German village of 102 to get first wave of Muslim hordes.
SUMTE,
Germany — This bucolic, one-street settlement of handsome redbrick
farmhouses may for the moment have many more cows than people, but next
week it will become one of the fastest growing places in Europe. Not
that anyone in Sumte is very excited about it.
Christian Fabel, the mayor of Sumte, Germany,
stands in front of a facility to house asylum seekers from Africa and
the Middle East.
His
wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly
can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to
accommodate nearly 10 times as many migrants as it had residents, she
told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he said.
But it was not. Sumte has become a showcase of the extreme pressures bearing down on Germany
as it scrambles to find shelter for what, by the end of the year, could
be well over a million people seeking refuge from poverty or wars in
Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In
a small concession to the villagers, Alexander Götz, a regional
official from Lower Saxony, told them this week that the initial number
of refugees, who start arriving on Monday and will be housed in empty
office buildings, would be kept to 500, and limited to 750 in all.
Nevertheless, the influx is testing the limits of tolerance and hospitality in Sumte, and across Germany. It is also straining German politics broadly, creating deep divisions in the conservative camp of Chancellor Angela Merkel and energizing a constellation of extremist groups that feel their time has come.
One
of the few people, in fact, who seem enthusiastic about the plan for
Sumte is Holger Niemann, 32, an admirer of Hitler and the lone neo-Nazi
on the elected district council. He rejoices at the opportunities the
migrant crisis has offered.
“It
is bad for the people, but politically it is good for me,” Mr. Niemann
said of the plan, which would leave the German villagers outnumbered by
migrants by more than seven to one.
Residents of Sumte attended a meeting on
Wednesday to discuss the plan to move migrants from Africa and the
Middle East to their village.
Graphic
Seeking a Fair Distribution of Migrants in Europe
Germans
face “the destruction of our genetic heritage” and risk becoming “a
gray mishmash,” Mr. Niemann added, predicting that public anxiety over
Ms. Merkel’s open-armed welcome to refugees would help demolish a
postwar political consensus in Germany built on moderation and
compromise.
Unlike
those in other European countries, far-right parties in Germany have
had little success in national elections, and remain firmly rejected by
the overwhelming majority of Germans.
Reinhold
Schlemmer, a former Communist who served as the mayor here before and
immediately after the collapse of East Germany, said people like Mr.
Niemann would “have been put in prison right away” during the Communist
era.
“Now
they can stand up and preach,” he said. “People say this is democracy,
but I don’t think it is democracy to let Nazis say what they want.”
Mr.
Schlemmer is among those concerned that extremists are exploiting
widespread concerns, even in the political mainstream, over absorbing
vast numbers of refugees, as the influx tests Germany’s capacity to
cope.
“We have zero infrastructure here for so many people,” Mr. Fabel, the mayor, said.
As
the federal government desperately scrambles to find shelter for the
refugees before winter sets in, it is assigning quotas to each of
Germany’s 16 Länder, or states, based on factors like economic strength
and population.
Initially,
the migrants were housed in renovated homes, then in gymnasiums,
military bases and old schools, but as obvious shelters run out, the
authorities are hunting for any free space they can find, like the 23
empty office buildings in Sumte.
Dirk
Hammer, a Sumte resident, said that he felt sympathy for the refugees,
but that he feared the sheer number of people dumped with little warning
in places like this could offer “an ideal platform for the far right.”
“I get stomachaches from fear of what is going to happen — not just here but in the whole of Germany,” he said.
At
least for the moment, the tolerant values of people like Mr. Hammer
have proved resilient, even as Mr. Niemann and like-minded neo-Nazis
deride such views as alien imports imposed by the United States and
other World War II victors.
How long are they going to be tolerant when these " refugees " start demanding mosques, Islamic schools and Sharia Law ? - TGFP.
When
Mr. Niemann took the floor at a meeting in October between villagers
and regional officials responsible for migrants, Mr. Hammer snatched
away the microphone.
“We
have to take a clear stand against these people,” Mr. Hammer said
later, noting that his family had lived in Sumte for 400 years. He
dismissed Mr. Niemann, who lives in a village a couple of miles down the
road, as a disruptive outsider.
Mr.
Hammer himself initially reacted with horror when he heard of plans to
move refugees into the empty office complex, built by a now-defunct debt
collection company, he wrote an angry open letter on Facebook
expressing his fury as a longtime supporter of Ms. Merkel’s Christian
Democratic Union party who felt betrayed.
“If
we are being used as dumping ground, this shows the situation is out of
hand,” Mr. Hammer said in an interview at his family’s home, a
modernized farmhouse.
But
he has curbed his anger and rallied to efforts by the mayor, Mr. Fabel,
to make sure that extremists do not capitalize on the widespread unease
among residents. He said he knew people who “are not far right, but who
are afraid and their fear is being exploited.”
Unable
to speak at the village meeting last month, Mr. Niemann and a handful
of followers heckled speakers who voiced sympathy for refugees, and
waved banners demanding an end to “asylum terror.”
At a follow-up meeting between officials and villagers on Wednesday, Mr. Niemann stayed silent, taking notes.
An
assertion by a senior regional police official that Sumte did not need a
permanent police presence prompted one villager to jump to his feet and
shout, “Of course we need protection.” But the discussion was civil and
devoid of inflammatory outbursts.
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