Category Archives: Germany

EU disputes Facebook’s claims of progress against fake accounts

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Commissioner says ‘still some way to go’ in battle against disinformation on social media

Facebook and other major social media platforms have been accused by the European commission of giving a misleading picture of their efforts to remove fake accounts spreading politically motivated disinformation.

The security commissioner, Julian King, told the Guardian on the publication of the sites’ self-assessment reports to the EU’s executive that there remained a “disconnect” between the claims of progress from social media companies and “the lived experience”.

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Germany charges two Syrians with crimes against humanity

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Charges – including 59 counts of murder – linked to UN exhibition of torture photographs in 2015

Germany has charged two alleged former Syrian secret service officers with crimes against humanity, federal prosecutors have announced.

The two men were arrested in the capital, Berlin, and the southern state of Baden-Württemberg in February, in a coordinated operation by German and French police.

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‘We were indifferent to the horror’: Nazi camp inmate to give testimony at trial

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Polish resistance fighter who escaped Stutthof will face Bruno Dey, accused of being accessory to murder of 5,230 people

It was when the guards began burning piles of bodies in the open because the crematorium could not keep up with the task that Marek Dunin-Wąsowicz realised he was being held in a camp whose purpose was not just to “concentrate”, but systematically to murder thousands of people.

In the autumn of 1944, the 17-year-old Pole saw trainloads of Jews, most of them from Hungary, being taken straight to the gas chambers at Stutthof. Others were gassed inside an adapted railway carriage, set on tracks to trick prisoners into believing that they were being transported to another destination.

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Number of Britons leaving for Europe hits a 10-year high

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Britons in Europe spoke of the importance of an actively European identity to them

The number of British citizens leaving for European Union countries is at a 10-year high, with the rate of departure accelerating since the referendum, new research has revealed.

According to initial findings of a report on the migration of UK citizens, 84,000 people are expected to leave Britain for another EU nation this year, compared with 59,000 in 2008. It found that about 11,500 people moved from the UK to Germany in 2018, compared with more than 8,500 in 2008.

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Ex-Nazi camp guard admits seeing people taken to gas chamber

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Bruno Dey, 93, tells trial he heard screaming but did not know killings were taking place

A 93-year-old former guard at the Nazi Stutthof concentration camp has testified at his trial that he once saw people being led into the gas chamber, followed by screaming and banging sounds behind the locked door.

Bruno Dey, a former SS private, went on trial on 17 October at the Hamburg state court where he stands accused of having been an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people while he was deployed at Stutthof from 1944 to 1945.

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Australia denies Cameroonian journalist visa for press freedom conference

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Authorities believed Mimi Mefo, an award-winning journalist who works for Deutsche Welle in Berlin, might try to stay

A Berlin-based journalist who was due to speak at a press freedom conference in Brisbane has said she was denied a visa by the Australian government because they believed she might try to stay.

Mimi Mefo, an award-winning Cameroonian journalist who currently works for Deutsche Welle, was scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the Integrity 20 conference on Friday.

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Truth behind German businessman’s ‘anti-Nazi’ father revealed

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Roland Berger held up his father, Georg, as a role model – but the real story is darker

It was an inspirational tale: after watching the horror of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, a German man tore up his Nazi party membership card in protest and turned against the regime.

His Christian-based principles led to him being hounded by the Gestapo, sent off briefly to Dachau concentration camp and eventually dispatched to the eastern front.

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EU would agree to Brexit delay, says German minister

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Merkel ally Peter Altmaier says ‘it goes without saying’ Brexit extension would be granted

Germany’s economic affairs minister has wholeheartedly backed the option of a Brexit extension beyond 31 October, as the European parliament pulled plans to hold a vote on Boris Johnson’s deal this week.

Peter Altmaier, a key ally of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said he believed a technical extension would be offered to allow extra time for legislation to pass or a longer period to accommodate a general election or second referendum.

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‘Think of your family’: China threatens European citizens over Xinjiang protests

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Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France have complained of intimidation by Beijing

Two days after Abdujelil Emet sat in the public gallery of Germany’s parliament during a hearing on human rights, he received a phone call from his sister for the first time in three years. But the call from Xinjiang, in western China, was anything but a joyous family chat. It was made at the direction of Chinese security officers, part of a campaign by Beijing to silence criticism of policies that have seen more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities detained in internment camps.

Emet’s sister began by praising the Communist party and making claims of a much improved life under its guidance before delivering a shock: his brother had died a year earlier. But Emet, 54, was suspicious from the start; he had never given his family his phone number. Amid the heartbreaking news and sloganeering, he could hear a flurry of whispers in the background, and he demanded to speak to the unknown voice. Moments later the phone was handed to a Chinese official who refused to identify himself.

