HUNGARIAN police evacuated Budapest’s main international rail station yesterday as hundreds of migrants tried to board trains to western Europe, as the continent struggles with its biggest movement of people since World War II.

    Tensions were high as hundreds of police, some in riot gear, began moving people out of the Eastern Railway Station.

    Although they offered no resistance, several hundred migrants staged an angry demonstration outside the station.

    “Germany! Germany! We want to leave!” chanted the crowd, with some holding their babies up in the air.

    The move came just 24 hours after Budapest police allowed people stuck for days in makeshift refugee camps to leave the Hungarian capital on trains bound for Germany and Austria, despite many not having EU visas.

    Trainloads of migrants arrived in Austria and Germany from Hungary on Monday.

    As thousands of men, women and children — many fleeing Syria’s civil war — continued to arrive from the east, Hungarian authorities let thousands of undocumented people travel on towards Germany, the favored destination for many.

    The influx is a crisis for the European Union, which has eliminated border controls between 26 “Schengen area” states but requires asylum-seekers to apply in the first EU country they reach — something that is often ignored as migrants race from the fringes of the bloc to its more prosperous heart.

    “We are still in the process of verifying how many of them are actually asylum-seekers,” Austrian police spokesman Patrick Maierhofer said.

    Many of the migrants slept at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, hoping to continue on their journey to Germany, which last week eased asylum restrictions for Syrian refugees.

    Europe is struggling to cope with its biggest movement of people since World War II, with more than 300,000 arriving this year, many fleeing war, persecution and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

    The plight of the refugees was brought sharply into focus last week after 71 people, including four children, were found dead in an abandoned truck on an Austrian motorway near the Hungarian border.

    So far, police in Hungary and Bulgaria have arrested seven people in connection with the truck tragedy, among them four Bulgarians and one Afghan. The nationalities of the other two were not known.

    The grim discovery led to a security crackdown in Austria with massive tailbacks forming along the border Monday, as officers inspected vehicles in search of people-smugglers and migrants.

    The escalating situation has divided the 28-member bloc ahead of emergency talks on Sept. 14, with western European leaders calling for greater efforts to help the new arrivals as countries on its eastern borders warned they were struggling to cope.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Monday that the refugee crisis was testing the core ideals of universal rights at the heart of the EU, urging all states to take their fair share of asylum-seekers.  (SD-Agencies)