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not a week has gone by without the automotive supply industry announcing hundreds of redundancies and the closure of entire plants
Often structurally weak regions are affected
where it is almost impossible to find a new job
Continental will close its plant in Gifhorn (Lower Saxony) by the end of 2027
ZF Friedrichshafen is closing its shock absorber factory in Eitorf (North Rhine Westphalia) with 700 employees
and the transmission plant in Brandenburg with 1,500 jobs is acutely threatened
Jobs are also at risk at ZF locations in Saarland
Schaeffler is cutting 100 of 500 jobs at its component plant for combustion engines in Ingolstadt
Schaeffler plans to eliminate 1,300 of around 80,000 jobs worldwide in the next few months
Marelli will close its plant in Brotterode
where 900 employees manufacture car headlights
Fehrer is shutting down its two northern Bavarian plants in Großlangheim and Wiesentheid by the end of 2024
which together employ 370 people and produce components and trim for vehicle interiors
Otto Fuchs plans to cut 500 to 600 of the nearly 3,000 jobs in its automotive division in Sauerland (NRW)
Magna wants to gradually close its rear-view mirror production in Dorfprozelten
250 of 450 employees will continue to be employed until 2027
The group had already shut down its plant in Bad Windsheim (also Bavaria) at the end of 2022
Lear is divesting its lighting and audio division and plans to eliminate 380 jobs in Kronach in northern Bavaria
hundreds more workers who manufacture car seats fear for their jobs
where 250 workers produced car seats for Opel-Rüsselsheim
Other auto suppliers planning to cut jobs in the coming months are Stabilus in Koblenz and Joyson
Recall and Waldaschaff in the Upper Main region of Bavaria
This wave of layoffs has been going on for a long time
the number of employees in the German automotive supply industry fell from 311,000 to 274,000
In many cases, those affected have fought for their jobs. For example, in Karben, Hesse, where Continental closed a plant with over a thousand jobs two years ago, or at Marelli in Brotterode, where they threatened an indefinite strike. But workers always faced not only ruthless managers, but also the IG Metall union and its company officials.
IG Metall (IGM) has enormous power in the car and supplier industries. Many of its 2.17 million members work in this sector. IGM officials and works council representatives sit on the supervisory boards of all large auto and supplier companies and are closely networked throughout Germany and internationally. They use this power not to defend jobs, but to sabotage the defence of jobs.
If there is trouble on the ground, they occasionally organise protests and even threaten to “fight” so as not to lose control of the resistance. But words are never followed by action. They isolate the protest, refuse to mobilise support in other plants of the group or the industry, and eventually sell out the jobs in exchange for a “social collective agreement” or the promise to delay the shutdown for a few months.
The automotive sector is the most important industrial sector in Germany. In 2021, it turned over €411 billion and directly employed 786,000 people. Three quarters of the turnover was accounted for by vehicle manufacturers, one fifth (€80 billion) by the supplier industry. If one adds car dealerships, the spare parts trade and other secondary sectors, 2.2 million and thus 7 percent of all jobs subject to social insurance contributions are directly dependent on the auto industry.
However, the car industry is dominated by globally operating corporations to a degree almost without equal. The supply chains extend across numerous national borders. While less complex operations have been outsourced to low-wage countries, in Germany alone 140,000 workers in the car industry are employed in research.
A large proportion of the cars produced in Germany are exported. Luxury models from Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, and Audi play a particularly important role. In 2021, German car companies generated two-thirds of their turnover abroad. They also maintain numerous plants in other European countries, in China and in North and South America. In 2022, 3.5 million passenger cars were produced in Germany itself and 9.6 million passenger cars of German group brands were produced abroad.
This international integration is even more pronounced in the supplier industry. Companies, some highly specialised, maintain plants at hundreds of locations in several dozen countries. Until now, Germany, followed by Japan, had been the world market leader in this sector.
The number one supplier, Bosch, has 400,000 employees in 60 countries and an annual turnover of €45 billion. 140,000 of them work at 85 German locations. Continental (number three in the world ranking) employs 241,000 people at 540 locations in 60 countries, and ZF Friedrichshafen (number four) 150,000 at 230 locations in 40 countries. Schaeffler is represented at 170 locations in 50 countries, employs 92,000 people and is also a major shareholder of Continental.
