A former student who volunteered at a refugee centre during the European migrant crisis describes how the reality on the ground was carefully staged for the cameras, and how he experienced an eye-opening experience in 2015.
Caroline Bosbach, a former volunteer at a large migrant shelter in Berlin and now a candidate in the 2025 federal election, told a leading German newspaper that she witnessed first-hand the media manipulation during the migrant crisis in 2015. Bosbach had given up on a career in politics, seeing it as antithetical to her happy family life, but has since experienced a political awakening, describing the conditions at the shelter where she worked and what it was like the day the camera crew arrived.
She said Die Welt “Everything changed in 2015 when I became involved in politics and worked at the refugee reception centre in Tempelhof,” she says, recalling her time as a student volunteering at a migrant shelter. [Berlin].
“There were 5,000 young people there, violence was a daily occurrence, and then the press came to visit. And suddenly there were people there who weren't there before, being filmed – women, children, families. I thought to myself, this is not right.”
To make this point, the paper bluntly states: “She believes they were photographed and brought there to show that it's not just young men who come to Germany.” Regarding the situation at the time, she argues that during the 2015 migration surge, Germany was in constant crisis, but “the reaction of most of the media and politicians was that everything is fine, there's nothing to see here.”
Bosbach is a former model. Let's DanceUK Strictly Come Dancing Or the U.S. Dancing with the StarsShe is the daughter of Wolfgang Bosbach, a prominent German conservative lawmaker who broke with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) over borders and monetary policy during the migrant crisis.
Bosbach's daughter told German media she was concerned that people were “too easily and too easily controlled” and that some were so keen on censorship to fight “fake information” that threatened freedoms. “We have the most humourless and intolerant government ever,” she said. Welts.
Bosbach's claims of violence at the Tempelhof refugee centre, where he worked as a volunteer as a student, are not without basis: in 2015, police were said to have been forced to intervene at the centre after fights broke out involving hundreds of migrants.
The following year, Christian refugees who had been allowed into the camp reported that they again had to flee “in fear for their lives” after Muslim asylum seekers discovered them among them. In late 2016, undercover journalists posing as refugees entered the camp and took part in discussions about the Islamic State's base in Berlin, where they met jihadi Chechen “mujahideen” living there.
Suspicions that the media has been manipulated to portray mass immigration in a more favorable light, especially during Chancellor Angela Merkel's turbulent period of the migration crisis, are also not new. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Using the example of border clashes on the Hungarian border, he observed how European news about the crisis was represented differently depending on which country it was broadcast to.
In the UK, young migrant men were shown on television throwing stones at police, the perpetrators of the clashes, but this was not shown in Germany, the report noted. German viewers instead saw footage of women and children “fleeing tear gas from security forces.” Other footage showed children being pushed to the front line of a confrontation with border guards, presumably looking straight into the camera, the report said at the time. The media's focus on sympathetic footage of women and children in coverage of the migrant crisis seems at odds with reality, when UN figures reveal that the vast majority of migrants are, in fact, adult men.
More recently, it has been claimed that we have again seen real-time media manipulation on European borders, such as an artificially created migrant crisis on the Polish border, as part of Moscow and Minsk’s hybrid war against the West. As reported in 2021:
The Polish government has released footage purportedly showing migrant children being “staged” to elicit sympathy from waiting media cameras, with at least one child reportedly having cigarette smoke blown in his face, reducing him to tears.
Women and children appear to have been only a tiny fraction of the thousands sent by bus by the Minsk regime to the EU's eastern border, but attendees nonetheless appeared ready to offer pathos for the waiting media cameras this week. But cameras on the other side of the fence were capturing footage that the Polish government claims exposes the farce.
The apparent harassment of children by migrant carers in an attempt to bring them to tears for waiting media has been criticised as a hastily stepped-up “propaganda campaign” at the border by the Polish government and its spokesperson.
