The Afghans sit in long rows in the middle of the hangar.
Wherever military aircraft are serviced, construction fences now separate the Afghans from the American soldiers around them who take care of them.
How many are there?
"265 - exactly," says a military policeman with sunglasses and grins as he walks by, while an American woman behind him is sticking sweets through the bars for children.
Lorenz Hemicker
Editor in politics
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Conversations with the people who escaped the Taliban are not allowed on the main American military base outside the United States on that day. There is too much concern in Ramstein that the Islamists in their homeland are threatening the families of the refugees. Some of them take a critical look at the television journalists' cameras. But most of them seem curious. Relieved to know the war behind you and a new life ahead of you.
The 265 Afghans in the hangar are only a tiny fraction of the refugees who are staying in the Kaiserslautern area that day. The hangar is the departure terminal, and the Afghans head for the American capital Washington. Arrivals are registered in other hangars. There were 9,000 in the past few days. And 6500 are still here. To accommodate the large number of people, the Americans have built a tent city on the base in the past few days. 10,000 people can be accommodated there, 4,000 more in the nearby Rhine Ordnance Barracks and another 5,000 at the more distant Grafenwöhr and Hohenfels locations.
If the Americans have their way, it shouldn't even come to that.
The bilateral agreement between Germany and the United States stipulates that none of the refugees remain in the country.
“We're trying to get up to 5000 people out a week,” says Jusdin Dere.
As the “Director of Operations”, the tall American major overlooks the process in the hangar.
He calculates that it takes seven minutes to clear a person - correspondingly longer for families.
200 people per hour are possible.
Which makes it clear that significantly more people can be smuggled through in this hangar.
But just stop there.
He doesn't know how many more refugees will arrive. Dere says that his hangar is ready for anything. Obviously, the number of Afghans arriving depends on many factors. Because Ramstein is only one last stopover in the American airlift, which leads from Kabul to the United States. Nobody can say how many American military transporters can still take off from Kabul and how many of the almost 500 seats on board are occupied by Afghans.
It is also unclear how quickly the refugees will be dispatched to the American air force base in Qatar, where the first stopover will be made.
After all, Ramstein is the most important but not the only European air base from which Afghans arrive in the United States.
In addition to her, it is said from the American side, there were also flights from the Sigonella Air Station in Sicily and from Rota in Spain.
These are two more bases with US troops.
The commander of the American air force, who is visiting the hangar that day, speaks of a “central role” of his base in Germany in the context of the American operation Allies Refuge.
A role that, as General Jeffrey Lee Harrigian shows, even the large base in Ramstein could not fulfill on the side.
10,000 to 11,000 American soldiers alone are tied up in the operation here - plus numerous border guards and civilian employees, such as the State Department, who take on responsibility for the Afghans from Germany.
Even without the Germans, says the trained fighter pilot, the whole thing cannot be mastered.
German companies, for example, played a crucial role in the supply of food and people's hygiene.
German authorities, in turn, were helpful in signing contracts with the companies.
Nobody dares to predict exactly when the last refugee will arrive here. The Taliban's deadline expires on August 31. Clark Price, currently the highest ranking American diplomat in Germany, who accompanies Harrigian on this day, leaves it at one sentence: "Our mission is to get as many people out as we can."