Reliable numbers are hard to come by these days.

This applies to both German nationals and local employees who are still in Afghanistan and to those who have made it to Germany.

The Bundeswehr has announced that it has flown out a total of 5,347 people from at least 45 nations in the largest and most dangerous evacuation mission in its history.

According to a report in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, there were only around a hundred local workers among the rescued people.

Together with the families, there are said to have been 500 people.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The Federal Ministry of the Interior could not confirm the number on Sunday. The most recent figures that the house has come from Thursday. According to this, 138 local workers were brought to Germany in the course of the evacuation mission, plus 496 relatives, for a total of 634 people. But it is possible that this number will also have to be corrected. The federal government is still busy merging the figures from the various sources.

The Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Police, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and the Federal Armed Forces each have their own figures.

The only thing that is certain is that a total of 527 local workers have entered Germany since 2013;

together with the family members there are 2575 people.

The federal government has given a total of around 10,000 Afghans a permit for a residence permit.

These include not only local staff, but also particularly vulnerable people, such as journalists and human rights activists, who are on the federal government's lists.

Identity no longer established before departure

The question of how many local personnel the Bundeswehr has brought to Germany in the past two weeks is so difficult to answer because the identity of the people was no longer established before departure from Kabul. As long as the local staff procedure was applied, a visa was required to enter Germany. In the process of issuing a visa, both an identity check and a security check take place. This only happens after landing at the airport.

Local staff may have found another way out of their country than with the Bundeswehr transport aircraft. Conditions at Kabul airport were chaotic during the evacuation mission. It is also conceivable that German local staff ended up in military aircraft from other countries. Ultimately, it was mostly American soldiers who decided who went on which aircraft. There are also reports of local staff who traveled to Germany by scheduled flight via Doha.

If you remove the local staff, around 4,700 other people were brought to Germany as part of the evacuation mission. Some of these are particularly vulnerable people who were on the federal government's list and who are entitled to a residence permit. It is also suspected that Afghans who live in Germany and who flew to Kabul in the past few weeks to help relatives escape were also found on the evacuation flights. It is considered certain that among the people who sat in the planes of the Bundeswehr, there were also those who actually had no authorization, but who benefited from the chaos. This number has not yet been determined either. You have to go through an asylum procedure in Germany.