The number of migrants trying to enter Germany after making the journey through Belarus and Poland has fallen slightly in recent days, officials said on Thursday, but warned that the situation was unpredictable following a significant recent surge.
"Whereas we saw significant increases from one week to the next from August, through September to mid October, we have now reached a point where numbers are more or less stagnating," police spokesperson Jens Schobranski said in the city of Frankfurt an der Oder on the German-Polish border.
Officials are closely monitoring the numbers of people trying to enter the country from crisis regions, as the figures have risen significantly in several European countries, with some attributing the rise to policies deliberately adopted by Minsk.
In May, Belarusian long-time ruler Alexander Lukashenko said his government would no longer stop migrants from travelling onwards into the EU, in response to tougher Western sanctions imposed on Belarus for the violent repression of peaceful protests after contested elections.
Since then, the number of migrants from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other troubled regions trying to enter the European Union illegally via Belarus has grown significantly. Bordering countries Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have borne the brunt of the influx.
In Germany, most of those crossing the border illegally have entered the eastern state of Brandenburg, although increases have also been noted in Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The German official said numbers had recently fallen somewhat. "But still, it's a big challenge to manage it all," Schobranski said.
In October alone, more than twice as many migrants were found to have entered the country illegally compared to September. He said it was impossible to predict how the situation might develop.
The German police recorded 4,584 unauthorized entries with reference to Belarus at Germany's eastern border between October 1 and 26.
The police plan to open a new registration centre next week in Frankfurt an der Oder to register the arrivals. Migrants would then be allocated to different states.
Amid the increase in migration, security officials in one state warned that right-wing extremists were forming vigilante groups at the border to repel the migrants.
Extremists are forming border patrols along the German-Polish border in Saxony, according to the state's domestic intelligence agency.
Right-wing extremist groups such as Der Dritte Weg which translates as "The Third Way" and the Freie Sachsen, meaning "Free Saxons," were using social media to call on people to join them and prevent migrants from entering Germany illegally, an official said in Dresden on Thursday.
"However, the monopoly on the use of force lies with the state and not with enemies of the constitution," said Dirk-Martin Christian, president of the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution on Thursday.
He warned that such groups sought to exploit such issues to disseminate their anti-constitutional objectives.
"Right-wing extremists already pursued this strategy during the asylum crisis in 2015 and 2016, and more recently in the context of pandemic protests," he said.
Right-wing extremists claim topics that move people and portray the governing parties at federal and state level as well as state authorities as incompetent and inactive in precisely these areas, Christian said.
He said the groups sought to imply that they were the only ones willing and capable of taking the public's concerns seriously and taking action.
People should not be fooled and should avoid being drawn into strategies that would help forward the agenda of such right-wing extremists, he said.
