Former student volunteer at a Europe Migrant Crisis-era refugee centre relates how the reality on the ground was carefully stage managed for the cameras and how the scales fell from her eyes in 2015.
Caroline Bosbach, a former volunteer at a large Berlin migrant shelter and now a candidate for election in the 2025 Federal votes has told a major German newspaper that she witnessed first-hand manipulation of the media during the 2015 migrant crisis. Describing her own political awakening — after she had previously sworn off a political career, believing it to be antithetical to a happy family life — Bosbach described the shelter where she worked and how it arrived on the day a camera crew arrived.
She told Die Welt of her time volunteering at a migrant shelter as a student: “In 2015 everything changed, I became political. I worked in the refugee reception centre in Tempelhof [Berlin].
“There were 5,000 young men there and violence was the order of the day. And then the press came for a tour. And suddenly there were people there who hadn’t been there before, who were being filmed: women, children, families. I thought to myself, that can’t be right.”
Making the point explicit, the paper spells it out, stating bluntly: “She thinks they were brought there for the pictures to show that it wasn’t just young men who were coming to Germany”. Describing the situation at the time, she asserted there were constant crises in Germany during the 2015 migrant surge, but “the response from large parts of the media and politicians was: everything’s fine. There’s nothing to see here.”
Bosbach, a former model who was a contestant on Let’s Dance, Germany’s analogue to Britain’s Strictly Come Dancing or the United States’ Dancing With the Stars, is the daughter of prominent German lawmaker Wolfgang Bosbach, a conservative who broke with Angela Merkel’s CDU during the migrant crisis era over border and financial policies.
For the younger Bosbach, she tells German media now she’s concerned the public is “so easy and so willing to be controlled” and there are people who are extremely enthusiastic about censorship to combat “disinformation”, factors that threaten freedom. “We have the most humourless and intolerant government we have ever had”, she told Welt.
Bosbach’s claims that the Tempelhof asylum centre she once volunteered at as a student was stricken with violence are not without foundation. In 2015, it was stated that police had been forced to intervene at the Tempelhof camp as brawls involving hundreds of migrants had broken out.
The following year, Christian refugees who had been given accommodation at the camp reported having to flee once again “afraid for their lives“, after asylum seekers of Islamic faith discovered their presence among then. Later in 2016, an undercover journalist posing as a refugee entered the camp and was privy to discussions about a Islamic State cell in Berlin and met a Chechen ‘Mujahideen’, one who engaged in Jihad, living there.
Allegations of manipulation of the media to portray mass migration, and particularly the chaotic years of Angela Merkel’s migrant crisis in a more favourable light is not novel either. In 2015, German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed how differently European news pertaining to the crisis was portrayed depending on what country it was being broadcast to, taking the example of border clashes at the Hungarian frontier.
In the United Kingdom, the perpetrators of the clashes — young migrant males throwing stones at police — were shown on television but in Germany, they were not, it observed. German audiences were instead treated to images of women and children “fleeing the tear gas by security forces”. Other images, it was stated at the time, allegedly showed children being pushed to the front of confrontations with border police, possibly for the cameras. The media focus on sympathy-grabbing images of women and children in migrant crisis reportage seemed at odds with reality, given United Nations numbers made clear the vast majority of those travelling were in fact adult men.
More recently, the real-time manipulation of the media was again alleged to have been seen at the frontiers of Europe, with the artificially manufactured migrant crisis on Poland’s borders, part of Moscow and Minsk’s hybrid warfare against the west. As reported in 2021:
The Polish government has released footage purporting to show child migrants being “prepped” to provoke sympathy for the waiting cameras of the media, with at least one having cigarette smoke blown in their face to make tears.
While women and children appear to make a small fraction of the thousands bussed to the EU’s eastern frontier by the regime in Minsk, nevertheless those present appear to have been prepared to evoke pathos for the waiting cameras of the media this week. Further cameras on the other side of the fence caught footage which the Polish government claims unveils the charade, however.
The apparent harassment of the children by their migrant handlers to produce tears for the waiting media has been criticised as “propaganda activities” at the hastily re-enforced border by the Polish government and its spokesmen.