Photo Gallery Germany's Crowded Refugee Centers
Germany has experienced tremendous growth in the number of refugees seeking asylum in the country over the past year. This has led to an acute shortage of accommodations. When it opened as a temporary reception center for first-time asylum applicants in 2010, Munich's Bayernkaserne, a former military barracks, was home to 400 people. As of the end of June of this year, some 2,000 refugees called it home.
The refugees stem from many areas, they mostly come from Syria, Eritrea, Serbia and Albania. The man pictured here at the Bayernkaserne is from Eritrea.
Although the problems have been stewing for a while, many government officials in Germany have acted as if the influx of refugees came as a major surprise. At the Bayernkaserne in Munich, officials have been creating improvised accommodations to deal with the problem.
Often, refugees must wait for weeks and weeks before they get their first meeting with a government official to consider their asylum application.
On Friday, police evicted 80 asylum seekers from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in Nuremberg who had threatened to go on a hunger strike if their applications weren't recognized.
At the end of June, a pastor with a Protestant aid organization claimed it would be inevitable that Germany would soon have to built tent cities for asylum seekers just like the ones seen in refugee camps in Lebanon or in Africa. Officials at the Bayernkaserne quickly prepared a new building with cots and very thin mattresses. Anything had to be better than erecting tent cities, the thinking went.
