Tag: germany

Germany threatens steps against Israel as tone shifts over Gaza

Germany’s foreign minister threatened unspecified measures against Israel on Tuesday and said Berlin would not export weapons used to break humanitarian law, as he and Chancellor Friedrich Merz delivered their most severe rebuke yet over Gaza.

Germany, along with the United States, had long remained in support of Israel’s conduct since the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, even as Israel became increasingly isolated internationally. Its about-turn comes as the European Union is reviewing its Israel policy and Britain, France and Canada also threatened “concrete actions” over Gaza.

Speaking to broadcaster WDR, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul warned Germany’s historic support for Israel must not be instrumentalised, as massive air strikes and shortages of food and medicines had made the situation in Gaza “unbearable”.

Earlier, Merz criticised air strikes on Gaza as no longer justified by the need to fight Hamas and “no longer comprehensible”, in comments at a press conference in Finland.

While not a complete rupture, the shift in tone is significant in a country whose leadership follows a policy of special responsibility for Israel, known as the Staatsraeson, due to the legacy of the Nazi Holocaust.

It also reflects a broader shift in German public opinion.

Keep reading

Germany Deploys Permanent Troops To Lithuania As Russian Offensive Builds

Germany has deployed a permanent military brigade beyond its borders for the first time since the end of World War II, with troops dispatched to the capital of Lithuania.  The event was inaugurated by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said during a military ceremony in Vilnius that “the security of our Baltic allies is also our security.” 

The decision is part of a series of actions in recent months by European nations to “bolster defenses” on NATO’s eastern flank amid claims that Russia intends to invade greater Europe if they defeat Ukraine.  The “domino theory” remains unfounded and the Kremlin has never threatened to attack any country outside of Ukraine.  The move to shift troops to Lithuania places them near the border of Belarus (a Russian ally) and within striking distance of Ukraine or the Russian border. 

European governments have been threatening an escalation by eventually moving NATO troops into Ukraine in direct confrontation with Russian forces.  Vladimir Putin has previously warned that NATO troops in Ukraine represent a red line which could result in nuclear conflict. 

Putin asserted that if Ukraine’s Western backers deepened their involvement in the war, such as sending troops, the consequences for the “invaders” would be “tragic”. 

“They must realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory,” Putin said, in apparent reference to increasingly lethal Western weapons provided to Kyiv. “What they are now suggesting and scaring the world with — all that raises the real threat of a nuclear conflict that will mean the destruction of our civilization.”

Keep reading

German chief of defence orders swift expansion of warfare capabilities

Germany’s Chief of Defence, Carsten Breuer, has ordered the German military to be fully equipped with weapons and other material by 2029, a document seen by Reuters on Sunday shows.

By 2029, Russia may have reconstituted its forces sufficiently to attack NATO territory, according to estimates by Breuer and other senior military officials at NATO.

The latest document, entitled “Directive Priorities for the Bolstering of Readiness”, which Breuer signed on May 19, said Germany will meet the goal with the help of funds made available by the loosening of the country’s debt brake in March.

The defence ministry in Berlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the directive, Breuer sets priorities for the weapons that should be acquired or developed most urgently, reflecting in part priorities NATO has previously laid out.

Among them, Breuer lists the strengthening of Germany’s depleted air defences, in particular with a view to intercepting drones.

Last year, sources told Reuters that NATO will request Berlin to at least quadruple its air defences, ranging from systems with a longer range, such as the Patriot, to short-range systems.

Another priority is a capability to launch deep precision strikes, according to the document, effectively hitting targets at a distance of more than 500 kilometres (310 miles) and far behind enemy lines.

In addition to pushing for Germany’s ammunition stocks to be replenished, Breuer also orders Germany to raise its stockpiling targets for all types of ammunition.

Other priorities listed in the document are the swift expansion of Germany’s capabilities in electronic warfare and the establishment of a resilient system of “offensive and defensive capabilities” in space.

In a speech in mid-May, Army Chief Alfons Mais said a large-scale social and industrial mobilisation meant Russian forces were rapidly gaining firepower.

Keep reading

“We Don’t Need Lessons in Democracy”: New German Chancellor Friedrich Merz SLAMS JD Vance – As German Government ARRESTS 6 Right-Wing Activists and Prevents their Travel

The new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has again slammed the Trump administration for “interference” in German democracy on the same day 6 right-wing German activists were arrested for wrong-think and prevented from traveling to a conference in Milano, Italy.

Speaking to leftist newspaper “Die Zeit“, Merz criticized Vice-President JD Vance’s courageous pro-freedom speech at the Munich Security Conference and recent posts from Vance and SecState Marco Rubio accusing Germany of “tyranny in disguise” for using the secret political police against the largest opposition party, the AfD.

“Of course, we are not heading toward “tyranny,” as we hear from the USA”, Merz said. “Such statements must be firmly rejected. Germany was liberated from tyranny by the USA, and today Germany is stable, liberal, and democratic. We don’t need any lessons in democracy (from the USA). That’s why JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference was perceived by many, including myself, as interference.”

