In the recent years several surveys to search for space debris in geostationary orbits (GEO) and in geostationary transfer orbits (GTO) have been performed using the European Space Agency's 1-meter telescope (ESASDT) on Tenerife. The GTO surveys were optimized to detect GTO objects near their apogee, i.e., the tracking rate and the survey fields were chosen accordingly. Despite of the optimization, GEO and GTO objects have been detected in both types of surveys. Nevertheless, it is expected that the ratio between detected GEO and GTO objects is different for the different surveys. In this paper we compare the detections from the GEO and the GTO surveys to study the advantage of optimized surveys. Several thousand short observation tracks (2-6 single observations) of newly discovered objects have been acquired during the search surveys. As the observation arcs are very short, only a few minutes, circular orbits were determined for all tracks. In order to determine full six-parameter orbits follow-up observations have been performed for part of the detections. This not only led to the discovery of GEO objects with high area-to-mass ratios, but also to a large number of faint debris objects in GTO. The paper will discuss the detected GTO debris population.