How the northern German village of Unterlüß became dependent on the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall.

DECEMBER 12, 2023

1.

Unterlüß is a small town in northern Germany almost completely enveloped by forest. Streets end before a wall of trees: spruces, oaks, birches and thin, highly grown pines. Cut into the forest is Germany’s largest privately owned shooting ground, a stretch of 15 kilometers. The satellite view shows that Unterlüß would fit comfortably into the space three and a half times. Zooming in reveals rows of tanks and, farther along the flattened area, craters marking the ground. This is where Rheinmetall, which manufactures equipment such as assault vehicles and medium-caliber automatic cannons for land, air and sea, tests the weapons it produces, where heads of state, defense ministers and business owners come to inspect its product range. From here, sounds of shots and explosions ring through the town’s streets, gardens and one-family houses almost daily.

Since the Russia-Ukraine war began, the blasting sounds have become more frequent. Rheinmetall’s order books are full. The factory now works in three shifts. “Since the beginning of the war, operating times have been optimized to increase capacities,” a Rheinmetall spokesperson said. The growth in business has also necessitated the building of a new assembly and logistics hall. In July 2023 alone, the company announced that it had won government contracts worth seven billion euros — mostly from Germany’s armed forces, but also from the Netherlands and Hungary.

But with the war in Ukraine, Germany seems to feel it can be on the right side of a conflict for once. The act of exporting weapons as a show of support is something the country no longer has to be ashamed of.

On Feb. 27, 2022, three days after the Russian army invaded Ukraine, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a speech that set the economic windfall for Rheinmetall in motion. “We are experiencing a Zeitenwende,” a “changing of the times,” he told the parliament. “And this means: The world after is not the same as the world before.” Concretely, this meant two major changes. One was an investment of 100 billion euros in the German military. The second was a shift in Scholz’s stance on exporting lethal weapons such as machine guns, warships and Panzerfäuste — rocket-propelled grenades — to Ukraine. Just 21 days before, he had turned down such a request by Ukraine in an interview and said, “The majority of Germans see it the same way as me.”

Since the invasion, Rheinmetall has hired more than 4,000 new workers across its locations, 361 of them in Unterlüß. And the company is looking for more: There are currently 283 vacancies at the plants in town. “Most of the new hires don’t move here,” said Kurt Wilks, the mayor of Unterlüß. “At the end of a shift, you can see the rows of cars leaving the town. The traffic has definitely increased since the war began.”

From Unterlüß, Rheinmetall sends tanks with names like Marder and Leopard, and the corresponding ammunition, to Ukraine. They often leave at night, transported on the company’s own train tracks out of town. “The noise you heard,” Rheinmetall said about the shots and explosions, “is part of the usual business.” The inhabitants are used to it. They don’t hear it anymore.

“It’s like traffic noise from the street,” said Eduard Müller, a former employee of Rheinmetall.

“It’s the same as how when the wind is right, you can hear the train rush past,” said Wilks.

The town’s selling point was the vast empty space, which the company needed for testing its weapons. Since then, Rheinmetall has been entangled with the town’s development — structurally, economically, conceptually.

What has happened in Germany is, truly, a “changing of the times.” It is a seismic shift from previously held beliefs. For decades, Germany has felt comfortable in the pacifist position, with doctrines prohibiting the export of weapons to conflict zones. But with the war in Ukraine, Germany seems to feel it can be on the right side of a conflict for once. The act of exporting weapons as a show of support is something the country no longer has to be ashamed of. Germany, in a sense, has become Unterlüß.

2.

“Unterlüß is a town fallen from the sky,” said Hartmut Günther, a local Lutheran pastor. The town emerged from industrial need: It became a settlement in 1847, when a nearby train stop was installed to transport wood. When Rheinmetall was founded 50 years later to produce munitions for the German empire, the fates of the town and the company became entwined. The town’s selling point was the vast empty space, which the company needed for testing its weapons. Since then, Rheinmetall has been entangled with the town’s development — structurally, economically, conceptually.

“There is a concentration of the region’s industry on one main employer, which means there is an economic dependence,” said Wilks, the mayor. When Rheinmetall is doing well, Unterlüß is doing well. When Rheinmetall is doing badly, Unterlüß feels it. Wilks estimated that about 25 percent of the people working for Rheinmetall also live in Unterlüß. What has tied Rheinmetall to this town for more than 130 years is the testing ground. “Where else would they be able to get this amount of land?” Wilks said.