On May 9, the parting Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrats) had used a trumped-up “dossier” containing no evidence of illegal activity to slander the lagrest opposition party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “confirmed far-right”, leading the push to ban the party, fire its members from governent jobs and deny it basic parliamentary rights.

10 million Germans voted for the AfD in February. Under pressure from an AfD lawsuit and US Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Tom Cotton, the German secret police had to retract the label and remove the press release from its website.

On the same day Merz claimed not to need “any lessons in democracy” from the Trump administration, 6 right-wing activists belonging to the Generation Identity movement were apprehended by German police at Munich airport and taken into custody to prevent them from traveling to a “Remigration Summit” in Milano, Italy taking place on Saturday. Two of the activists were even taken off a plane they had already boarded, indicating the orders came urgently at the request of the “Conservative” Christian Democrat government in the State of Bavaria.

Keep reading

Spy Agency Report on the Alleged “Extremism” of AfD Turns Out to Be So Stupid That it Destroys all Momentum for Banning the Party

In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well.” Today – a mere 72 hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush its long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed Right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.

The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD is. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of unceasing democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.

The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the rollout – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.

The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.

Keep reading

Why Is The Secret German Spy Report On The AfD Party Only Filled With Public Statements?

The German domestic spy service, the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has released a 1,100-page report on the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which it used to label the party a “confirmed” right-wing extremist party. The report is huge and reads like it was written by Antifa, but that was to be expected. However, one interesting point is that it contains only public statements, including quotes made by AfD politicians and a lot of memes.

Why is that?

We already know that the BfV is secretly surveilling AfD members in certain German states, mostly in the east, where the party is “confirmed right-wing extremist” already. This designation allows for the BfV in those states to partake in extraordinary surveillance powers over AfD members, including reading their chats and emails. Presumably, they can also track their browsing history, and perhaps they are even listening in on their conversations at home.

What this means is that the BfV has plenty of statements, memes and content to use based on private statements, but it is purposefully choosing not to use them. After all, a certain number of those AfD members, in private moments, probably also express opinions, post memes, or share thoughts that the BfV would love to include in a secret report on the party, which many hope will eventually justify an outright ban.

Again, why is the BfV not using these private statements?

There are multiple reasons.

For one, a big part of the apparatus of spy agencies is to obtain information, but not release it to the public. The public may not be able to stomach such personal and private information and the means that were used to obtain it. Since the Edward Snowden revelations, and even before then, we have become acutely aware that we have accepted devices into our lives and homes that can be used to spy on us on a scale never seen before in history. However, even now — even after all this information has been revealed — I believe nearly all of us still cannot quite grasp what this means — nor do we want to.

Yes, we know that AfD members are being spied on across Germany. Their emails are read, their phone calls are recorded. AI is being used to sort out keywords of interest to the security services. However, nobody really knows how this information is being processed and what it is being used for, or even who is reading it. The spies who control this information have extraordinary power. As a significant portion of them are now far left, at least in Germany, they believe they are acting as a bulwark against the rise of Nazism, and the ends justify the means when it comes to the AfD. There are other psychological motives at work, of course, as spy agencies are on the whole very good at keeping their secrets, not even necessarily because of internal controls, but because the spies are dedicated to their mission. There is, also, the sense of power that comes with being the watcher, and for many spies, this is a powerful intoxicant. They know, while you are in the dark.

Keep reading

German Conservative Media Leak Secret Police Dossier Used to Ban and Spy on AfD: Criticizing Mass Migration is “Far Right”

Several conservative German media have published the allegedly “secret” dossier the German intel service used to justify classifying the largest German opposition party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as “confirmed far-right”. The 1100-page dossier contains mainly public statements by party members which criticize open borders and mass immigration.

“Cicero“, “Tichy’s Einblick” and “Junge Freiheit” obtained the 1,100 page dossier which ex-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser used to drop a bomb on the AfD on her last day in office. The German secret political police (Office for the Protection of the Constitution – Verfassungsschutz / BfV) has since retracted its classification of the AfD as “far-right” after the AfD sued in court and US Senator Tom Cotton wrote to DNI Tulsi Gabbard to ask US intel agencies to stop exchanging information with German secret services that spy on the political opposition.

The dossier released by the conservative media did not contain any new revelations, but consists entirely of public statements by AfD politcians that most US conservatives will find completely normal sentiments, such as a Facebook post by the party from September 25, 2023:

Instead of a pointless housing summit: Deportation for more housing! If hundreds of thousands or even millions enter Germany every year without the same number of apartments being built, there won’t be enough housing. So due to rising demand, rents also increase. The result: According to calculations by the housing industry association, up to one million apartments may be missing by 2025. But instead of even talking about how this problem can be reduced through consistent deportations and protected borders, the established parties organize a pointless housing summit and decide on brutal regulations at the expense of the Germans.

Pretty extreme, huh?

