’ to indicate they wanted to rape them, and ‘chased’ them ‘like cattle’ around the streets.

One victim there was a 19-year-old girl called Lotta, who’d gone out to celebrate in a chic dress and high heels with friends. While they were walking from one nightclub to another, they were surrounded by men of ‘foreign origin’ who separated the girls from each other.

‘I was suddenly alone,’ said Lotta. ‘Twenty to 30 men were standing round me … every time a hand went away from my body, the next one arrived. I felt helpless.’

Like her friends, the teenager was sexually assaulted, had her hair pulled and was finally thrown to the ground after the men had finished with her.

In Stuttgart, women complained of sexual attacks by ‘trouble-makers with an immigrant background’ and 15 other ‘Mediterranean men of Arabic appearance’.

When one group of young girls refused these men’s advances, their boyfriends were beaten up. One girl who fought off an attacker ended up in hospital with a broken nose and deep cuts to her face.

The attacks have sounded the alarm bell in Germany over the consequences of mass migration. A country dogged by guilt over its Nazi past, it has enjoyed its recent role as saviour of Europe, welcoming in foreigners from the war-divided Middle East and Africa’s poverty hotspots.

When the migrants began arriving in their thousands each day last summer, there were welcoming parties across the country. ‘We love refugees!’ proclaimed banners outside reception centres.

Yet that warm hospitality is now being replaced by fear, as a society renowned for its good order begins to buckle under the strain — and to worry if it has made a mistake.

Figures this week revealed that 1.1 million newcomers registered for asylum in Germany in 2015. Many more — including potential jihadists and opportunists pretending to be refugees — are suspected of slipping in under the radar since August, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel controversially announced she would welcome all Syrian migrants who knocked on the door. Mrs Merkel has since dramatically changed her tune, saying this week that she wanted to stem the flow of migrants into the European Union, while keeping all borders open.

Yet the influx into Europe since she made her grand gesture shows no sign of abating. German ministers say 3,200 migrants a day continue to enter the country.

Denmark began passport checks on its border this week, and border controls have also been imposed by other countries including Sweden and Hungary, threatening Mrs Merkel and the EU’s cherished Schengen agreement, allowing free movement between member states.

All this is raising questions from ordinary Germans, and this week provoked confessions from their political masters. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere admitted the New Year crimes against women by such large numbers of men from a migrant background were a ‘new departure’ for the country.

Mrs Merkel said: ‘Everything must be done to identify the guilty parties without regard to their background or origins. We must send clear signals to those who are not prepared to abide by our laws. Questions arise over whether some groups are subscribing to misogyny.’

Her words were clearly carefully chosen to avoid specifically linking migrants with these attacks against women. But the truth is the mass assaults have clear echoes of the sex crimes in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011, during celebrations welcoming the so-called Arab Spring, when groups of men violently harassed women.

Lara Logan, a CBS reporter, was sexually assaulted by a mob in scenes reminiscent of those in Germany. Her clothes were torn off, and between 200 and 300 men took pictures of her naked body as her attackers ‘raped her with their hands’ over and over again.

Another deeply worrying aspect of the New Year horror in Cologne also emerged this week.

Many Germans, including some of the victims themselves, have accused authorities of a conspiracy of silence over the assaults to stop criticism of the mass immigration policy pursued by Mrs Merkel and her politically-correct supporters. The mainstream media in Germany has, until recently, toed the Government line; a top public broadcaster, ZDF, recently refused to run a segment about a rape case on its prime-time ‘crime-watch’ show because the ‘dark-skinned’ suspect was a migrant.

The programme’s editor defended her decision, saying: ‘We don’t want to inflame the situation and spread a bad mood. The migrants don’t deserve it.’

Cracks only began to show just before New Year. Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, broke ranks by accusing officials of conducting a campaign of deception on a ‘massive scale’ by burying bad news on migration. It reported that drug gangs involved in organised crime were actively recruiting newly-arrived migrants from the vast temporary camps where they live.

