Berlin:German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended her policies on refugees, in the wake of recent terror attacks. As tensions grow, the government is still trying to deal with the large number of migrants who took advantage of Germany’s open borders last year.
There were endless corridors where officials bustled through with files, offices with computers, microscopes and fingerprint-readers.
I saw signs for medical centres and canteens – some places freshly painted, others still being renovated.
Security staff were watchful, translators wrestled with all kinds of languages.
In individual rooms, intense conversations were under way between officials and families about life stories and dramatic journeys.
Anxious children looked up from parental laps, some playing with toys, others restless in stuffy waiting rooms.
Waiting is the key to this place.
For this is a new centre designed to end the long wait for hundreds of thousands of people who came to Germany last year as migrants – and who do not yet know whether they will be allowed to stay.
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“Welcome culture” was the phrase used as Germany suddenly opened its borders.
Since then, the flow of migrants into Germany has hugely decreased as borders have closed and agreements such as the EU’s deal with Turkey have kept many would-be migrants well away from Germany.
But the legacy of last year’s mass arrivals is still very tricky for Germany – and even more so given recent violent incidents, some of which have been linked to recent migrants.
I was given special access to a new centre designed to show how Germany is responding to the crisis.
In the city of Bonn, it is a centre for processing asylum applications – one of more than 20 planned to deal with a huge backlog.
The numbers are staggering.
“We are pretty certain that by the end of the year everybody who came last year will have their application decided,” I was told by Katrin Hirseland, from the Federal Ministry for Migration and Refugees (BAMF).
How many applications will have to be dealt with? “It will be somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000.”
This presents a huge challenge for the government. How will it be done? In Bonn, the ministry has taken over the Ermekeilkaserne – once an army barracks.
It is a site full of history.
In the 1950s, when Bonn was the capital of the new West German state, the defence ministry was based here when the country was allowed an army again despite the horrors of Nazism.
Those horrors had persuaded Germany to create a generous law on political asylum for those fleeing persecution.
But it never imagined so many would come in such a short time.
Armin Moers, who runs this new centre, is a hugely energetic individual keen to show me how the system will work.
