No, it wasn’t an early Halloween prank. And it certainly wasn’t a case of ‘oops we misspoke.’ Instead truth is stranger than fiction. Christian Fabel, the mayor of a very small town in Germany called Sumte is now dealing with a very big problem.

In early October, Mayor Fabel received orders from the district government. Sumte, with a population of 102, was to told to take in over 1,000 Muslim refugees, and they had just a month to brace for impact.

His wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to accommodate nearly 10 times as many migrants as it had residents, she told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he said.

I would’ve thought it was a joke too. A very bad joke. Let’s think about this for a minute. A small town in Germany, so small that it doesn’t have a school, shops, or a police force, has been ordered to host Muslim refugees on short notice and has exactly ZERO resources to back them up. At least Sumte was able to negotiate the max number of refugees down to 750, that’s something I guess.