SUMTE, Germany — This bucolic, one-street settlement of handsome redbrick farmhouses may for the moment have many more cows than people, but next week it will become one of the fastest growing places in Europe. Not that anyone in Sumte is very excited about it.
In early October, the district government informed Sumte’s mayor, Christian Fabel, by email that his village of 102 people just over the border in what was once Communist East Germany would soon be taking in 1,000 asylum seekers.
His wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to accommodate nearly 10 times more migrants than it has residents, she told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he recalled.
But it was not. Sumte has become a showcase of the extreme pressures bearing down on Germany as it scrambles to find shelter for what, by the end of the year, could be well over a million people seeking refuge from poverty or wars in Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In a small concession to the villagers, Alexander Götz, a regional official from the government of Lower Saxony, told them at a meeting this week that the initial number of refugees, who start arriving on Monday and will be housed in empty office buildings, would be kept to 500, and limited to 750 in all.
Nevertheless, the influx is testing the limits of tolerance and hospitality in Sumte, and across Germany. It is also straining German politics broadly, creating deep divisions in the conservative camp of Chancellor Angela Merkel and energizing a constellation of extremist groups that feel their time has come.
One of the few people, in fact, who seem enthused by the plan for Sumte is Holger Niemann, 32, an admirer of Hitler and the lone neo-Nazi on the elected district council. He rejoices at the opportunities the migrant crisis has offered.
“It is bad for the people, but politically it is good for me,” Mr. Niemann said of the government’s plan that, even under the pared back program, will leave the German villagers outnumbered by migrants by more than seven to one.
Germans face “the destruction of our genetic heritage” and risk becoming “a gray mishmash,” Mr. Niemann added, predicting that public anxiety over Ms. Merkel’s open-armed welcome to refugees would help demolish a postwar political consensus in Germany built on moderation and compromise.
Unlike those in other European countries, far-right political parties in Germany have had little success in national elections, and they remain a fringe firmly rejected by the overwhelming majority of Germans.
Reinhold Schlemmer, a former Communist who served as the mayor here before and immediately after the collapse of East Germany, said people like Mr. Niemann would “have been put in prison right away” during the Communist era.
“Now they can stand up and preach,” he said. “People say this is democracy, but I don’t think it is democracy to let Nazis say what they want.”
Mr. Schlemmer is among those who are increasingly wary that extremists are exploiting widespread concerns, even in the political mainstream, over absorbing vast numbers of refugees, as the influx tests Germany’s capacity to cope.
Sumte has no shops, no police station, no school and only one bus passes through each day. The initial number of arrivals was, in fact, reduced to avoid straining the local sewage system and give time for new pumps to be installed.
“We have zero infrastructure here for so many people,” Mr. Fabel, the mayor, said.
The strain can be seen even in far more prosperous and prepared places than this one, including Hamburg, the city closest to Sumte, where authorities have already turned municipal parks and an industrial lot into migrant tent camps.
The New York Times
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