Most of the 3,500 inhabitants live in one-family homes made of red brick and topped with the typical German roofs, high and triangular. Some of them were built by Rheinmetall to be rented to its workers. Müller moved into one of those houses just outside the testing ground. He came to Unterlüß in 1985 after finishing his degree in mechanical engineering and worked at Rheinmetall until his retirement in 2019. “Sometimes the windows would shiver from the nearby blasts,” he said.

When things go poorly for weapons, they go poorly for Unterlüß. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rheinmetall sold a group of houses and apartment blocks to an investor. Now many of them stand empty, abandoned, windows darkened, water damage visible, gardens unkempt. The defense industry suffered losses caused by the end of the Cold War — “business considerations of the management at the time,” as a Rheinmetall spokesperson described it. The existence of the Soviet Union as an enemy had necessitated Rheinmetall’s main client, the German army, to remain weaponized. The dissolution of the enemy had pulverized government spending on weapons. Rheinmetall sold assets and laid off workers. Müller said the mood in the town was bad. There are no real alternative employers in Unterlüß.

Perhaps for this reason, when I asked people in Unterlüß their opinions of Rheinmetall, many appeared cautious. One man I spoke to wanted to speak only anonymously. He grew up in Unterlüß, and Rheinmetall has been here all his life. He has friends who work there, but he himself rejects weapons and does not want to produce them. So for lack of alternatives, he drives 40 kilometers to a job that pays less than what he could earn at Rheinmetall. He knows others who are against weapons like he is, but he said they are the minority. In general, the residents of Unterlüß do not discuss the issue.

3.

The war in Ukraine has been good for Rheinmetall. Since Feb. 24, 2022, Rheinmetall’s share price has almost tripled. In March 2023, the company managed to ascend to the DAX — the stock index that holds Germany’s 40 most highly valued companies. And when the world’s stock markets dipped after the attack on Israel by Hamas and the ensuing counterattack on Gaza, Rheinmetall’s share prices went up further still.

When a journalist from the public broadcaster visited the factory in April 2023, he filmed Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger showing the Hungarian defense minister the company’s newest products, lined up on the testing ground in Unterlüß. The film shows the two men walking past a sleek white drone sitting on a launcher. “Reconnaissance drone,” Papperger explains. The visit was a success for Papperger. In July 2023, Rheinmetall announced that Hungary had ordered loitering munition, also known as exploding drones, in a contract worth several hundred million euros. Exploding drones hover, chase targets, calculate the right moment to attack, then detonate in an attempt to kill or destroy.

The prosperity of Rheinmetall, however, is not apparent in the town. In places, Unterlüß looks shabby: overgrown sidewalks, houses in need of paint and repairs, empty shopfronts — the last pub closed in July this year. The local swimming pool, which was built by Rheinmetall, now has to be refurbished with public money.

He said he has visited Rheinmetall workers at their homes and has seen how they look at the floor “in shame.”

“Rheinmetall does not want every club in town coming and asking for 500 euros,” said Wilks, the mayor. Investment in the town, he said, is not the company’s business interest — it is responsible to its shareholders. It does pay tax to the municipality, a Rheinmetall spokesperson confirmed. Public records show that tax payments for all local businesses totaled 6.5 million euros in 2022; for 2023, tax payments are expected to be 9.5 million euros. A fraction of this would come from Rheinmetall; in turn, this amount would be only a tiny fraction of Rheinmetall’s total tax payments, 183 million euros in 2022. However, sometimes Rheinmetall does make donations in Unterlüß, Wilks said — to the local museum, for example. But there is no regularity. The company donated to a church in Hermannsburg, a nearby town that is part of the same municipality as Unterlüß, but not to our church in Unterlüß, said Günther, the pastor. (In response to a request for comment, the company said that it does make donations but declined to comment on particular contributions.)

Günther, who has a long beard and wears his gray hair in a ponytail, describes himself as a pacifist. At the Church of Peace, he tries to stay in between those who feel uncomfortable about Rheinmetall and those who work for the weapons manufacturer. He said he has visited Rheinmetall workers at their homes and has seen how they look at the floor “in shame.” But he said he sees it as his duty not to judge them, not to make them feel bad. He wants his church to be open to everyone.

The town seems to breed its own narratives. Several people used the same phrase to describe how minds changed after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the need for arms and an army became clear because the alternative might have been “to be simply run over” by Putin’s army.

The mayor said it: “Without a functioning weapons industry, we would be without protection, at the mercy of others.”