Keep reading

Germany Wind Power Firms Face Millions In Losses As Wind Speed Drops To 50-Year Low

In many ways, Germany’s wind power revolution has been a success, with wind power serving as the country’s largest source of electricity. However, the current wind lull over the last three months has led to an extreme dip in energy production, which is costing firms millions in losses.

The wind speed average has dropped below less than 5.5 meters per second in the first quarter of 2025, according to German Meteorological Service (DWD). The last time the country saw such low speeds was in 1972 and 1973, and before that, in 1963.

Wind energy producers have been hit hard. For example, PNE, a wind farm operator in Coxhaven, showed revenue dropped to €27.9 million from €31.4 million the previous year, but perhaps more importantly, it went from an operating profit of €1.1 million in the first quarter to a loss of €7.1 million, according to Welt.

The company indicated that there was 31 percent less electricity generated nationwide in the first quarter of the year than in the same period last year, according to data from the German Energy and Water Industry Association (BDEW).

However, it should be noted that April 2024 and 2022 saw much higher wind speeds than previous years, so comparing 2024 to 2025 makes this drop look even more extreme. Experts say there is no evidence of climate change being at work, noting that previous decades have had similar lulls in wind speed.

Germany experienced so-called “dark lulls” over the winter, featuring little sunlight and low wind speed, which led to extremely high prices. Germany imported energy from neighboring countries and turned to conventional power plants in response.

Keep reading

Germany’s Fiscal Suicide

Germany’s general state debt spiral should be a constant feature in daily headlines. Its prominence should force policymakers into a radical fiscal turnaround. Yet while Germany is working under immense pressure to ban the AfD, forming alliances with left-wing extremists and eroding the political culture, on the other side of the Atlantic, preparations are underway for the approaching storm.

We live in record-breaking times. In the first quarter of this year, global debt surged to a record high of $324 trillion. This milestone becomes significant when compared to global GDP, which currently hovers around $110 trillion. Governments worldwide now owe 100% of GDP — an alarming reality, as no modern state has ever managed to free itself from the ensuing fiscal bind once this threshold is reached. Debt levels of 80-90% mark the “point of no return.”

The Tipping Point of the Debt Spiral

At this scale, debt reaches a critical mass. It inevitably forces an escalating debt service burden that drains scarce capital from the private sector to finance bloated social funds, ultimately leading to the same scenario we faced 15 years ago during the last severe sovereign debt crisis. Back then, Greece’s impending default sent shockwaves across credit markets. Central banks intervened with trillions, and governments stepped in to rescue debt-laden pension funds and banks with taxpayers’ money.

Greece’s national debt stood at 143% at the onset of this crisis, and it is now about 155% — no debt consolidation has occurred. The southern European countries are, quite frankly, sinking into a swamp of debt. Italy, with 140%, Spain at 120%, and France’s budget deficit at 7%, leave much to be desired. On average, the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is now approaching 95%, closing in on the global benchmark of 100%.

Bond Vigilantes Lurk in the Markets

We must now prepare for the moment when a tipping point in bond markets triggers a series of sovereign defaults. This will occur when a growing crisis of confidence among investors, banks, and investment funds translates into a sell-off cascade in the bond markets. Let’s keep an eye on interest rates: if they rise with high volatility and market volume, general unrest is on the horizon. We have already witnessed the emergence of “bond vigilantes” this year — critical bond investors who pull the plug when debt levels rise. On the day it was announced that Germany would borrow about a trillion euros over the next four years and issue corresponding bonds, the interest rates on German bonds surged by more than 40 basis points.

Keep reading

Germany arrests leaders of ‘kingdom’ linked to far-right plot, prosecutors say

Police arrested four people on Tuesday linked to a radical group seeking to replace the modern German state, prosecutors said, in the latest operation against a movement flagged as a potential threat to democracy.

The arrests took place as part of raids against the Koenigreich Deutschland, or ‘Kingdom of Germany’, after the interior ministry banned the group, which prosecutors said had established shadow institutions for a new state in line with a far-right ideology known as the ‘Reichsbuerger’ movement.

One of the four people arrested was the movement’s self-declared sovereign, the prosecutors said.

Germany’s domestic intelligence service put the Reichsbuerger movement under observation in 2016, shortly after one of its members shot dead a policeman during a raid at his home.

Scrutiny of the movement, which is broad and covers a number of conspiratorial theories questioning the legitimacy of the modern German state, intensified in December 2022 when authorities thwarted advanced plans for an armed coup.

Its adherents believe that today’s German democracy is an illegitimate facade and that they are citizens of a monarchy which, they maintain, endured after Germany’s defeat in World War One, despite its formal abolition.

Police acted on four arrest warrants on Tuesday for suspects identified as Mathias B., Peter F., Benjamin M. and Martin S., omitting their surnames in line with German privacy laws.

Prosecutors said they are the ringleaders of a criminal organisation that had set up “pseudo-state-like structures and institutions”, including a bank and insurance system, an authority printing “fictional documents” and its own currency.

Peter F. was the group’s “supreme sovereign”, with oversight and decision-making powers over the group’s key areas, a statement from the prosecutors said.

Keep reading