In addition, there are numerous internationally active German suppliers whose names are hardly known to the wider public: Brose (Coburg) with 26,000 employees at 63 locations in 23 countries; Fritz Dräxlmaier (Vilsbiburg) with 75,000 employees at 60 locations in 20 countries; LEONI (Nuremberg) with 95,000 employees in 32 countries; HELLA with 39,000 employees at 125 locations in 35 countries, and many more.
These suppliers are constantly shedding plants and whole divisions and buying new ones in order to optimise their results and squeeze every last cent of profit out of the working class. Some of them are also active in other sectors, like Bosch, which also produces household appliances, power tools and more.
Like the car industry as a whole, the supplier industry is increasingly coming under pressure from international competition. In 2002, only one Asian company was among the ten largest suppliers in the world. In 2012, there were already five from Japan and South Korea. In the meantime, the Chinese battery manufacturer CATL is in second place behind Bosch.
The global battle for market share and profits has been further exacerbated by the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and the Ukraine war, which have led to supply chain bottlenecks, rising energy prices, chip shortages and severe sales losses. Added to this is the switch to electric vehicles, which requires high investment costs and devalues many elaborate technologies in which German companies were leaders.
Meanwhile, German companies are sounding the alarm. Last Thursday, the consulting firm PwC published a study according to which German automotive suppliers have lost a global market share of 2.7 percentage points since 2019—“as much as they were previously able to gain with difficulty in 20 years”—and are also in last place in terms of profit margin. “Competitiveness is in acute danger—and things are already slipping.”
For example, the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden is using to subsidise US corporations to the tune of $430 billion under the pretext of climate protection and energy security, is seen in Europe as a protectionist measure that puts European companies at a disadvantage.
The European Union and the German government are fighting back with the same weapon. For example, the electronics giant Intel alone is receiving government subsidies of €10 billion to build a chip factory in Magdeburg. Another €10 billion are earmarked for two chip factories in Dresden. And all this under conditions where the federal government has been arguing for weeks, because allegedly a few billion euros to reduce child poverty cannot be found!
The US has imposed aggressive sanctions against China, which are intended to cut off the country from pioneering technologies and thus slow down its economic rise. For example, Washington has ruled that the latest generation of microchips and machines for their production may no longer be delivered to China. Europe has also joined in this campaign.
The struggle for raw materials, markets and profit is not only fought out with economic weapons, but also with military ones. While the wars of the US and its European allies in the Middle East during the last three decades were mainly about oil, strategic raw materials such as lithium and rare earths are now at the centre of imperialist conflicts.
This is why NATO is ruthlessly fueling the Ukraine war and investing tens of billions to defeat Russia militarily. Both Russia and Ukraine itself have large quantities of these strategic raw materials. In addition, the nuclear power Russia is to be eliminated as a potential ally of China, which has been officially declared a “strategic rival” by both the US and the EU.
The developments in the car and supplier industries show, as if under a microscope, the whole irrationality of the capitalist system, which Marx had already exposed in his main work Das Kapital.
The huge technological progress in the fields of information technology and renewable energies, which play an important role in the auto industry, does not serve to make work easier and solve social problems like the climate crisis, but to increase the profits of corporations worth billions and to make the life of the working class unbearable. Instead of social progress, technological innovations lead to social regression and war, which threatens the continued existence of humanity.
The trade unions do not oppose this development, but are among its driving forces. Their transformation from reformist workers’ organisations into co-managers and corporate stooges began four decades ago with the globalisation of production.
During the economic boom of the post-war period, when the production process was even more concentrated on a national scale, they had pursued the strategy of extracting a “fair” share of growth for their members. They often spoke of a “cake” that was to be shared and sometimes even organised strikes, under pressure from their members, to get a bigger slice of the cake.
The globalisation of production that began in the 1980s knocked this possibility out of their hands. The liberalisation of trade and financial markets were implemented under the governments of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl. Lower costs of transport and the improvement of global communications enabled corporations to move production to countries where wages were cheap, taxes low and infrastructure optimal.
