For many of the three-quarters of a million migrants who have reached Europe’s shores so far in 2015, Germany has been the intended destination.
It expects at least 800,000 asylum applications by the end of this year alone and there are predictions of well over one million.
Thousands of people have travelled up from Turkey, through the Balkans and across Austria before claiming asylum on German soil.
More are coming every day and are distributed around the country to spread the pressure on civic resources.
Oberhausen in the populous North Rhine-Westphalia region is one of the many villages, towns and cities to receive an influx of refugees.
Situated near Duesseldorf in the Ruhr valley, Oberhausen was once an industrial powerhouse, producing coal, steel and zinc.
But now the pit heads are silent, a giant gas holder has been turned into an art space and Germany’s largest shopping mall occupies a former factory site.
The newest inhabitants of this city of 210,300 are 2,514 asylum seekers, housed in camps run by the Red Cross while they wait for their claims to be processed.
They have been largely welcomed into Oberhausen and the city has not seen any of the right-wing protests staged in Dresden and elsewhere, particularly in the east.
But the camps are full and, although more are being fitted out, hundreds of new arrivals are expected before the end of the year.
“People need patience,” says Joerg Fischer of the German Red Cross.
Children from the camps have access to the local integration school, set up especially to teach young foreigners the German language and way of life.
The biggest group of asylum seekers have come from Syria but other arrivals are from Afghanistan, Albania and the Balkans.
Germany has not seen such an influx of refugees since the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s.
Between January and the end of October, 331,226 people formally applied for asylum in the country, 52,730 doing so in October alone.
But numbers arriving are much higher – 181,000 asylum seekers registered in October and more than 750,000 have done so this year so far.
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