As retirement neared a decade ago, German butcher Waldemar Hackstaetter took stock of his finances and concluded he and wife Hildegard couldn’t afford to remain in their home country. So they moved to rural Bulgaria, where they knew their combined income of 1,200 euros (£1,026) would buy a lot more.

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“The month stretched further than our pension did (in Germany) and we didn’t want to become a burden to our children,” 78-year-old Waldemar said. If the Hackstaetters were pioneer emigrants, they are now part of what is slowly becoming a diaspora. Since they left, Germany’s economy has prospered, drawing a steady flow of immigrants that peaked with over a million who crossed its borders at the invitation of Chancellor Angela Merkel during the refugee crisis of 2015.

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Over the same ten years, numbers of German retirees persuaded by poverty to move the other way have risen as much as eightfold. While modest in absolute terms, the trend is clear. In 2002, 107 Germans were getting their state pensions wired to Bulgaria. By 2018 it was 652. The equivalent increase in Thailand was from 671 to 5,415.

Many, like the Hackstaetters, will have emigrated for economic reasons, and growing numbers of pensioners in Germany are now living below the poverty line.

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