Two black-clad German police officers watch as a large white van approaches the Dutch-German border and slows. One officer waves the van into an adjacent car park for a quick check of its cargo while the other stands back, his hands cradling a black, gleaming Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun.
“You never know who’s in the car,” says Frederik, a 32-year-old riot police officer, explaining the weapon.
“Or what they’ve taken,” adds a colleague at the Bundespolizei (federal police) checkpoint.
After a short inspection of the van’s contents – what looks like large boxes of sweets – the driver rejoins lorries and private cars that roll, largely uninterrupted, from the Netherlands on the A30 Autobahn into Lower Saxony near Bad Bentheim.
Welcome to the EU’s Schengen free travel area in 2024.
Last September Germany extended to its north, western and southwestern borders with the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark and France the checks it already operated on its Austrian, Czech, Swiss and Polish borders.
The decision was a political response to a series of violent attacks involving failed asylum seekers in Germany, including a knife attack that left three dead. Three months on the temporary checks on the German-Dutch border are still operating 24/7 with temporary infrastructure of shelters, containers and about a dozen officers per 12-hour shift.
This is a curious moment in the history of the Schengen area, named after the Luxembourg village where the dream of open European borders was first agreed 40 years ago next year.
Enacted a decade later in 1995, 25 of the EU’s 27 members are part of the club. Ireland remains outside, a legacy of UK reservations and the island’s division, but Schengen continues to grow. Bulgaria and Romania will join the free travel area on January 1st, with final border checks set to end in July 2025.
Simultaneously, however, founding member states are chipping away at the original idea – some would say ideal – of Schengen.
Today the Netherlands becomes the 11th Schengen country to impose checks on its borders. The move is in response to security concerns, it says, and controls Germany introduced last September.
Germany has the most land borders in the EU – nine – nearly 3,800km of borders. For the last decade creeping checks mean its borders are no longer as invisible as they are supposed to be.
At the height of the refugee crisis Germany introduced police checks on its border to Austria. Then in October 2023 federal interior minister Nancy Faeser introduced stationary checkpoints on the Polish/Czech/Swiss borders. These “temporary” measures are set to be renewed, again, on December 15th. The measures on Germany’s western Dutch/Belgian/French/Luxembourg borders from mid-September are up for renewal mid-March.
Ms Faeser, previously opposed to such checks, justifies them now due to a growing risk from “Islamist terrorism”. Germany needs to police all its borders because of a “high abstract threat situation with, at present, no concrete indications of danger”.
Last September’s checks, she promised, would be implemented “flexibly, based on the situation on the ground” to minimise disruption for workers, carers, tradespeople and other cross-border traffic.
For its stretch of the German-Dutch border Lower Saxony has chosen a mixed model. Stationary checkpoints on three road crossings are operated primarily by drafted-in riot police. Local federal police, meanwhile, operate round-the-clock mobile units – uniformed and plain clothes – on smaller countryside border road crossings.
At the Bad Bentheim border crossing, press officer Ralf Löning says on-the-ground visual checks are key to the effort. Small transporters are inspected closely, particularly if there is a lot of luggage or if identification and other documentation do not match up to answers.
“There are no full controls. Not every car is stopped nor are the trucks, which are sealed. Instead our concept is to keep things moving as much as possible,” said Löning, pointing to the open road behind the approaching cars. So far the checks have not operated in the busy summer season, he says, though traffic remained manageable during the recent midterm break.
After the white van is let on its way officers turn their attention to an SUV pulling what appears to be an Italian food catering trailer. Two men – darker with beards – smile as they answer questions. After almost 10 minutes they are still there.
Löning says physical appearance alone is not a criteria for closer checks. “We don’t want to discriminate against anyone, and appearance is far less of a factor than, say, ID and other documentation,” said Löning. “A Dutch man of North African origin in a BMW with his wife and two kids in the back is less likely to be stopped than a group of younger men travelling together in a van.”
The Dutch-German border is not known as a hotspot for irregular migration, a fact confirmed by official figures released on Friday. In the 77 days from the introduction of border checks until December 1st, checks on the Lower Saxony-Dutch border uncovered 15 cases of trafficking involving 39 people.
Other outcomes include 14 asylum applications and 113 people detained over active European arrest warrants.
“Those with less-than-innocent motives can no longer assume they won’t get picked up moving across Europe,” said Löning.
The Dutch-German border is better known for drug smuggling but that is the purview of customs officers, none of whom are stationed at these checkpoints.
The federal interior ministry declines to explain how it weighs up the cost-benefits of 24/7 police controls on its borders. Each border is different and “the respective situation has to be regularly reviewed and considerable grounds provided to the European Commission why this ultima ratio has been chosen”.
Countrywide figures released this week show that since checks were extended to all German borders on September 16th federal police prevented 8,451 attempted illegal entries, with 300 traffickers detained.
No figures are available just for the new, western border controls but in October 2024, the first full month of checks on all borders, almost 7,000 such cases were logged countrywide. This represents a 120 per cent drop on the same month in 2023 despite the addition in September of 42 per cent more border to check.
The Schengen Borders Code (SBC) allows member states to temporarily reintroduce border controls in the event of a serious threat to internal security “as a last resort measure, in exceptional situations, and must respect the principle of proportionality”.
A European Commission spokesman says it must be informed in advance but that it has no powers to reject any application for temporary border controls.
More than 400 applications for “temporary” controls have been filed since 2015, most renewed every six months. Things may change under new common EU asylum and migration rules from 2026.
For now, though, Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), likely to head any new government after a snap federal election expected in February, is likely to retain the status quo.
“Since the introduction of border controls the number of illegal entries has fallen noticeably, and over 1,000 people smugglers have been stopped,” said Alexander Throm, CDU interior spokesman in the Bundestag. “We must not leave our borders to people smugglers and traffickers.”