Federal police are taking action against alleged human smugglers

On Wednesday morning, several hundred federal police officers searched around 41 properties in Berlin, Potsdam, Spremberg and Sonderhausen (Thuringia) for rbb information. The focus is in Berlin. The investigators focus on 18 German men and 23 women with Vietnamese citizenship. The women were pregnant and the men are said to have recognized the children’s paternity in return for payment.

The Federal Police is conducting the investigation on behalf of the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office. The focus is on a 52-year-old Vietnamese woman living in Berlin who, according to rbb information, is said to have conveyed false acknowledgment of paternity in 36 cases.

“The alleged fathers? Some of them have a criminal record as long as a roll of toilet paper,” an investigator told rbb24 Recherche. According to information from the rbb, some of the alleged fathers are homeless, drug, alcohol or mentally ill men. Some have already come into conflict with the law several times, accused of drug, violence and weapon offenses. One man is said to have been violent towards children in the past, another even to be a convicted sex offender.

The investigators assume that the men are not biologically the fathers and have no interest in caring for the children as fathers. Rather, they wanted a profitable business. For the recognition of bogus fatherhood, the agents pay you between 3,000 and 6,000 euros in cash. The agents themselves demand “from experience, amounts between 5,000 and 10,000 euros,” said the Federal Police Inspectorate for Combating Crime in Halle, which is in charge of today’s measure, in an answer to rbb24 research. The Vietnamese mother has to pay for the “fees”.

“The children are only a means to an end,” explains an employee from the Berlin youth protection department, who does not want to be recognized. The problem of bogus fatherhoods has long been known in the Berlin district offices. Lichtenberg and Marzahn-Hellersdorf are considered hotspots. According to rbb information, most of the false fathers come from these districts.

The employee knows that the business of conveying recognition is organized professionally. As a rule, the Vietnamese women come to Berlin pregnant with the help of criminal smuggling organizations. Here they would first go into hiding and then report to the State Office for Refugees in the eighth month of their pregnancy, i.e. on maternity leave. After their arrival in Germany, a mediator takes care of a pseudo father and the recognition of paternity.

The recognition of paternity by a German gives the child a residence status after birth and the right to German citizenship. And the Vietnamese mother also receives a residence permit because she takes care of the child.

If the alleged fathers do not have a steady income, no maintenance can be demanded from them. The women and their children are therefore entitled to the so-called advance maintenance payment, which the youth welfare offices advance. This is increasingly “a financial burden for the municipalities”, so the employee.

But that doesn’t stop the smuggling business. In the next step, many women who came to Germany this way would bring their Vietnamese husbands and, in some cases, their children together as part of family reunification. The fictitious father remains responsible for the one child to the authorities as the father. Even if the women are married and have other children with their husbands.

It is difficult to get to the women to explain the dangers they are exposing themselves and their children to, the officials said. “Imagine something happens to a Vietnamese mother, she gets sick or even dies. And then suddenly you have a criminal or pedophile as your official father, we’ve had something like that before.”

Registry offices, youth welfare offices, local courts and notaries are responsible for documenting paternity. As rbb24 research found out from authorities, the investigation against the 52-year-old Vietnamese also involves “several notaries from the Berlin area”. At the end of 2018, the Berlin immigration authority advised the Berlin Chamber of Notaries of possible cases of abuse. Around 200 questionable notarizations are said to have been carried out by a notary at that time. The Chamber of Notaries responded with a handout to its members in order to identify possible fake paternity.

The President of the Chamber Court and the President of the Regional Court are responsible for checking the notaries in Berlin. Since 2017 there should have been at least six disciplinary proceedings at the Court of Appeal due to “improper paternity acknowledgments”, the press office announced on request. Such cases are not recorded statistically. There is no information about the outcome of the proceedings, as it is a matter of “individual personnel matters”.

According to rbb research, thousands of Vietnamese – including many young women, including underage women – have been smuggled into Germany via Eastern Europe. Here they can often only live illegally and have to work off the costs of smuggling – up to 20,000 euros – plus the costs of bogus paternity. At best in the nail salon – at worst as Forced prostitutes.

The searches on Wednesday join a whole series of raids by the federal police and police authorities in Berlin and other federal states against organizations of Vietnamese origin that earn their money with smuggling, labor exploitation, drug trafficking, forced prostitution and the mediation of bogus paternity.

In September of this year, for example, the police took action against a Vietnamese-German smugglers’ gang accused of around 80 false acknowledgments of paternity. A raid in May involved around 100 women who are said to have been abducted to Germany via Slovakia to work as forced prostitutes for the gang. Forced prostitution and bogus fatherhoods were also the issue in March when the federal police searched brothels and massage parlors in east Berlin.

Exactly one year earlier, around 700 federal police officers, in cooperation with Europol, took action in seven federal states against an internationally operating group of people smugglers. The focus was again on Berlin. The Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed in January that this is a huge network and human trafficking: Berlin is “Hub for Vietnamese human traffickers “.

According to information from rbb24 research, the 52-year-old Vietnamese woman, who is currently being investigated in Berlin for the mediation of bogus paternity, is connected to this Vietnamese, internationally operating network of human traffickers.

Broadcast: evening show, December 1st, 2021, 7:30 p.m.