Germany’s newspaper Die Welt quoted Munich police spokesman Thomas Baumann as saying Sunday that the surging number of new arrivals had forced Bavarian authorities to redirect migrant flows to Berlin, Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Austria said late on Sunday it planned to phase out emergency measures that have allowed refugees to stream into Austria and Germany from Hungary since Saturday morning, raising the prospect that the influx might slow.
The estimate of migrants coming mostly on trains and buses from Hungary via Austria to the southern city of Munich was “10,000 plus”, says Upper Bavaria district president Christoph Hillenbrand.
Arriving on another train, two boys, perhaps seven or eight years old, pushed out their chests like football stars and beamed smiles as they traversed the throng of applauding people.
At Munich station, well-wishers turned up again to cheer the new arrivals, although, at a few dozen, they were neither as numerous nor as loud as a day earlier.
The travellers who stopped to speak told of weeks-long journeys by land and sea.
“I want to study accounting in Germany“.
“It can be a bit off-putting”.
Sadly, the Associated Press reports that according to the global Organization for Migration, of the more than 2,700 people killed trying to reach Europe from the Middle East and Africa, only a third of the recovered bodies have ever been identified, leaving many relatives subsequently unable to confirm the fate of their missing loved ones. “And it raises their hopes. We mustn’t awaken false hopes”.
Migrants are also looking to other parts of Europe.
Rail operator Deutsche Bahn said it had brought 22,000 refugees across the border into Germany in over 100 trains in recent days.
It was unclear whether passengers on the Salzburg trains would disembark in Munich or continue further by train to other German states.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has taken in by far the E.U.’s largest numbers of refugees amid the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
So where do you put 20,000 people, and counting? Contemplating what they have been via, some did not fairly know what to make of all of it. However for others, the sense of aid was written throughout their faces. All had broken English at best and no German.