Oktoberfest ride operator hands out free cycling shorts to combat widespread upskirting

Elisabeth Polaczy, who operates the Teufelsrad at Munich's Oktoberfest, has begun handing out free cycling shorts to women and girls as they approach her ride. The Teufelsrad—the Devil's Wheel—is one of the festival's oldest attractions, a spinning contraption that whirls riders around while they attempt to hold their seats. It is also, it turns out, a site of systematic voyeurism. German journalists investigating the phenomenon discovered more than 32,000 videos on Meta platforms alone that captured women in traditional dirndl dresses as the ride's centrifugal force lifted their skirts, exposing their underwear to cameras held by strangers. Some of these videos accumulated millions of views.

The scale of the problem emerged only recently, but it has deep roots. Upskirting—the act of filming or photographing under someone's clothing without consent—became illegal in Germany in 2020, carrying penalties of up to two years in prison or a fine. Yet the law has not deterred the practice. At this year's Oktoberfest, which runs through early October, Polaczy, now 80, has distributed more than 100 pairs of cycling shorts to festival-goers, a direct intervention born from her recognition that official warnings alone cannot protect the women and girls who ride her attraction. "I want to do everything I can to make people feel secure," she told the BBC.

Warning signs in German and English surround the Teufelsrad's tent, and Bavarian police have posted notices about upskirting since 2025. But Polaczy acknowledges the fundamental challenge: it is nearly impossible to monitor every person holding a smartphone in a crowded festival tent. The sheer volume of devices, the speed of the ride, and the difficulty of identifying who is filming make enforcement a practical impossibility, even with her vigilance.

Police have made arrests. This year, officers detained a 45-year-old Swiss man for filming under a German woman's dirndl. In 2025, there were 10 arrests for upskirting at the festival; in 2024, seven. The numbers suggest both increased awareness and increased enforcement, yet they also hint at the vastness of what goes undetected and unprosecuted. Women's rights advocates have argued that the law, despite its severity, is insufficient—that criminalization alone cannot address a problem rooted in a culture of entitlement to women's bodies and the technological ease with which violations can now be committed and distributed.

The cycling shorts represent a pragmatic, if troubling, response. They are a band-aid on a structural wound. They acknowledge that the legal system has failed to create safety, and that the burden of protection has fallen to individual women and to a single ride operator in her ninth decade, working to preserve the dignity of strangers. The shorts are free, distributed without judgment, a quiet act of solidarity. But their very existence is an indictment—evidence that at one of Europe's largest festivals, in a country with explicit laws against this crime, women still cannot ride a spinning wheel without the risk of being filmed and humiliated.