The anonymous man who refuses to work at Rheinmetall said it: “You see now, if we didn’t have weapons, we would have been run over.” He also said the war changed his mind “a little bit” about Rheinmetall. But he still would not want to have weapons in his house.

No one who visits Unterlüß or considers moving here can ignore for long that the town is dominated by Rheinmetall. “Many came in peacetime,” Günther said. “They did not think about it deeply.”

Müller found an answer for himself when working at Rheinmetall: “I think fewer people die from the products I make here than die from the car or cigarette industry.” He sat in his cozy living room and recounted how he used to work on 155 mm cluster ammunition, when it was still legal.

Rheinmetall is a global business. There are no lists of what it sells and to whom. Some of its sales can be grasped from its press releases: stun grenades for testing sold to the U.S. in 2018, or naval mines to Australia in 2023. Other times it is investigative journalists and activists who uncover the more controversial places the company’s products end up — for example, how Rheinmetall’s Leopard tanks were used by the Turkish army against Kurds in northern Syria, or how in 2015 an unexploded shell in a Yemeni town could be traced to a Rheinmetall subsidiary in Italy.

While Rheinmetall is indeed a part of and benefiting from Germany’s Ukraine strategy, the company also is involved in a long-standing court case against the German government, requesting damages for losses when the German government blocked a deal between the company and Russia in 2014.

Mellinger, whose son used to work for Rheinmetall, is one of the few people in Unterlüß who clearly said they would prefer if there were peace, if no more weapons were built: “Because one knows: People on the other side are getting killed.”

The Russia-Ukraine war has also raised tensions among the inhabitants of Unterlüß. The town has a large community of Russian German resettlers — Germans, mainly from Russia and Kazakhstan, who had a right to German citizenship. More than one million people came to Germany in the five years following the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of them use the Russian language to this day.

Rita Mellinger came to Unterlüß from Kazakhstan in December 1989. When the war in Ukraine broke out, she was worried. She works at the R-Market, a small shop that sells typical products from Eastern Europe: frozen dumplings, soap, creams, Russian tea. Wafts of dill drift out onto the street. When the war began, the locals stopped coming; she and her colleague took down posters advertising Russian artists.

After Putin’s invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian refugees came to Unterlüß. Mellinger noticed that some seemed intimidated when they entered the shop and heard the Russian language being spoken. She also saw how the gunshots made people quiver, like the woman who had fled Mariupol and later became Mellinger’s friend. Mellinger, whose son used to work for Rheinmetall, is one of the few people in Unterlüß who clearly said they would prefer if there were peace, if no more weapons were built: “Because one knows: People on the other side are getting killed.” She said she is glad that the locals eventually started shopping at the R-Market again.

4.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of forced conscription in 2010, most Germans have generally been pacifist, in large part because of the country’s terrible military history. In April 2022, one poll found that 52 percent of Germans felt the government should act “resolutely and show strength.” But the poll also found that 40 percent felt the government should use restraint in its military aid to Ukraine, “in order not to provoke Russia.” This divide in opinion was not reflected in the mass media at the time. A survey of German media companies concluded that seven of the eight investigated outlets presented the delivery of weapons to Ukraine unambiguously as the sensible measure to end the war and expressed skepticism about the usefulness of diplomatic negotiations. Eventually, later that year, public favor for expanding and spending more money on the German army rose sharply.

As the war continues, there is an increase in skepticism about certain weapons exports among the German public. Recent polls showed that the majority opposed exporting cruise missiles (36 percent for it, 52 percent against) and fighter jets (28 percent for it, 64 percent against) to Ukraine.

Still, few in Unterlüß would push back against weapons export. The local parliament member is Henning Otte, a Christian Democrat who sits on the parliamentary defense committee; Otte is also the vice president of a lobbying group for the German arms industry. While the right-wing Alternative for Germany party protested weapons exports to Ukraine in the East German states, they did not have this in their program in Unterlüß.

This is a different Germany. Rheinmetall workers speak about how they are no longer being spat at but applauded as they transport tanks down the motorway, and many in Germany no longer laugh at the army but agree with Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said it needs to be “kriegstüchtig” — ready for war.

Günther’s relationship to the church is also not without conflict. During a recent conference, he was surprised when two people high up in the Protestant administration said the Christian church was not a religion of peace. The Church of Peace’s previous pastor told a TV documentary that when he once led a prayer for peace, a member of the church told him, “Peace means I will lose my job.”