The unions responded by turning into corporate lackeys. Although the “pie” is distributed much more unfairly today than it was 40 years ago—a manager in one of Germany’s top firms listed on the Dax earns 70 instead of 15 times as much as an average worker and large corporations make quarterly profits in the tens of billions—the unions deny any clash of interests between workers and capital.
They have subscribed to the neoliberal theory that the more profits flow, the better off workers are. Instead of fighting for the division of the national “pie” between labour and capital, they are now fighting for a larger share of German corporations in the world market. They are fighting for the competitiveness of “Germany as an industrial location”—even if this means layoffs, lower wages and increased exploitation for their members.
They do this because they themselves profit handsomely from it. A trade union official or a works council representative (who is relieved from working on the production line) earns much more than an assembly line worker. In the metal and steel industries in particular, union secretaries and works council chairmen are not infrequently rewarded at the end of their careers with company board positions that earn them a salary of a million eruos along with a fat pension.
IG Metall, with more than two million members, not only describes itself as the largest trade union in the world, but its president Jörg Hofmann is also deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Volkswagen, the world’s largest auto company, and a member of the supervisory board of Bosch, the world’s largest supplier. He also goes in and out of the Chancellor’s Office and plays a leading role in regular meetings between the government, trade unions and employers’ associations.
IG Metall, in cooperation with the Hans Böckler Foundation, holds an annual “suppliers’ conference” at which works council reps and union officials are sworn into their roles as co-managers. Alarmed by the wave of redundancies in the supplier industry, this year’s conference, which took place on March 29 at the Maritim Airport Hotel in Hanover with the participation of Jörg Hofmann, adopted a “Hanover Declaration.”
It was symptomatic of the transformation of the trade unions into corporate organizations. IG Metall did not declare war on the insatiable corporate bosses and financial sharks who are driving the worldwide attacks on auto workers, but begs them to use their help in the “transformation process.” For long passages, the statement reads like the paper from a management consultancy, providing advice to corporations on how to optimise their profits.
“We observe with concern,” it says, “that companies are not facing up to their responsibility to shape the future together with us as equals: Such elementary change processes only succeed together.” And: “Developing the industry for the future and shaping the transformation socially and ecologically are central tasks of politics, companies and trade unions alike.”
“The aim must be to maintain industrial value creation in Germany,” the statement reads. “Structural change in the automotive and supplier industries must not be at the expense of workers in Germany.”
And what about the workers in other locations? If IG Metall has its way, the “structural change” should be at their expense.
IG Metall is also offering its services to companies in order to pressure the German government to take tougher trade war measures and to loosen up further billions in subsidies. “Germany and Europe must also pursue active and strategic industrial policies so that Europe can become the lead market for a successful energy and mobility turnaround,” the “Hanover Declaration” says, referring to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
IG Metall also demands support from the federal government in cutting more jobs: “Labour market policy instruments must also be made available to facilitate transfers to other companies if continued employment in the company is no longer possible.”
It is obvious that jobs and social gains cannot be defended with a trade union that pushes the “transformation process” in close cooperation with the corporate boards.
The job cuts in the German auto and supplier industries are part of a comprehensive attack on the international working class, which is further aggravated by the growing expenditure on armaments and war. Worldwide, arms spending is exploding. Gigantic sums are being poured into the renewal of nuclear arsenals, the expansion of armed forces and the financing of the Ukraine war.
This money is to be squeezed out of the working class. The “new era” announced by Chancellor Scholz can only be financed by cutting social spending and wages. It should not be forgotten that Hitler was brought to power in 1933 by the bourgeois parties and authorised to establish a dictatorship in order to crush the workers’ movement and convert the economy to war production.
No one should believe that such a thing could not happen again. Many large car and supplier companies are still owned by families like the Porsches, Piëchs, Quandts, Klattens, Schaefflers, etc., who had become rich under Hitler through “Aryanisation” and forced labour.