The Cologne police force has also been accused of deliberately hushing up the New Year scandal. It issued an official press release the following day describing the celebrations as ‘exuberant, but mostly peaceful’. The release has since been retracted, and last night it emerged that police chief Wolfgang Albers is to resign.

Broadcaster ZDF had to apologise for a ‘cover up’ after it failed to report the Cologne story for three days, even though it knew about it.

And until Thursday, a week after the attacks, there had been silence from Mrs Merkel’s ministers about the backgrounds of the perpetrators. Initially, they insisted there was no evidence that new migrants were involved in the violence.

A leaked police report which emerged 48 hours ago showed this was far from the truth. It revealed that one of the Cologne attackers said: ‘I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly: Mrs Merkel invited me.’

The report by a senior officer added: ‘When we arrived [at the square] our vehicles were pelted with firecrackers. On the cathedral steps were a thousand people, mainly of immigrant background, who were indiscriminately throwing fireworks and bottles into the crowd.

‘Women literally had to run the gauntlet through the mass of drunk men in a way you can’t describe ….many came to officers shocked and crying to report sex assaults. We were unable to respond to all the offences. There were just too many.’

Another unnamed officer told a Cologne newspaper that 14 of those questioned on the night were from Syria and one from Afghanistan.

‘That’s the truth, though it hurts to say it,’ he added. ‘They had definitely only been in Germany for a few days or weeks.’

By yesterday morning, police had arrested only two of the alleged sex attackers, who said they had immigrant backgrounds. Videos of the crowds, together with the howl of fireworks and the shrieks of women they assaulted, were found on their mobile phones.

Officers also found a note on one of the men containing Arabic to German translations for phrases including ‘nice breasts’, ‘I’ll kill you’ and ‘I want to have sex with you’.

Both have now been released due to lack of evidence.

So far, 18 asylum seekers have also been detained out of 32 other men suspected of theft and violence but not sexual impropriety. The 32 include Algerians, Moroccans, Iranians, Syrians, an Iraqi Serb, an American and two Germans. The involvement by foreigners flies in the face of Germany’s PC lobby which has ruthlessly called critics of Merkel’s migration programme ‘Nazi’ or ‘racist’.

Take 59-year-old Akif Pirincci, an outspoken Right-winger and German writer of Turkish origin, who has warned that Christian Germany is becoming Islamic.

His books, one of which is called Germany Gone Mad, were best-sellers until last autumn, when big publishers and bookshops chose not to distribute them any more. It is the first time since the Nazi era that such censorship has occurred.

In another controversy, Catholic journalist Matthias Matussek lost his job at the respected German newspaper Die Welt after he posted his views on November’s massacre in Paris on his personal Facebook page, saying mildly: ‘I think that the terror in Paris will move our (German) debate about open borders and … young Muslim men in our country in an entirely new and fresh direction.’

Despite the censorship, unpalatable truths have still slipped out. Last month, the interior ministry in the large south-west state of Baden-Wurttemberg published figures on criminal offences committed by asylum seekers between January and November 2015.

They made alarming reading. Asylum seekers represent one per cent of the population of the state but were involved in five per cent (27,255) of all registered crimes, among them 1,000 cases of grievous bodily harm, 22 of attempted murder, and 700 of domestic burglary. The highest number of offenders were Syrians, committing 5,576 of the offences.

Andre Schulz, head of Germany’s criminal police association, said recently that in his experience 10 per cent of the migrants would turn to criminality, including theft, sexual assault or drug dealing.

‘The policy has been to leave the German population in the dark …ordinary citizens are being played for fools,’ he declared.

Meanwhile, an academic report this week claims that hundreds of thousands of young male migrants arriving in Europe will threaten the peace and stability of Germany and other Western nations. Out of those who came last year, 69 per cent were men, 18 per cent were children and just 13 per cent were women.

Dr Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M university, warns that the skewed sex ratio is a recipe for disaster: ‘Crimes such as rape and sexual harassment become more common in highly masculinised societies, and women’s ability to move about freely without fear within society is curtailed. In addition, demand for prostitution soars.’

