German Migration Agency Reassesses Thousands of Refugee Cases Following Corruption Scandal

Corruption is Everywhere - Even in German Migration Ministry

So much for good old German security. One wonders who paid the bribes to get migrants in, who the migrants were in general, and why were they worth bribing officials for? 

Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in the German city of Nuremberg.

© Daniel Karmann / Global Look Press

The German federal migration service plans to review thousands of successful asylum applications. Earlier, it was revealed that a regional migration office granted asylum to thousands of people without sufficient grounds.

The German Federal Office for Migration and Asylum (BAMF) will re-examine some 18,000 cases in which refugees were granted asylum in Germany, the agency’s director, Jutta Cordt, told journalists at a press conference on Friday. The inspection will cover all successful asylum applications filed as far back as 2000, she added.

The measure will be applied to all asylum cases processed by a BAMF regional office in the city of Bremen. It follows a corruption scandal that involved the former regional office head as well as five other local employees, including three lawyers and an interpreter.

In April, the German Suedeutsche Zeitung media outlet as well as the NDR and Radio Bremen broadcasters reported that the former Bremen migration office head had decided to grant asylum to people in some 1,200-2,000 cases between 2013 and 2016 without having sufficient grounds to do so. In early May, the interim head of the same office, who had succeeded the person accused of abuse of authority, said in a report that the fraudulent scheme might have involved as many as 3,332 refugee cases.

The former Bremen office head, whose identity has not been made public, was eventually charged with bribery and organization of fraudulent asylum application processing. In the meantime, the BAMF has already reassessed some 4,400 refugee cases, 30 percent of them in Bremen. Out of all successful asylum applications processed by the Bremen migration office, 40 percent were declared invalid, the German media reported. At the same time, only 5.8 percent of decisions taken by other migration offices were considered invalid.

Meanwhile, it has been also revealed that less than 1 percent of all asylum applications approved by local and regional migration offices have been properly reviewed by the federal migration office. Out of some 1.65 million asylum applications approved between January 2015 and March 2018, only 11,830 were examined by the BAMF, the German Bild daily reports, citing the Interior Ministry’s answer to a requested filed by an MP and interior policy expert, Linda Teuteberg.

The agency decided to give up on internal checks as “thousands of inexperienced new employees simultaneously processed asylum applications every hour,” Teuteberg, who is a member of the Free Democratic Party, told Bild, commenting on the ministry’s statement. She then complained that such an approach has led to an “extremely high error rate” and demanded that a “comprehensive sample check of all decisions taken by the migration agencies be conducted at the federal level.”

In the meantime, the head of the Free Democrats, Christian Lindner, said that the scandal in the federal migration service is not an “isolated case” and called for re-examination of Germany’s refugee policy as a whole, starting from 2014. He particularly demanded that a special investigation committee be established in the lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag.

More than 1 million migrants from predominantly Muslim countries have entered Germany since the refugee crisis erupted in 2015 – fueling strong anti-migrant sentiments and protests against Merkel's open door policy. Germany then faced a number of terrorist attacks involving refugees as well the notorious sexual harassment incidents during the 2015 New Year's Eve celebrations in Cologne and other cities.

Following these developments, Merkel eventually partially changed her stance on immigration. Even though she never admitted that her open door policy was wrong, her Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union, agreed to cap the number of asylum seekers at 200,000 a year. However, recently Merkel also announced that Germany will take in some 10,000 new migrants who were selected by the UN’s refugee agency.

German Pastor Declares Himself an Anti-Semite

RA By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL 

The Wiesenthal Center called for the pastor to be sacked after learning about the comments.

NEW YORK CITY— A pastor for the Lutheran Church in Bremen, Germany who boasted that he is an anti-Semite has prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Center to call for his dismissal.

The pastor, Volker Keller, who is a member of the Bremen city government council responsible for the integration of Muslims for the northern German city, sent an email to this Jerusalem Post correspondent, announcing his embrace of anti-Semitism.

He wrote: “Yesterday evening the anti-Semite Arn Strohmeyer delivered a lecture to me…Best wishes to Israel, Yours truly, Volker Keller, Antisemite.”

