Elation as refugees are received with open arms in Austria and Germany.

Austria and Germany threw open their borders to thousands of exhausted refugees on Saturday, bussed to the Hungarian border by a rightwing government that had tried to stop them but was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers reaching Europe’s frontiers.

Left to walk the last yards into Austria, rain-soaked travellers, many of them refugees from Syria’s civil war, were whisked by train and shuttle bus to Vienna, where authorities promptly arranged for thousands to head straight on to Germany.

German police said the first 1,000 of up to 10,000 people expected on Saturday had arrived on special trains in Munich. Austrian police said more than 6,000 had entered the country by Saturday afternoon.

Munich police said Arabic-speaking interpreters helped refugees with procedures at emergency registration centres. The seemingly efficient Austrian and German reception contrasted with the disorder prevalent in Hungary.

“It was just such a horrible situation in Hungary,” said Omar, arriving in Vienna with his family.

In Budapest, almost emptied of refugees the night before, the main railway station was again filling up with new arrivals, but trains to western Europe remained cancelled. So hundreds set off by foot, saying they would walk to the Austrian border, 110 miles away, like others had tried on Friday.

Another group of refugees has begun the walk from Budapest towards the Austrian border.
After days of confrontation and chaos, Hungary’s government deployed more than 100 buses overnight to take thousands to the Austrian frontier. Austria said it had agreed with Germany to allow them access, waiving asylum rules that require them to register in the first EU state they reach.

Wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags against the rain, long lines of weary people, many carrying small, sleeping children, got off buses on the Hungarian side of the boundary and walked into Austria, receiving fruit and water from aid workers. Waiting Austrians held signs that read “Refugees welcome”.

“We’re happy. We’ll go to Germany,” said a Syrian man who gave his name as Mohammed – Europe’s biggest and most affluent economy is the favoured destination of many refugees. Another, who declined to be named, said: “Hungary should be fired from the European Union. Such bad treatment.”

Hungary insisted the bus rides were a one-off, even as hundreds more people gathered in Budapest, part of a seemingly unrelenting human surge northwards through the Balkan peninsula from Turkey and Greece.

By contrast, the Austrian state railway company, OeBB, said it had added 4,600 seats by extending trains and laying on special, non-scheduled services.

Hungary, the main entry point for refugees into Europe’s borderless Schengen zone, has taken a hard line, vowing to seal its southern frontier with a new, high fence by 15 September.

Hungarian officials have portrayed the crisis as a defence of Europe’s prosperity, identity and “Christian values” against an influx of mainly Muslim refugees.

Prime minister Viktor Orbán said on Saturday that Hungary would deploy police forces along its border with Serbia after 15 September, and the army too, if parliament approves a government proposal.

“It’s not 150,000 [refugees coming] that some [in the EU] want to divide according to quotas, it’s not 500,000, a figure that I heard in Brussels, it’s millions, then tens of millions, because the supply of immigrants is endless,” he said.

For days, several thousand camped outside Budapest’s main railway station, where trains to western Europe were cancelled as the government insisted all entering Hungary be registered with asylum applications processed there as per EU rules.

But the logjam broke on Friday when, in separate rapid-fire developments, hundreds broke out of a teeming camp on Hungary’s frontier with Serbia, escaped a stranded train and took to the highway by foot chanting “Germany, Germany!”

The government appeared to throw in the towel, mobilising a fleet of buses to take them to the Austrian border.

The scenes were emblematic of a crisis – about 350,000 refugees and migrants have reached the border of the European Union this year – that has left the 28-nation EU groping for solutions amid dysfunctional squabbling over burden-sharing.

At an EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Saturday, the usual diplomatic conviviality unravelled as they failed to agree any practical steps out of the crisis. They are especially at odds over proposals for country-by-country quotas to take in asylum seekers.

“Given the challenges facing our German friends as well, all of Europe needs to wake up. (The time for) reverie is over,” said Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner.

“Now, the continent of Europe is challenged. In this great challenge, the entire continent has to give a unified answer. Whoever still thinks that withdrawal from the EU or a barbed wire fence around Austria will solve the problem is wrong.“

Chancellor George Osborne said Europe and Britain must offer asylum to those genuinely fleeing persecution but also need to boost aid, defeat people-smuggling gangs and tackle the conflict in Syria to ease the migrant crisis.