Inside the ‘drive-thru brothels’ where prostitutes offer £25 hook-ups from dingy static caravans at side of busy roads
ON a busy highway, hundreds of static caravans line the roadside, lit up like Christmas trees.
Each one has garish lights hanging in the window. When switched on, they indicate that the prostitutes who wait inside are available for sex.
While they might sound grotty, these mobile homes are a common sight across Germany and a favourite with long-distance truck drivers. And it's all totally legal under German law.
As part of our investigation into the country's legal sex trade, The Sun visited the Am Eifeltor, a sprawling road in the industrial heart of Cologne, on a busy Friday night.
With Brit tourists being ushered away from Amsterdam's red-light district, more and more are flocking to the west German city, which is famed for its mega-brothels and FKK clubs.
But now German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is calling for legal restrictions on sex work, declaring it “morally wrong” and telling parliament that it is “unacceptable for men to purchase women”.
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It is estimated that more than 1.2million men in the country buy sex every day.
But working conditions can vary and campaigners insist there is little protection for the women working out of the caravans, which represent the darkest edges of the sex work industry.
Unlike in brothels, there are no security guards or pimps to deal with unhappy or violent customers - leaving the women extremely vulnerable.
A spate of recent arson attacks and murders have highlighted the horrifying dangers they face, with the culprits often able to drive off and flee before anyone is able to raise the alarm.
In Cologne, we witnessed car after car pull up to park between caravans before the drivers got out, knocked on the door to negotiate a price and then disappeared inside for up to 20 minutes.
Clients from across the continent
The going rate here is around £25 to £45, depending on what level of sexual services each client wants.
Sex industry abolition activist Elly Arrow told The Sun: “These caravans get a lot of the cross-border sex tourism, but you've got intra-German sex tourism, so to speak, as well.
“They'll get men coming from other cities, or men who are on business trips, and long-distance truck drivers, who stop in places like Eifeltor because it's especially cheap.
“There are a lot of these transport truck drivers. They come from all over Europe.
“So they don't come to Germany specifically to buy sex, but it's just part of the life on the road. It's legal here. It's easy, and it's cheap.”
After the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the women raised their prices, leaving sex buyers livid.
In forums discussing the trade in Germany, users are seen angrily talking about the price increase from €30 to €50 (£25 to £45).
The caravans are a common site across all of Germany and tend to be pushed out to the edge of town, often in industrial areas.
Dangerous business
But life in these remote caravans can be dangerous for the women who use them as their business.
Arrow explained: “Men can do a lot of risky and degrading things to these women, for essentially pocket money.
“In the northern part of Germany, we've had quite a few cases of arson in the caravans.
“The women who work in those, while they might be clustered in groups, they are isolated next to a highway and the nearest house could be very far away. It leaves them very vulnerable.”
Earlier this year a caravan in Himmelpforten, near Hamburg, was set ablaze by a man on a motorbike.
The static home was totally destroyed, but thankfully no one was in it at the time of the fire.
It came weeks after another prostitute was robbed at knifepoint and a year after a different caravan was burned down.
A year before, a different caravan in the region of Horneburg, south-west of the city of Hamburg in Lower Saxony, was .
Horrifying consequences
Activist Arrow explained: “When you're alone in a room with a man you've got all these theoretical rights and protections.
“But the reality is, from what I've seen in sex buyer forums and heard from the women themselves, men can do almost anything they want short of murder and get away with it.
“The chance a woman will take a man to court for non-payment or a murder attempt is just not likely.
“I'm not speculating when I say that a fear of assault is a concern for women every day.”
Easy to flee over the border
While the work these women do is perfectly legal, many Germans do not want to see it happening near their own homes.
In response, many of the caravan complexes are pushed to the edge of towns and are often found in industrial areas like Efieltor with an ever-moving flow of traffic going past them.
Arrow explained: “We often put prostitution at the edge of town, because, even though we claim to be tolerant of the industry, nobody actually wants it next door, or at least not visibly.”
But this means when anything does go wrong, finding a perpetrator can be almost impossible.
She added: “Research shows that a disproportionate number of men who murder sex workers do so in locations next to highways because it is remote.
“It's easy to get a sex worker in a vulnerable position where it is very difficult for her to defend herself.
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“If he's a truck driver, he can disappear from the scene of a rape, robbery, or murder very quickly and be in another country. This makes them almost impossible to track.
“Sex buyers have been shown by studies to be incredibly disrespectful or violent to sex workers and confident they won't see any repercussions.”