In addition to the number of migrants reaching Germany, the country is also accepting back ethnic Germans who had been living in Russia and other former Soviet Republics.
During the course of 2015 the number reached some 6,000 ethnic Germans who returned. This was several hundred more than in 2014.
The high point was in 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and borders came down. That year 400,000 entered Germany.
Thousands have returned every year but it was down to just 1,800 in 2012. Since then the number has been swinging up again.
The data comes from the only arrival centre which is near Göttingen in Lower Saxony, approximately in the centre of Germany.
Most ethnic Germans last year were returning from Russia and Kazakhstan, with smaller numbers from Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.
The majority said their purpose was to reunite with relatives already living in Germany.
As a condition of being accepted, migrants must demonstrate before they leave that they have a basic knowledge of the German language.
In the closing days of WWII more than 12 million Germans in eastern Europe sought desperately to evade the advancing Red Army and fled west.
Before then, however, several hundred thousand Germans in the east had already been deported by the Soviets to remote areas of Siberia and Central Asia, trapping them in the USSR from 1945 until 1990.
