Just weeks after Germans surprised the world, and themselves, by embracing the challenge of taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees, Germany's leaders are rolling up the welcome mat.
In a primetime appearance on German television on Thursday, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière lashed out at the "many" refugees he accused of not following Germany's rules.
"There are many refugees who believe that they can just allocate themselves," he said.
"In Germany, we are rapidly getting close to the limits of our possibilities," Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's economic minister and vice chancellor, told Spiegel Online in an interview published Friday.
"While the asylum law doesn't have a ceiling, there are real limits to how much pressure we can put on our cities and towns."
Germany expects somewhere between 800,000 and one million refugees this year, substantially more than the rest of Europe combined.