The trigger for Keller’s email appears to be a series of Jerusalem Post exposes on Strohmeyer’s alleged modern anti-Semitic views and the city of Bremen’s public funding for, according to critics, hate-mongering events in the Citizens’ House Weserterrassen targeting the Jewish state.

Volker Keller refused to answer multiple Post queries. Renke Brahms, the executive cleric for the Bremen Protestant Church, wrote to the Post by email that the church ”distances itself from every form of anti-Semitism and clearly supports the existence of Israel…

Pastor Keller sent a ‘sarcastic email’ and wanted to express that he is not an anti-Semite and feels wrongly defamed. The choice of this form was an extraordinary misunderstanding and is from our perspective, as well as Mr. Keller’s, a completely inappropriate reaction. We have made this clear to Mr. Keller that in his function he is not allowed to write such emails.”

Forgive me for being skeptical but why can't we see Pr. Keller say that?

Not 100% sure, but I think this is Pastor Keller's church

It is unclear why Keller feels defamed. Keller, who used his business church email to send his embrace of Jew-hatred note, co-founded an NGO called “Nord-Bremer Citizens against War.”

According to a Friday article in Die Taz daily in Bremen, the activists from Keller’s group participated in demonstrations in front of supermarkets in 2011 calling for the boycott of Israeli products. Strohmeyer, the obscure anti-Israel writer, can be seen in a photograph at the gathering near protesters showing orange slices dripping with blood under the slogan "Boycott Israel’s fruit." Keller declined to say if he supports a boycott of Israeli products. 

Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the human rights NGO the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Post by telephone: "This man [Mr. Keller] had no problem in communicating in an anti-Semitic way and should apologize personally for his quote. And short of hearing directly from him, we have no reason to believe that he doesn’t hold the views... he should be fired. This person with his state of mind should not have anything to do with integrating people in Germany’s democratic culture."

However, Cooper added that if Keller issues an apology to the parishioners of the church and the Jewish community for “expressing this non-Christian sentiment,” he should be allowed to retain his job.

Keller has refused to issue a public apology to the Jewish and Christian communities in Bremen. Brahms declined to respond to Cooper’s criticism.

Carsten Splitt, a spokesman for the EKD, an umbrella body for German Lutheran, Reformed and United churches, said he forwarded the Post queries to the former head of the EKD, Nikolaus Schneider, but Schneider said he did not wish to comment. Splitt added that Schneider “does not know Mr. Keller and it is a matter for the Bremen Church.”

Because of Keller’s role in the city administration, the anti-Semitism row has also raised eyebrows. Bremen is a main hub for anti-Israel hatred in Germany and a leader in boycott actions against Jewish products. Andre Städler, a spokesman for Bremen’s Mayor Carsten Sieling, did not immediately respond to a Post query.

Last year, Schneider and the German Protestant establishment grappled with the classic religious  "anti-Semitism of the church’ founder Martin Luther."

The 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation will take place in 2017.

“Luther’s view of Judaism and his invective against Jews contradict our understanding today of what it means to believe in one God who has revealed himself in Jesus, the Jew,” wrote the Church in a statement.

Brahms declined to answer Post queries about the continuity of religious anti-Semitism with the alleged contemporary anti-Semitism of Keller.

With the rhetoric that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries about Jews, it should not be too surprising that Luther was an anti-Semite. Not surprising, but disappointing and disquieting. I have come to believe that a true believer in Jesus Christ cannot be antisemitic but non-believers are often predisposed to it. Nevertheless, we all have blind-spots and I suspect this was one for Luther. I can only hope that he recanted that attitude late in life.

We can also hope that this is the case for Pastor Keller. It doesn't have to be, given the sorry state of the Christian Church in Germany, I suspect there are many Christian Churches in Germany with pastors who have no relationship with Jesus Christ whatsoever.

I once took a Lutheran woman, a German immigrant to Canada, to a Christmas play at my church. She was completely mystified by all the references to Jesus. She knew there was God, but, "who is this Jesus?", was exactly what she asked.