Germany’s Border Checks Stretch Police Thin

Portable toilets at Sigmarszell. The same arrangement repeated at checkpoint after checkpoint along Germany's borders. Officers are being moved from protest duty to border shifts to football matches, with no proper recovery time in between. What Berlin presented in September 2024 as a temporary security measure has become a semi-permanent operation (Tagesschau). The Bundestag's own police welfare watchdog now says the system cannot continue like this.

14,000 officers, fewer migrants

Uli Grötsch, the Bundestag's independent commissioner for the federal police, published his 2026 annual report this week. His office is a parliamentary watchdog that monitors policing conditions. His conclusion is blunt: Germany's internal border controls are placing an "extraordinary burden" on the federal police and are not sustainable (RP Online).

Around 14,000 officers are assigned to the borders. That means overtime, exhausted shifts, and fewer officers at railway stations, airports and major events (Spiegel). Training and crisis readiness are also being hit, because instructors and specialist teams are being pulled into checkpoint rotations (Süddeutsche Zeitung). At Bad Reichenhall, on the Austrian border, 20 to 25 officers from a mobile surveillance unit are permanently tied to one crossing. They are then not available for knife-ban enforcement at Munich or Nuremberg railway stations (RP Online).

The case for keeping the same deployment is weakening. Irregular entries in the first half of 2026 fell to just under 25,000, about 22 percent lower than the previous year. Germany has still kept the same number of officers at the same checkpoints (Spiegel, Tagesschau).

Courts rule against, controls continue

The Munich Administrative Court has declared checks at the Austrian crossing unlawful in three cases. It found that their duration and design may breach the Schengen Borders Code, the EU rulebook that protects passport-free travel at internal borders (Finanznachrichten/dpa-AFX). The same court still refused to block future controls. In practice, travellers are checked first and can only challenge the measure afterwards.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt accepts that the federal police are under pressure. But he has linked any extension beyond September to three tests: migration trends, protection of the EU's external border, and the bloc's new asylum rules, which took effect on 12 June (n-tv). His argument is that if fewer people arrive irregularly, and if other EU states share more responsibility under the reformed asylum system, Germany can ease off.

The problem is that none of those tests has a public benchmark. No one outside the ministry can see when the condition has been met.

The European Commission has urged Germany and eight other states to phase out internal controls and move instead to mobile, risk-based checks (The Brussels Times). Brussels' leverage is limited by the way Schengen works. A member state acts first and informs the Commission afterwards. The Commission can review, apply pressure and, eventually, litigate. It cannot simply order the barrier lifted (Verfassungsblog).

Neighbours bear costs they cannot price

Poland's Border Guard checked 3.84 million people on its borders with Germany and Lithuania over one year, most of them on the German section (RMF24). Luxembourg depends on about 230,000 cross-border workers who commute every day from France, Belgium and Germany. Controls and transport disruption hit a commuter system already under pressure, with workers saying they feel "taken hostage" (RTL Infos, Vosges Matin).

No neighbouring state has produced a hard estimate of the cost. Nor is any neighbour in a clean position to object. France has maintained its own Schengen controls since the 2015 terror attacks. Poland has extended its checks with Germany until October. The more member states use the exception, the harder it becomes to call Germany's version a breach rather than part of a wider unravelling.

For Malta, Schengen is often experienced through the airport gate rather than the daily land commute. But the mechanism matters all the same. Once internal border controls become routine in the large member states, the burden does not stay at those borders. It changes the meaning of a freedom that smaller states rely on without having the political weight to define.

Grötsch's report also raises a rights issue. His office opened investigations into 33 racial-profiling cases and recorded a 58 percent rise in total submissions from the previous period (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Zeit). Officers are burning out. Travellers cannot avoid checks that a court has already found unlawful in specific cases. Both sides are carrying the cost of temporary controls that no longer behave as temporary.

Germany has normalised an exception to one of the EU's basic freedoms without producing evidence that matches the scale of the operation. The police watchdog, the courts, the Commission and Germany's neighbours are pointing in the same direction: the deployment is heavier than the results justify. The answer now sits with Dobrindt. So far, he has offered a September deadline and three conditions that the public cannot verify.