Resistance to these attacks is developing everywhere. In the US, for example, only last week the 150,000 workers of the “Big Three”—Ford, General Motors and Stellantis—voted by 97 percent to strike for better wages. If this resistance remains under union control, it is doomed to failure. Defending basic rights, incomes and jobs requires a strategy that is irreconcilably opposed to the “social partnership” of the unions:
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DER SPIEGEL [M]: alptraum / iStockphoto / Getty Images; Ilya Andriyanov / imageBROKER RF / Getty Images
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 44/2024 (October 19th, 2024) of DER SPIEGEL.
In May, the authorities made their move, making seven arrests, including the 30-year-old Habib I. Düsseldorf prosecutors consider the Bulgarian national to be an important player in this gang that elevated cocaine smuggling to a whole new dimension. Habib I. is thought to have been the leader of the team assigned to extract the narcotics out of the containers once it arrived in the Port of Hamburg from South America.
Five men were waiting to carry the wooden planks into a barn. The sixth, though, was apparently waiting in the Rhineland for news about what else might be in the container: Ümit D., 39, thought to be the leader of the gang in Germany. A man who used to be a member of the outlawed motorcycle club Hells Angels.
Today, Ümit D. is sitting behind bars awaiting his trial. Habib I.’s girlfriend also no longer has to wonder when he is coming home. Not before midnight. And not after midnight either. It could be a couple of years.
It’s so much cocaine – 35.5 tons – that not even a semi-truck would be enough. Even if only 25 tons were discovered in Hamburg, and the rest overseas: It is such an immense amount that it seems logical to assume that it is the exception. A one-time only affair. But the 35.5 tons have become the new normal in cocaine smuggling. The numbers are spiking dramatically.
Suspected cocaine dealer Ümit D. (right) with a Mercedes AMG GT R; an isolated farmhouse near Kuhstedt suspected of being the unloading site for a cocaine delivery
Not only that: Before the cheaper version crack, which is smoked and is extremely addicting, began appearing more often on the streets of Germany, cocaine didn’t seem to produce widespread misery. And deaths were also rare. To put it cynically: They were deaths that society could live with. And so, therefore, could politicians.
Two things have now changed that calculus: First, the sheer quantities that are now arriving – and being consumed. Never before has so much cocaine been snorted. Of 72 European cities examined, 49 showed rising traces of cocaine in wastewater, while only 10 cities showed a reduction. Students now take cocaine, as do plumbers and carpenters, and – as cases from Bavaria show – police officers.
It is no longer the drug of high society. Rather, at six to seven euros per line, blow has become an everyday drug of the masses, for all those looking to dial back their anxieties or dial up their performance. It will be a few years until the consequences become apparent: Cocaine users have a much higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.
All that has shaken Europe out of its slumber and made clear that while cocaine might be in the foreground, this battle is for something much bigger: the rise of the dark power of organized criminality, referred to by German investigators by its initials. OC.
A container terminal in the Port of Hamburg; confiscated cocaine
That is the wakeup call that all of the EU has now heard. Nobody is interested in the current situation in the Netherlands becoming the European norm. "We have managed to make the issue a priority in almost every European country,” says de Bolle, the Europol head. "Politicians can no longer close their eyes to the massive damage that organized crime causes.”
For every gang that is busted and every criminal caught, new ones spring up. The mafia doesn’t have a labor shortage: Finding recruits who believe that the path to Mercedes AMG GT R goes through the gang rather than through school is rather simple. Only organized crime can promise them the lives they envision for themselves. The gangsta lifestyle from the rap videos, that trinity of rapid narco-wealth: cars, women, drugs.
On the evening that Ümit D. was yelling into his mobile phone in the McDonald’s parking lot in the Rhineland, on the evening when it became clear that 7.2 tons of cocaine was gone – on that evening, Ümit D. had a rendezvous with someone who apparently didn’t shy away from murder. At 9:30 p.m., a white Mercedes entered the parking lot and a man climbs out who is almost a carbon copy of Ümit D. – muscular and broad-chested with a crew cut. The two of them go inside and sit down at a table to eat.
According to police information, Ümit D. and Hami S. used to be members of the now defunct Hells Angels charter "Rhine Area.” Hami S. is the brother of former charter boss Kamil S., and his right-hand man was Ümit D.
