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For months, they waited and waited to reach this reception room inside the refugee centre in Berlin. Now, the gleaming hall with row-upon-row of seating and polished counters in the heart of Germany’s capital awaits them — asylum-seekers, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. “We were allotted this place, the abandoned headquarters of a defunct bank, with no water or electricity and, within two months, we had to process hundreds of thousands of men, women and children through it,” says Monika Hebbinghaus, press officer of the Regional office for Refugee Affairs, while walking us through the procedures.
Many coming in through the perilous route from Turkey, Greece and all the way from Hungary in 2015, much of the way on foot, were dehydrated and had open wounds, says Ms. Hebbinghaus. Their numbers swelled with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban closing his borders to them even as Germany braced for about a million at its doorstep. School gymnasiums across the country had to be requisitioned to put them up. Even as Chancellor Angela Merkel was widely criticised for agreeing to admit about 8,00,000 asylum-seekers within a few months, she refused to back down from espousing Germany’s “open-door” policy.
The cost of handling the refugees, including social benefits, came to about €20 billion in 2016, and cost Ms. Merkel several local elections, including the one in Berlin, a city-state that itself took in about 55,000 refugees. “Some protested against her policy loudly, but many other objected more silently by voting against Merkel,” says journalist Martin Jabs. “In Germany, it remains a very touchy subject to be seen as racist or anything that links to our Nazi past, but people were worried about losing jobs as well as a way of life, though neither happened.”
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