An estimated four million alleged refugees are now living in Germany, including millions that have remained in the country for decades, Berlin’s official statistician has revealed.
Data released by Destatis ahead of World Refugee Day on June 20 shows that a record 4 million people are living in Germany after immigrating as refugees since the Second World War.
The statistician found that 3.3 million people immigrated to Germany since 1950 as refugees, while around 713,000 foreign survivors of World War II remain alive and within the country.
According to the data, 832,000 of the 3.3 million post-1950 refugees are Ukrainian nationals, or 25 per cent. Meanwhile, over one in five (22 per cent) hailed from Syria, meaning that the two countries account for nearly half of all displaced people living in Germany since 1950.
Other significant groups included 316,000 people from Afghanistan, 186,000 from Iraq, 146,000 from Turkey, 120,000 from Poland, and 117,000 from Iran.
The report found that 1.2 million refugees arrived between 2014 and 2021 in the wake of the Syrian civil war, and a further 1.1 million arrived between 2022 and 2025 following the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
However, in an apparent contradiction of the notion that refugees should be temporary and return home after conflicts conclude, Destatis found that some 476,000 people currently living in Germany arrived between 1990 and 2000, in part as a result of the wars in the now dissolved Yugoslavia.
The official statistician also found that the average age of a refugee living in Germany in 2025 was 39. The majority of refugees were male at 55 per cent, compared to 45 per cent who were women.
Germany’s large refugee population comes largely as a result of the open borders ethos of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who unilaterally opened the gates of Europe in 2014, sparking the first European Migrant Crisis.
The country has seen a radical transformation in its demographics as a result, with one in five people residing in the country being migrants, or around 16.4 million. The true scale of the transformation comes into clearer view when counting those with an “immigration history”, meaning they either immigrated themselves or had two parents who immigrated to the country, which together account for 22 million people, or 26.3 per cent of the total population.
While the mass importation of foreigners was pitched as an economic panacea for the country, it has mostly ballooned welfare spending, with nearly half of all ‘citizen’s allowance’ welfare beneficiaries being foreigners. A similar picture is found in terms of crime, with foreigners being significantly overrepresented among criminal suspects, at 42.9 per cent.
The issues surrounding immigration have been a boost to the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which now consistently polls as the most popular party in the country.
A survey from INSA found that 78 per cent of voters do not believe that the neoliberal coalition government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz has been successful in addressing immigration.