Berlin has said it expects to receive a record 800,000 asylum seekers this year, more than the entire EU combined in 2014, laying bare the scale of the biggest refugee crisis to face the continent since the second world war. If the latest official projection released on Wednesday is borne out, it would be nearly twice as high as Germany’s previous record for asylum claims, set during the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992. Interior minister Thomas de Maizière warned that the Schengen zone, which allows passport-free travel across much of mainland Europe, could not be maintained unless EU states agreed to share asylum seekers. The 800,000 figure — which represents about 1 per cent of Germany’s population and is a sharp increase on an earlier estimate of 450,000 — is one of the starkest signs yet of the extent of the migrant crisis facing Europe, as thousands of refugees fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and poverty in Africa stream into the continent.