Emergency shelter for refugees in Tegel ready to go into operation

Huge tents stand as emergency accommodation for refugees on the site of the former Berlin-Tegel airport.

The new emergency accommodation for refugees on the old airport site in Tegel is starting up.

The tent complex with 900 places will be ready for use starting Friday evening, a spokesperson for the integration administration told dpa in the afternoon. According to him, this does not mean that newly arriving refugees will move in. The emergency accommodation at the former Tegel airport is intended as a reserve and will only be used if all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Only a few places left free in refugee shelters

Because only a few of the 24,500 places in refugee accommodation are still available, Integration Senator Katja Kipping (Left Party) put stage 1 of an emergency plan into effect on Wednesday. The core of this step is the opening of the tent complex, which had already been set up a long time ago at the Ukraine arrival centre in Tegel just in case. It was originally intended for the temporary accommodation of war refugees from Ukraine, but has not yet been used for this purpose. It is operated by the German Red Cross.

Distribution to several federal states nearly stopped

The reason Kipping gave for her action was that most of the federal states had recently stopped taking in asylum seekers. Therefore, the distribution of new arrivals to the federal states according to the so-called Königstein Key no longer functions properly. But since new asylum seekers continue to arrive in Germany, many of them in the capital, Berlin must now accommodate more. This exacerbates the already tense situation here.