The gathering feels like the opening of an upmarket car showroom. There’s free food and drink and guests stand around admiring the vehicles – even if they are not your everyday runabouts.
These tanks and mobile missile launchers are carefully spot-lit and each carries a QR code for more information – but there are no price tags.
“If you buy two,” says one suited man discreetly to another, both dwarfed by a green Lynx tank, “we can maybe talk ...”
But these expensive attractions are just the warm-up act for what is unveiled with dry ice and a laser show: a new production facility for 150mm artillery shells, 350,000 of them annually.
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Cutting a symbolic blue ribbon are Nato head Mark Rutte, Germany’s finance and defence ministers and, smiling like a proud patriarch, Armin Paperger.
The 62 year-old is chief executive of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms company and, 18 months ago, this was a spread of garden allotments in the Lower Saxon town of Unterlüß, 80km southwest of Hanover.
Now it is a modern factory of concrete struts and corrugated metal. One end looks like a data centre, with grey and black cabinets; in the other end, robotic arms lift and lay artillery shells for show.
Germany has been a major arms exporter for decades, but kept it discreet. Then Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and the game changed.
Days later Berlin announced the “Zeitenwende”, a watershed shift towards huge military support for Ukraine and staggering defence and security spending at home.
By 2030 Germany will have spent at least €250 billion rearming – and Rheinmetall expects a large slice of pie.
Almost 1,300 days on from Putin’s invasion, company shares have jumped 17 times in value. This new factory may be filled with weapons of war, but Rheinmetall insists its main offering is peace.
As guests take their seats, a slogan – “Taking responsibility in a changing world” – vanishes and is replaced by a corporate film.
Tanks move around fields and fire at things. A Fiat Panda explodes. Clients are promised an “end-to-end ammunition ecosystem” and a boost to “industrial resilience and ... national security”.
Papperger takes to the stage, telling his audience: “We are investing in our own security, and this plant is an important signal.”
He is followed by Rutte. With Russia and China ramping up their own arms spending, this factory “is exactly what we need to ensure the prosperity and security of our societies across Europe ... and turn the tide”.
“Now there’s cash on the table,” adds Rutte, nodding to German federal finance minister Lars Klingbeil, who is bankrolling Germany’s unprecedented military investment.
The centre-left Social Democratic (SPD) co-leader knows his party is traditionally wary of the military. Many who refused to believe Russia would invade Ukraine – until it did – have been on a journey ever since.
The more centrist Klingbeil is not a SPD Putin apologist. Just back from Kyiv, he tells the audience how seeing the ruins of a residential block, bombed at dawn last week with 24 deaths, “make you see the war is real”.
Germany’s rearming is preventive, he insists, “so no child born [here] today should experience war”.
Klingbeil would like Germany to become as pragmatic as his home constituency, which begins five minutes from this Lower Saxon factory.
The military and Rheinmetall are major employers here, he says, and soldiers and arms production are “things we have never hidden”.
Following up is Boris Pistorius: another Lower Saxon native, SPD politician and Germany’s defence minister. He insists that, with war returning to Europe, pacifist moral high ground is no longer an option for his party – or country.
In the past he has argued that Germany needs to become “war-ready”. Today he speaks instead of “defence-readiness”.
“This is really worth celebrating,” said Pistorius, looking at the hall filled with tanks and missiles, “though we – I certainly – would prefer to live in a world where all of this wasn’t necessary.”
Rheinmetall is not a household name around the world but it has been a major player – and employer here in Unterlüß – for 125 years, including in both world wars.
Seamless steel tubes were its innovative contribution to the first World War while, in the second, Rheinmetall kept wartime arms production going here with about 3,700 forced labourers.
At a factory mother-and-baby home for “racially inferior” prisoners, the infant mortality rate was 47 per cent. By the war’s end, the company was owned by the Nazi state.
Today Rheinmetall is number five in Europe’s arms industry with about 40,000 employees worldwide and 3,200 working locally on artillery shells and battle tanks.
Although Klingbeil speaks here of “flicking the switch” – on a new factory and German attitudes to its military build-up – leading party leftist Ralf Stegner lodged a protest.
He has urged Germany to lead new, UN-based international initiatives that include the Global South and “avoid the impression of western hegemony and arrogance”.
“The basis must be democracy, freedom and universal human rights,” he argued in an essay, “not the balance sheets or interests of the arms industry.”
