On patrol with Poland's ultra-nationalist border vigilantes

Telegraph

16 hours ago

Binoculars in hand and slathered with homemade bug spray, Maly and Marius head into the wilderness, their eyes peeled for any sign of asylum seekers in the woods of north-west Poland.
As they creep along the border with Germany, Maly scans the treeline while Marius checks the ground for footprints.
With no migrants in sight, the pair end the patrol and return to their campsite to swap shifts with other volunteers near Stolec, a village by the Krzyz Barnima border crossing. Then a cyclist appears, and Marius gives him a friendly look. Sometimes, he says, locals come over to congratulate them for defending Europe's borders.
'Get a real job!' the cyclist shouts in Polish as he furiously rides away.
Suffice to say, this was no ordinary ride-along with Polish border guards – Maly and Marius are vigilantes, the self-appointed guardians of a remote stretch of woodland on the Polish-German border that they say is so badly protected they need to do it themselves.
Over the past fortnight, 'citizens' patrol' groups have sprung up across Poland as part of an escalating diplomatic spat with the German government, under which Friedrich Merz, the country's chancellor, is turning away asylum seekers from its land borders.
The decision has caused outrage among Polish Right-wingers and some border communities, who claim that their side of the frontier risks becoming a dumping ground for rejected asylum seekers and illegal migrants.
In an attempt to placate the vigilantes, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, this month deployed armed border guards to all 52 crossings with Germany, including the spot where Maly and Marius conduct their patrols.
But the gesture seems to have backfired – the vigilantes have now declared a David-and-Goliath style victory over the Polish government, and are vowing to keep up the patrols unless further demands are met.
While the volunteers here say they are an apolitical grassroots organisation, the wider 'citizens' patrol' movement appears to be driven by the Polish hard-Right, and in particular Robert Bakiewicz, a nationalist activist.
Since the patrols started, Mr Bakiewicz and other Right-wing activists have flooded the internet with viral videos, which purportedly show German police vans secretly dropping off unwanted migrants on the Polish side of the border.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Bakiewicz accused the German government of waging 'hybrid warfare' on Poland by pushing back asylum seekers, echoing the West's term for Russian sabotage attacks on Nato allies.
'As you know, the Russians have been trying to destabilise the situation by pushing migrants from the east,' he said, referring to the influx of migrants from Belarus, and more recently, Belarus via Lithuania. 'Now the Germans are doing the same to us, and because our government is Germany-friendly, they allow it to happen.'
Mr Bakiewicz claimed Germany's actions were rooted in jealousy of Poland's vast economic success over the past few decades. 'Poland is getting stronger and stronger, and this is their way of making Poland weaker,' he said.
Germany denies that its new border policies are unlawful.
Some vigilantes believe they have managed to stop German border forces from sending asylum seekers back to Poland.
'We've seen German police vans with tinted windows coming to the border, most likely full of asylum seekers,' says one 51-year-old patrol member, also named Marius, who works as a welder in the Stolec area. 'When they saw us, the car turned around. In my opinion, we scared them away.'
Patricia, 45, another volunteer who patrols the forests surrounding Stolec, adds: 'We consider it a success because we forced the government to do something. But the government has only sent the guards here for 30 days, and we are afraid after that the roads will be empty. So we still patrol. We want the controls to be permanent.'
In May, Mr Merz ordered his border guards to turn back asylum seekers under pressure from the far-Right, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party, which came second in last February's elections and is now the de facto opposition.
The chancellor has also faced public anger over a string of recent terror attacks in Germany committed by asylum seekers facing deportation orders.
Some vigilantes say this is a key part of their motivation – they fear that Germany is pushing mentally ill or extremist asylum seekers onto their side of the border, who may then commit similar atrocities.
Back at the border near Stolec, Maly and Marius have allowed The Telegraph to join them for another sortie on the condition that their faces and surnames are not published.
While they insist they are not breaking the law, the Polish government has threatened to prosecute anyone suspected of impersonating border guards or hindering their work.
During that patrol, the pair once again found no migrants, though they did lead The Telegraph to a clearing where soiled clothing was strewn on the ground.
'We think maybe this was a meeting point with smugglers where they changed their clothes and left,' says Maly. 'But we are not sure if they were coming into Poland or going to Germany.'
Standing at the patrol's makeshift headquarters, a green gazebo full of high-viz jackets, coffee mugs and water bottles, next to a border checkpoint manned by Polish soldiers with assault rifles, Marius later says: 'We get on well with the border guards, there is no hostility.'
The vigilantes' presence seems to be tolerated by two young border guards on the crossing, perhaps because they are too busy flagging down drivers to check their passports and inspect their car boots.
Many of the drivers seem far from happy about the checks, which have been imposed mainly to appease the vigilante border patrols.
'I've always felt strongly about security at the border,' says Marius, 'but many Polish people are hostile to us. The country is very divided, and they are not thinking about the well-being of Poland – they are thinking about ideology.'
As the end of the week draws near, more vigilantes turn up at the checkpoint, hoping to join in. Among them is Maksymilian Katarzynski, a teenager who has dressed up in tactical-style fatigues with the Polish flag on the epaulettes.
Viewed from a distance, he could easily be mistaken for a Polish border guard, and that seems to be the idea. But the 19-year-old says he is not worried about the legal consequences because he is acting out of patriotism.
'If we see any illegal persons, we will apprehend them and take them to border control,' he says, as he sets up a tent near the border checkpoint with a 'no illegal immigration' banner. 'I'm here as a duty to my society.'
While there is no doubt that asylum seekers are active on the German-Polish border, official statistics suggest the numbers are low compared to other migration routes in Europe.
In mid-May, when the new German border rules were introduced, the total number of people requesting asylum at Germany's nine land borders was recorded as between two and 13 per day, peaking on May 17.
In total, 105 asylum seekers were rejected from Germany's land borders during that period, with only 28 of those rejections taking place at the Polish-German border. By comparison, as many as 1,100 migrants have been known to cross the English Channel on small boats in a single day.
Critics of the vigilantes say this means they are over-reacting to the problems at the border, and that their work potentially risks benefiting their arch-foe Russia, which revels in spreading disinformation across Europe, particularly around migration.
The flood of public anger about poor border security has also been a huge benefit to Poland's Right-wing opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS).
Last month, Karol Nawrocki, the party's preferred candidate in the Polish presidential elections, swept to victory and has since become one of the border patrollers' most vocal cheerleaders.
Once he is sworn in as president next month, Mr Nawrocki will be able to veto key legislation by Mr Tusk's government, which has the potential to collapse his centrist coalition. Rumours abound in Warsaw that encouraging anger towards the Tusk government in the border regions could also be part of PiS's strategy.