The man and the woman in the lavishly motorized Mercedes with the darkened windows look over doubtfully as to whether this is all they have to do now. A family van with a Slovenian license plate is parked next door, and the driver is waiting in the shade. And on the left is a man in jeans and a police vest, shining a lamp under the car, while a colleague on the passenger side pricks open the plastic paneling in the footwell.
The two officers are among the veil investigators of the Bavarian border police, and until the interior minister comes to his press conference, they are simply doing their work here at the former motorway filling station on the A 8 near Piding. When Joachim Herrmann arrives, the van driver and the couple in the Mercedes have long had their papers back. No complaint, as in most of the other cases. The minister is nevertheless satisfied – and a little bit because of that.
Because the police officers who are supposed to prevent illegal migration and fight cross-border crime on Bavaria’s borders with Austria and the Czech Republic have had an additional task since August 1st. They should randomly check the arrivals for the three Gs, i.e. check whether the people have been proven to have been vaccinated against Corona, have recovered or at least have tested negative. Bavarian police officers checked 6625 people at the state borders in the first ten days, says Herrmann, and there were more than 39,000 checks at the two airports in Nuremberg and Memmingen. And in all of these controls, only 68 violations of the Corona entry regulation were found, a rate of 0.15 percent.
According to von Herrmann, people are well informed, responsible and understanding. The numbers of the Federal Police presented by the President of the Federal Police Directorate in Munich are higher, but the ratio is similar: According to Karl-Heinz Blümel, the federal police on Bavaria’s border with Austria have checked around 33,500 people since August 1, and around 7,000 in the Czech Republic at Munich Airport a good 150,000. In doing so, they would have uncovered 781 violations of the obligation to provide evidence, a rate of 0.4 percent – most of them here on the border with Austria.
The fact that the quotas are so low is also due to the fact that the airlines have not been allowed to let anyone on the plane without appropriate proof for a while. Certain societies had to be reminded of this once again, says Herrmann. But people who travel overland are also extremely disciplined when it comes to infection control. No matter how big or small the transition is and what time of day the check takes place: there have never been more than one percent of complaints, says Herrmann. A family of four meets this quota for the checkpoint in Piding on Wednesday lunchtime. The children are still under twelve, but the parents would need proof of one of the three Gs. The police officers will report them to their local health department, everything else is up to them.
Regarding the cooperation and the agreements between the Bavarian border police, which was founded three years ago, and the federal police, Herrmann, Blümel and the border police director Annette Lauer, who has been in office since the beginning of this year, are full of praise. When special controls were ordered at the borders with Tyrol and the Czech Republic in spring because of the corona situation there, the federal police quickly took over 28 of the 43 crossings to be occupied, according to Blümel, the Bavarian police 15 – with the result that none of these 43 Transitions had to close, as Blümel emphasizes.
The general division of tasks at the borders has long been clear, despite the Bavarian state government’s initially far greater ambitions: the federal police, constitutionally, controls directly at the border, Bavaria’s officials are moving to Nuremberg and Memmingen airports and the veil manhunt in the hinterland. For this veil manhunt, Herrmann and Lauer are waiting on Wednesday in Piding with a “track record” for the first half of the year away from Corona.
There is no shortage of border traffic
Compared to the first half of 2020, the number of offenses under immigration law had risen from 1682 to 1766, the number of unauthorized entries from 539 to 712 and the number of people smuggled from 36 to 91.In addition, the border police officers had 274 with arrest warrants from January to June Wanted people were taken out of circulation and encountered a total of 7237 people, cars or things that were searched for, that is 438 hits more than in the first half of 2020. This first half of 2020, Herrmann limits the meaningfulness of the comparison himself , however, was characterized by a phase of full corona lockdown with much less border traffic.
There is no shortage of border traffic in Piding on Wednesday. The wave of return journeys to the northern federal states is rolling, and the veil investigators in their consistently very elegantly painted limousines let one car after the other follow the checkpoint of the border police. When fixed border checkpoints were set up again at the three most important motorway crossings at the height of the refugee crisis in September 2015, the federal police, which meanwhile have taken up posts less than two and a half kilometers further at Walserberg, have been carrying out their round-the-clock controls since then Last year no more reinforcements from the Bavarian police needed. On Wednesday, the veil investigators also mingle in the traffic on Walserberg. All the other places where the limousines are usually parked look almost noticeably empty on this day.