Volkswagen announced last week that its Osnabrück plant will stop building cars and start building weapons for Israel. The company is selling the factory to an Israeli investment firm and the German state of Lower Saxony, with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the state-owned Israeli company behind the Iron Dome, lined up as their first customer. Car production will end next year, and according to Volkswagen’s own statement, it will be replaced by a “competence center for security and defense.”
Because nobody at Volkswagen mentioned what that plant used to make, or who used to work there against their will, allow me to:
The Osnabrück site grew out of Karmann, a coach builder that spent the Second World War producing aircraft parts for the German war effort. Karmann used forced labor during WWII, keeping prisoners in barracks behind barbed wire on the same ground where components for Israel’s air defense will now be assembled. Volkswagen itself was founded by the Nazi Party in 1937, at Hitler’s request, to build a car for the German masses. Ferdinand Porsche designed it. Four concentration camps and eight forced labor camps operated on Volkswagen property during the war. A VW engineer once traveled to Auschwitz to hand-select workers from a transport of Hungarian Jews.
While this doesn’t make Volkswagen unique among German industrial giants, what is unique is where the company landed afterward. VW paid into a fund for forced laborers and pledged financial support to Israeli institutions caring for Holocaust survivors. That was the shape of German atonement: money flowing toward the genocidal Apartheid state built by the people the Nazis tried to exterminate. More than eighty years later, the plant that once built parts for Hitler’s air force is now being converted to help build parts for a military that the United Nations says is committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.
A UN Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded last September that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians. This past June, the same commission found Israel is still doing it, this time through the deliberate targeting of children. Roughly a third of everyone killed in Gaza since October 2023 has been a child. Somehow none of that has slowed Germany down, instead, it only sped the machine up.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz briefly suspended some ammunition shipments to Israel last August, under pressure over the ongoing brutal assault on Gaza’s civilian Palestinian population. He lifted the freeze within months, and in an interview last week he called Israel “the only democracy in the entire Middle East,” said its existence is “non-negotiable,” and promised he would always support Israel militarily for as long as he holds office. In the same breath, he tried to insist there are no unconditional deliveries to Israel. One statement promises limits while the other one promises none.
But the numbers don’t lie.
Germany approved nearly $930 million in arms exports to Israel in the first half of this year, more than four times what it approved in all of 2025.
Most of it went toward a nuclear-capable submarine built in Kiel and delivered to the Israeli navy in July. Close to a fifth went to joint projects between German and Israeli defense firms, the exact arrangement Volkswagen is about to join. A UN commission calling what’s happening in Gaza genocide changed nothing about the pace of German weapons moving toward the country carrying it out.
Britain, by comparison, is playing a different and arguably more nefarious character in the same script. This week, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband is expected to announce a ban on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, timed to look like Britain finally taking the occupation, genocide and Apartheid seriously.
Before the announcement went public, British diplomats privately told Washington that the sanctions are largely symbolic and won’t touch the UK’s broader trade or security relationship with Israel.
British officials have already acknowledged that traders can simply relabel goods to get around the ban. Prime Minister Andy Burnham reportedly called Donald Trump the day before to give him a heads up, so nobody in Washington would mistake the gesture for an actual shift in policy.
One government builds weapons factories while the other announces sanctions engineered in advance to mean nothing. Both are responding to the same facts: a UN commission calling it genocide, an International Court of Justice opinion calling the occupation unlawful, mounting documentation of aid obstruction and mass civilian death. Neither government disputes these facts so much as it declines to let them matter.
Volkswagen’s history was supposed to be the cautionary one, a warning about what happens when a country folds its industrial base into a war machine built to destroy a people. Instead Germany’s memory of the Holocaust has become the reason it says it can never restrict what it sends Israel, no matter what Israel is found to be doing with it. The factory in Osnabrück once ran on forced labor to build weapons for one campaign of mass killing. It’s about to reopen to help build weapons for a government committing another. This is what happens when the lesson of “never again” gets read as an instruction to arm one side, and nothing more than that.
Shukran Ahmed, keep spreading the truth.
I understand it comes at great personal cost, but we have no option.
Silence Kills, so does willful ignorance.
✊🏽
Sickening perverse even. Germany are implicitly guilty of murder .