The scale of the refugee influx into Germany is almost unprecedented in modern European history: 1.5 million people in six months (for the refugees only started arriving in large numbers in July). It's as if the United States, with four times Germany's population, were taking in one million Syrian and Afghan refugees every month. Americans would never accept that.
What's surprising is not the fall in support for Merkel's policy. It's the fact that it is still so strong, even though no other member of the European Union is being anything like so generous in its refugee policy. (Britain has offered to take in 20,000 refugees over the next five years.) There must be something special about the German response.
There is certainly something special about modern German history, though most people elsewhere have forgotten it or never knew it. Not the Nazis and the war, but what happened at the end of World War II and just afterwards. As the Soviet army rolled west across eastern Europe in early 1945, huge numbers of ethnic Germans fled before it.
Hundreds of thousands of them died of cold, hunger and the constant bombing, but between six and eight million made it into what is now Germany before the fighting ended. Almost as many more were expelled from Eastern European countries in the following five years, mostly from Czechoslovakia and the parts of Germany (about a fifth of its current area) given to Poland by the victors.
Between 1945 and 1950 some 12 million German refugees arrived in Germany - a Germany that had been bombed flat and was desperately poor. Even food was scarce in the early post-war years. But the Germans took the refugees in, shared what they had with them, and together they pulled their country out of the hole it had dug for itself.
Germans don't like to dwell on this period of their country's history, but it hasn't been forgotten. Indeed, one-fifth of today's Germans are those now elderly refugees and their children and grandchildren. Deep down Germans have an understanding of what it is to be a refugee that no other Western Europeans can share.
Does this explain why Merkel did what she did? Nobody can say except herself, and she isn't saying. She certainly hasn't been a strong advocate of large-scale immigration in the past.
But she grew up in the town of Templin in northern Brandenburg, in what was then East Germany. When she was a child and a young woman, that area, not very far from the new Polish border, had a population that was 40 per cent refugees.
Does their own refugee heritage explain why half of Germany's 80 million people still support a policy that, so long as it lasts, will be adding 1.5 million more non-German-speaking Muslims to the country's population each year? Yes, it probably does.
-Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