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Former Nazi camp guard to go on trial in Hamburg

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Man, 93, accused as accessory to murder of 5,230 people in what could be one of last such cases

A former guard at Stutthof concentration camp will go on trial in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday, in what could be one of the last criminal cases of an individual charged over the Holocaust.

The 93-year-old man, named in the German media as Bruno D, in keeping with the country’s press code, was 17 when he joined the SS-Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion), which manned the watchtowers at the concentration camp east of what is now the city of Gdańsk, in Poland.

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30 years after communism, eastern Europe divided on democracy’s impact

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Pew research reveals very different views on whether countries are better off today

Thirty years on, few people in Europe’s former eastern bloc regret the monumental political, social and economic change unleashed by the fall of communism – but at the same time few are satisfied with the way things are now, and many worry for the future.

A Pew Research Center survey of 17 countries, including 14 EU member states, found that while most people in central and eastern Europe generally embraced democracy and the market economy, support was far from uniformly strong.

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Jammed homemade guns appeared to stop Halle attacker killing more

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Footage streamed by gunman shows him becoming frustrated at malfunctioning weapons

The deadly attack carried out by a masked gunman in eastern Germany would have ended with many more victims if his homemade firearms had not malfunctioned, footage broadcast on a livestreaming platform suggests.

The gunman, who tried to force his way into a synagogue in the town of Halle on Wednesday before killing two people, broadcast his rampage on the Twitch platform.

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Germany: mass shooting attempt that killed two was antisemitic attack, minister says

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  • Authorities say indications suggest ‘rightwing extremist motive’
  • Reports say gunman was 27-year-old German citizen

Two people died and two more were severely injured in the eastern German city of Halle on Wednesday after a gunman in a military-style outfit tried to force his way into a synagogue in an attempted mass shooting.

In a chilling echo of the Christchurch mosque shooting, the gunman recorded the attacks on a head-mounted camera and uploaded it online with an antisemitic and rightwing extremist rant. German media identified the killer as Stephan Balliet, a 27-year-old German citizen from the town of Eisleben in Saxony-Anhalt.

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Eight injured as stolen lorry crashes into cars in Germany

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Authorities investigating 32-year-old Syrian national over incident in Limburg

German authorities are investigating a man who drove a stolen lorry into a line of cars in Limburg in the western state of Hesse, injuring eight people.

The 32-year-old had pulled the driver of the vehicle from his cabin at a red light before using the lorry to plough into eight cars waiting at a light near the town’s central railway station at about 5.20pm (1620 BST) on Monday.

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Comic joins Germany’s oldest political party with eye on leadership

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Jan Böhmermann says he will be ready by next contest to lead Social Democratic party – which he predicts will soon

Germany’s leading television satirist has joined the Social Democratic party, weeks after announcing his ambitions to become its leader.

Jan Böhmermann, who has a weekly programme on state television and is notorious for sparking diplomatic scandals, has missed the deadline for the current leadership contest, expected to conclude on 8 December.

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‘Human rights before mining rights’: German villagers take on coal firm

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Residents say they will not be ousted by energy firm seeking to expand the Garzweiler mine

A group of villagers living on the edge of one of Germany’s biggest surface coalmines have vowed not sell their properties to the energy company RWE, and to mount a legal challenge against any attempt to oust them from their homes.

The protest alliance is the first coordinated effort in more than 10 years against the expansion of the Garzweiler mine in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which threatens the existence of 12 villages that are home to 7,600 residents. Demolition of the first four villages is scheduled to begin in 2023.

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Neo-Nazi ‘terrorist cell’ on trial over alleged Berlin attack plot

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Eight members of Revolution Chemnitz accused of planning armed assaults on immigrants

The trial of an alleged neo-Nazi cell accused of plotting a violent political uprising in Germany has begun amid fears that the far-right movement is increasingly armed and radical.

Eight members of Revolution Chemnitz, aged between 21 and 32, have been charged with forming a rightwing terrorist organisation.

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Beach towels and Brexit: how Germans really see the Brits

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Exhibition at Bonn’s House of History documents ‘unrequited love’ of all things British

The strategy that Germany’s diplomatic corps proposed to keep Britain in the European community was unconventional and bold.

In November 1974, the then German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was desperately searching for the right words to convince British Eurosceptics to vote to remain a member of the European Economic Community.

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German police detain ‘French Spiderman’ after Frankfurt feat

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Urban climber Alain Robert scales 153-metre Skyper building in financial capital

An urban climber known as the “French Spiderman” has been detained by German police after scaling a high-rise building in Frankfurt.

Alain Robert took 20 minutes to climb the 153-metre (502ft) Skyper building in the heart of Germany’s financial capital early on Saturday.

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