Watching and Waiting for Border Crossers

Climbing into a Volkswagen van for a nighttime border patrol, Chief Inspector Klaus Mueller looks at the sky. “Very cloudy,” he notes. “Smuggler-friendly weather.”

Not that it much matters. Smugglers attempt to cross the rivers that separate Germany from Poland every night, in rain or bitter cold. After black market cigarettes, their main cargo is people.

Before German unification, East Germany and Poland, as Warsaw Pact allies, left their border relatively unguarded compared to the barbed wire, minefields and watchtowers the East Germans put between themselves and West Germany. Nowadays the German-Polish border remains a largely green expanse, with woods and fields on either side of the Oder and Neisse rivers and no fences.

The border patrol office at Frankfurt an der Oder, about 30 miles east of Berlin, is responsible for a 40-mile stretch. Four to six patrol vans go out each shift, three shifts a day.

The border guards are equipped with high-tech tools like night-vision goggles and heat-sensing cameras. But mostly they rely on their eyes and ears.

“When you just stand still at night you can hear every whisper, every footstep, over long distances,” says Officer Jan Steenfatt.

Border guards wear bulletproof vests, but shootouts are rare. At the first sign of trouble, smugglers usually flee, leaving their clients lost and bewildered.

Steenfatt and his partner, Officer Romy Ballat, spend the first half of their 2 p.m.-to-10 p.m. shift driving a one-lane restricted path along the Oder. Most smuggling occurs in darkness, so daylight hours are spent looking for signs from the night before. The latest finds: a pink sweater discarded in the mud, a gasoline can.

After dark, they drive to a railroad bridge favored by smugglers. A couple of nights before, some were caught climbing through the steel framework. As a chill wind blows, Mueller scans the Polish side with night-vision goggles that provide a sharp, green-tinted view.

Climbing down through the brush to the banks of the river, the officers find nothing amiss. But after returning to their van, they receive a radio report that another patrol has spotted a small boat moving toward the German side. “The first two crossers,” Steenfatt says excitedly.

They drive onto a peninsula that juts into the Oder. The sound of traffic from the nearby city drones in the background. A bank tower gleaming in the distance is used by smugglers as a landmark, Steenfatt says.

“It’s hard when you hear their stories,” Ballat says of the people who get caught, often after having paid their life savings and traveled halfway around the world chasing a dream of finding work in the rich West.

“Just because you put on a uniform doesn’t mean you become a robot,” Steenfatt agrees.

But the two have their job to do, and believe Germany can’t allow everyone in who wants a job. “We have our own problems,” Steenfatt says, referring to the 4.5 million Germans out of work--a postwar high.