The German government is unable to say where more than half of the one million asylum seekers allowed into the country have ended up, MailOnline can exclusively reveal. Government statistics show that Germany registered 1.1 million applications by the end of last year under its EASY system, which does not record much more than an applicant’s country of origin. German Interior Ministry spokesman Dr Harald Neymanns admitted that delays in the processing of asylum seeker applications would account for some of those missing. But he also said that in some cases refugees may not have stayed in Germany but instead gone on to a different country elsewhere in the EU.
The state stands disgraced and trust is vanishing — and not just when it comes to deportations, but when it comes to everything that a state actually stands for: internal security. Has the German state given up?
It is a painful diagnosis, and it goes far beyond the chaotic and horrific scenes in front of Cologne’s main station on New Year’s Eve. The state is suffering from a stress fracture: In key areas it has long been overwhelmed. It is an uncomfortable realization for the German people. The same state that records their lives right down to the smallest taxable detail and last year alone wrote or amended on the federal level around 8,000 paragraphs of law is now failing at its most basic tasks: protecting its citizens; law enforcement; security; public order
. . . Largely unnoticed by the populace at large, German policymakers have spent the past few years reducing the size of the police forces while at the same time inundating them with new responsibilities. “It was bound to happen sooner or later,” says a police union official about the New Year’s attacks. At some point, he continues, there is a price to pay when police forces have to spend just as much effort going after their budget-cutting goals as they do going after criminals.
According to GdP, one of two competing police unions in Germany, there were 237,198 state police officers in 2000, but today there are 10,000 fewer. Furthermore, all German states are faced with a mountain of overtime racked up by their officers — some 18 million hours nationwide.
And it’s not just police personnel that have been overworked. Equipment too is well beyond its wear limit, in many cases to the point that it has become dangerous. A classified Federal Interior Ministry report from Jan. 19, 2015 notes that German police would be unable to adequately protect themselves from gunfire from a Kalashnikov, the favored weapon of terrorists worldwide — even in their response vehicles.
The front page of the “Bild am Sonntag” newspaper may well have ruined Angela Merkel’s breakfast on Sunday. Europe’s biggest-selling newspaper featured a dark, full-page silhouette of the German chancellor’s head, containing the headline “Is Merkel still the right one?” — questioning whether she is really fit to govern. In between the words of this rhetorical question, the tabloid printed what it considered Merkel’s main problems: “lack of respect, lack of authority, power struggles” — “terrorism, criminality, overburdened authorities,” before adding, “Merkel’s refugee policy on the point of failure.”
Ms Merkel, who normally gives a warmly applauded speech at Davos, has had to stay at home this year to deal with the refugee crisis. In her absence, Joachim Gauck, Germany’s [apolitical] president, took to the stage to issue a thinly veiled attack on Ms Merkel’s refusal to put a numerical limit on the number of refugees Germany can accept. He argued that “if democrats do not want to talk about limitations then populists and xenophobes will.”
Meanwhile a new poll (N24-Emnid Umfrage) reveals that only 15 percent of Germans think that Merkel should stick to her current course (presumably that refers to the refusal to set any limits to the numbers taken).
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