At Pocking, a well-kept Bavarian town, the headmaster of the grammar school wrote to parents last summer telling them not to let their daughters wear skimpy clothing. This was to avoid ‘misunderstandings’ with 200 migrants who were put up in the school’s gymnasium before being moved on to a proper camp in the autumn.

The letter said the migrants were ‘mainly Muslim, and speak Arabic. They have their own culture. Because our school is directly next to where they are staying, modest clothing should be worn … revealing tops or blouses or miniskirts could lead to misunderstandings.’

Even charity workers have been horrified by the behaviour of some of the new guests.

Last autumn in Bonn, the Refugees Welcome organisation made an embarrassed online apology for incidents of sexual harassment at a party it helped organise to make migrants feel at home.

A letter also sent last year by prominent women’s groups to the Integration Minister in the state of Hesse, central Germany, where a huge camp housing 6,000 migrants has been set up in the town of Giessen, described a culture of rape and violence.

‘Women and children are unprotected here. This situation is opportune to those men who already regard women as their inferiors and treat unaccompanied women as “fair game”. There are numerous rapes, sexual assaults and forced prostitution.’

The worry is that same rape culture has now spilt out onto Germany’s streets

What is most concerning is that the Cologne attacks were carried out in a public square, with thousands of witnesses, by men who did not cover their faces, grinned at the police, and were clearly not worried about the repercussions.

This was not an organised gang: it was simply men looking for sex on New Year’s Eve who had gathered after contacting each other on their mobiles.

Even now, Cologne’s pro-migrant mayor, Henriette Reker, still appears to be in denial. At a Press conference, she contradicted police by saying that newly-arrived migrants had not been to blame.

She said that, to prevent future attacks, women should follow a new ‘code of conduct’ soon to be published online by the council. They should keep strangers ‘at arm’s length’, stick together in groups, and not get split up even if they were ‘in the party mood’.

One prominent local councillor and lawyer, Judith Wolter, admitted in an open letter to the people of Cologne that the cathedral square and adjoining areas has now become a no-go area — ‘especially for women. It must be assumed that there is a high security risk here in the evening and night hours’.

It is not just Germany. Other European countries with large numbers of male migrants also endured a spate of New Year sex attacks. Women in Switzerland and Austria were targeted. Yesterday, Vienna’s police chief, Gerhard Purstl, provoked outrage when he warned women not to go out alone at night.

In Helsinki, Finland, which took in 32,479 asylum seekers last year (almost all men, two-thirds from Iraq), police said they had stopped incidents ‘similar to those that took place in Cologne’ by blocking 1,000 migrants from celebrations at the city’s Senate Square.

Extra security guards, hired by police for the night, said there was trouble when 2,000 other migrants caused ‘widespread sexual harassment’ in the square.

The police explained: ‘There hasn’t been this kind of harassment on previous New Year’s Eves. This is a completely new phenomenon.’

They added that sexual assaults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Finland before record numbers of asylum seekers arrived in 2015.

In the Swedish town of Kalmar, some 15 women aged between 17 and 19 said they’d been attacked on New Year’s Eve in the town square, as well as on a dance floor.

The country took in 160,000 migrants last year, mostly young men — the highest proportion compared with the population of any country in Europe.

As in Cologne, the men allegedly encircled their victims, before groping and assaulting them. When one victim told them to leave her alone, they did not understand because they could not speak English, said Police Commissioner Monica Oldin.

‘We are a bit worried that something is going to happen in the future,’ she added. ‘And, of course, the girls are anxious and do not know if they dare to go out’.

When I visited Cologne’s cathedral square this week, the Christmas tree was being taken down as police stood watching as women’s groups demonstrated over the attacks.

Germany is having to confront the harsh result of welcoming in huge numbers of men from a culture which denigrates women and abhors the social rules of a modern European society.

The European Commission estimates that three million more migrants — many of them ill-educated Muslim males who are illiterate even in their own Arab language — will arrive in the EU this year. The chances of successfully integrating them is next to nil.