How the German Foreign Office collaborated with asylum NGOs and pressured foreign embassy officials to grant entry visas to thousands of fake refugees with forged passports

Prosecutors in Berlin and Cottbus have opened criminal investigations into the widening scandal.

Annalena Baerbock, Minister of Mass Migration

Today, I invite you to follow me down a little mass migration rabbit hole. We will investigate a small part of the machinery that is bringing the migrants to Germany, in all of its utter bizarreness, and at the end we will speculate briefly about why all of this strange stuff is happening.

Our point of departure is this little story that broke a few days ago:

The offices of the public prosecutor in Berlin and Cottbus are investigating officials from the Foreign Ministry under Annalena Baerbock (Green Party). These officials are alleged to have instructed employees in German embassies and consulates to authorise applicants with incomplete or obviously forged documents to enter Germany …

According to reports, several thousand people are said to have travelled to Germany with bad papers over the past five years. The majority of them are reported to have then applied for asylum.

According to the report, the holders of the doctored papers are said to come primarily from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey, but also from Pakistan and various African countries. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office confirmed the investigation …

Articles like this are written to be as bland and uninteresting as possible, and I can sense your impatience already. Who cares about this, eugyppius? We all know that corruption in the mass migration machinery must be truly prodigious.

It gets more interesting, I promise.

The prosecutors’ investigations were triggered by a series of investigative reports conducted by the news magazine Cicero last year. After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, the German Foreign Office began working closely with various NGOs to make it as easy as possible for Afghans to leave their country and enter Germany. Cicero wanted to know how this assisted migration worked on the ground, and in this way they uncovered the astounding case of Mohammed G. and his alleged brother, Khan G.

Khan, who has been living in Germany since 2014, wanted to use legal provisions for family reunification to bring his brother Mohammed to join him. In October 2022, he ended up pleading his case before the Berlin Administrative Court, with the assistance of an immigration law firm:

The story that [Khan] told … was heartbreaking. He said his 14-year-old brother had fled from Afghanistan to neighbouring Pakistan and was living on the streets. He was suffering from an eye injury, Khan said, because he had been hit by shrapnel from a bomb. He now needed medication, but as he was in Pakistan illegally and had no papers, he could not see a doctor.

This story obviously sounded convincing to the representatives of the Foreign Office. They agreed to issue the requested visa for family reunification “provided that a new security check does not raise any concerns.” …

But then something unusual happened: the German embassy in Islamabad refused to issue Mohammad G. a visa. They apparently had doubts about the applicant’s identity. Mohammad G., who according to his brother had no documents, presented a passport to the officials. And this passport turned out to be forged when it was checked by experts.

The Foreign Office told their embassy officials in Pakistan to ignore the forged passport and grant the visa anyway. The embassy staff pushed back, and in the end, Mohammad G. had to stay in Pakistan – a very small and symbolic victory for the forces of prudence and reason.

A few weeks later, Cicero reported more details about Mohammed’s case. They revealed that the forged passport was not the only thing that had made embassy officials suspicious. They also had good reason to doubt that Mohammed was Khan’s brother, that he had any kind of eye injury, that he was homeless, and even that he was from Afghanistan:

Mohammad G., who was said to be homeless and neglected, wore expensive (Western) clothes to all appointments, was well-groomed and was able to fill out all forms independently. He is also said to have stated that he was living with an acquaintance in Islamabad. Not a word about homelessness. He also failed to mention his eye injury, even when he was explicitly asked why he was a hardship case. According to reports, there was also no visible sign of an eye injury.

Mohammad G. spoke Dari with a Pakistani accent, and the local embassy employees suspected that he did not grow up in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. The employees also mentioned “considerable doubts” that Mohammad G. was really 14 years old. According to independent assessments by various officials and a trained document consultant, his actual age was more likely to be between 17 and 20.

What is more, Khan G. – Mohammed’s alleged brother – was only in Germany in the first place on the strength of a so-called “deportation ban” – “the lowest form of protection recognised by German asylum law.” Such status does not include the privilege of family reunification at all, but the Foreign Office had moved heaven and earth to get a Berlin court to make an exception. Why?

It gets weirder. At first, Foreign Office officials actually demanded that their embassy in Pakistan paste a visa into Mohammed’s passport, despite the fact that it was obviously forged. When they refused, the Foreign Office asked them to issue Mohammed a replacement passport to receive the visa. This would require the approval of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), and would only be legal if Mohammed’s identity had been clearly established, which it had not been. Embassy officials urgently advised BAMF against issuing a passport, and after Cicero broke this second half of the story, the Foreign Office decided that getting Mohammed into Germany wasn’t that urgent after all. BAMF never received a formal request to issue the genuine passport for a false identity.

It was at this point that Berlin prosecutors began investigating. Their initial target was Khan G., but they expanded their focus to the Foreign Office itself after an ex-employee of the Interior Ministry filed a criminal complaint. Mohammed G., meanwhile, disappeared, after a failed attempt to pay embassy fees with counterfeit money.

A few months later, in April of last year, correspondence about Mohammed’s case between the Foreign Office and the German embassy in Pakistan emerged. A Foreign Office official wrote to the embassy in December 2022, informing them that they had “no doubt about the applicant’s identity, false passport or not.”

In light of the fact that .. we received not only various photos of the applicant (which seemed credible to all parties involved) but also the detailed story, which was also credible, and everyone in the room agreed that issuing a visa was the right course of action in this particular case, I’d like to insist on the instruction to issue a visa despite the false passport, as the false passport does not invalidate the [basis] of the court settlement. I don’t think it’s surprising that an Afghan passport would be forged – especially as we should have recognised the forgery earlier, since we already had the passport (we are therefore ‘too late’ with these concerns).

Let me read between these lines for you: The Foreign Office knew that the passport was forged when they asked the Berlin court to grant Mohammed G. a visa, and in December 2022 they found it extremely inconvenient and potentially embarrassing to themselves that their embassy in Pakistan was drawing attention to this forgery. They wanted them to play ball and treat the forgery as if it were authentic, lest any irregularities come to light. They insisted to the embassy that they should paste the authentic visa into the forged passport because a visa “is not issued for a passport, but for a person,” and said that their embassy were wrong to assume that clarifying Mohammed’s identity was their responsibility in the first place. The Foreign Office had already secured an order from the Berlin Administrative Court despite the forgery, which they had concealed, after all!

Now comes the point for speculation: How did an Afghan immigrant in Germany (Khan G.) end up arguing a family reunification case before judges in Berlin, supported by an unnamed immigration law firm, on behalf of some random person from Pakistan, who in all likelihood Khan had never even met before? There’s an interesting detail in the news reports that sheds light on this point. Originally, Khan said that his brother’s eye had been injured during “an exchange of fire between Taliban fighters and US soldiers,” but before the court in Berlin he claimed the culprit was “an air raid on their family farm.” Somebody – perhaps his lawyers – had improved the story, from an early version that may have suggested Mohammed was injured while fighting with the Taliban, to a later version that made him the more unambiguous victim of Western aggression. Some very well connected people were using Khan and German family reunification provisions to squeeze yet another allegedly Afghan refugee into Germany, by any and all means necessary.

It is no accident that all of this happened on the watch of Annalena Baerbock. Since becoming Foreign Minister, Baerbock has pushed very hard for Germany to accept more Afghan refugees. Within weeks of taking office, she entered into negotiations with the heads of Kabul Luftbrücke (“Kabul Airlift”), an NGO co-founded in 2021 by her fellow Green Party member Erik Marquardt. Kabul Luftbrücke is one of various organisations that work as de facto consular authorities in Afghanistan; aspiring refugees approach these groups, who then arrange their transport to neighbouring countries with German consulates where they can apply for entry visas.

From Cicero again:

Kabul Airlift has complained that it takes far too long to assess the risk situation and approve visas, and calls for less bureaucracy and more benevolent security evaluations. They say that Afghans applying for family reunification are separated from each other for an unnecessarily long time due to the long waiting times. In 2021, the founders of Kabul Airlift even accused the then-German government of “bureaucratic and political obstructionist tactics.” They also called for loosening the rules on family reunification.

Obviously, organisations like Kabul Luftbrücke have enormous influence within the Foreign Office. Having helped to create an especially easy path from Afghanistan into Germany, they or their sister organisations then worked to funnel as many asylum applicants along this path as possible, whether or not they actually had anything to do with Afghanistan. In the case of Mohammed G., they were especially brazen and clumsy, but there must be many thousands of other refugees much like him.

Precisely as Khan G. was lying to a Berlin court to get Mohammed a visa to Germany, Baerbock and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser were cobbling together their “humanitarian admission programme,” intended to bring “particularly vulnerable” Afghans to Germany:

The programme is aimed at people who have “particularly exposed themselves through their commitment to women’s or human rights or through their activities in the fields of justice, politics, media, education, culture, sport or science.” Afghans who are persecuted “because of their gender, sexual orientation or gender identity” are also to be granted protection.

NGOs like Kabul Airlift were placed in charge of pre-selecting Afghans for this programme. Strangely, among those groups favoured by the NGOs were “members of the Afghan judiciary,” who required asylum “to protect them from the persecution of the Taliban regime.” The German ambassador in Pakistan, upon receiving all these strange visa applications, promptly fired off a letter to the Foreign Office, complaining that half of these alleged legal scholars were in fact “graduates of Koran schools … trained in Sharia,” and likely to have Islamist connections.

After the ambassador’s letter leaked, Baerbock and Faeser were embarrassed enough to suspend their humanitarian programme in order to establish additional security screening for visa applicants. Curiously, Faeser’s Interior Ministry had always demanded such screenings, but Baerbock – presumably in thrall to the insane asylum NGOs – had resisted, telling her staff to “remain firm” against the security concerns of the Interior Ministry and even to “escalate any dispute, publicly if necessary.”

The borders aren’t just open by accident. There are specific actors, with specific interests, working very hard to keep them open, and organisations like Kabul Luftbrücke play a crucial role here. We can see their entanglement with our own Foreign Ministry clearly enough, but there are surely entanglements on the other side as well – in the migrants’ native lands. I very much doubt it is an accident, for example, that as soon as these groups thought they had received carte blanche to wave just anybody through the visa process, the queues filled with a bunch of Islamist Koran scholars who posed a security threat so great that even our eminently tolerant embassy officials felt the need to complain. We will probably never know the full story here, or all the interests involved, but my God does it stink.