It’s a milieu in which organized crime goes hand in hand with organized violence – a very specific kind of violence. Kamil S. is thought to have tortured lower-ranking gang members – so-called "prospects” and "hang-arounds” when displeased. There are stories of whippings and of a truck battery that Kamil S. clamped to the scrotum of a fellow charter member, according to a report in the German tabloid Bild.
Confiscated cocaine from the 35.5-ton discovery in 2023
In 2017, a Turkish national founded a transportation company called DP-Log in the Rhineland town of Siegburg. He could hardly speak a word of German, but the man who immediately registered power of attorney did: Ümit D. Less than a year later, Ümit D.’s father took over control of the company and after that, the son no longer had anything to do with it. Officially. Investigators are convinced, however, that he continued to pull the strings.
The other possibility: The smugglers ship the container full of bananas or wood themselves, with the cocaine already in it. To do so, you just need a company in South America that works for the drug cartel and a shell company in Germany that orders the bananas or wood, and voila! The mafia receives the cocaine container delivered straight to their front door, or to a remote, rundown farm like the one in Bremen.
A mobile scanning device belonging to German customs; a container used for torture in the Netherlands
DP-Log began importing containers full of tropical wood in August 2022, always from the same provider in Guyana – 55 containers by the time the 7.5-ton cocaine delivery was discovered in August 2023. The first containers were likely clean – test deliveries to see if customs would inspect them, and also to lull officials into believing they were legitimate. Investigators still don’t know if the 56th container was the first to contain blow, or just the first that was found.
The trail leads directly from DP-Log to Ümit D. and his family. Perhaps that is the reason that containers for DP-Log are the exception. Usually, they are ordered by other German companies – shell companies without a real business.
Assistance in such instances is provided by Martin F., a man who establishes so-called "shelf corporations.” Such constructs are actually intended for startup founders who are in a rush to develop their business idea and don’t want to waste any time with founding a company. Instead, they buy a pre-fabricated company shell, make it their own and rename it. Martin F. has dozens such shelf-corporations available, and Ümit D. apparently becomes a reliable customer of his.
The investigators are relatively certain of how the procedure worked because they already had Martin F. on their radar by April 2023, at the latest. They received a tip that spring from the port authorities in Cartagena, Colombia. A company from Mannheim had ordered two containers full of hand soap. Hand soap? From Colombia? Doesn’t Germany have enough soap of its own?
The two containers may not have contained any cocaine, but there was good reason to take a closer look at the owners of the company – and what it was in the habit of ordering.
Ultimately, investigators stumbled across what are likely the gang’s three largest cocaine deliveries: 12.5 tons, 8 tons and the 7.2-ton shipment from August 17, 2023. With the final find, 1,648 kilograms in September 2023, it likely really did come to an "end.” Even before that, Ümit D. complained in an intercepted phone call: "We’re fucked! We’re finished!” It’s done. "Our mothers are fucked.”
Commendable, to be sure. But it raises the question: Why now and not sooner? Why not five years earlier when the idea of a port security center first arose, as Erdmann, the drug investigator from Hamburg, recalls – and was not acted upon.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser on a visit to Peru in February; a meeting of European interior ministers in Hamburg in May
The list of responsibilities enumerates what must be done, but also shows all that has been ignored over the years. Years in which there may have been successful teams of investigators in customs and police, such as in the case of the 35-ton discovery – but also years during which the two agencies often worked in complete isolation from each other.
Now, though, customs and police are supposed to really get moving. Just a shame that they have been paralyzed for so long. Paralyzed by the austerity tactics of politicians so often praised for spending cuts and slashing the budget.
Instead, there are a lot of summits, a lot of alliances, a lot of blah blah, but little in the way of new funding for more people and better equipment. At least not in the Port of Hamburg, as things currently look. "According to our knowledge, no increases are planned in the new budget either,” says Liebel. Customs hasn’t commented.
Finance Minister Christian Lindner with customs agents
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the liberal Free Democrats is responsible for customs. In May 2023, Lindner issued a "Strategy for the Combatting of Organized Criminality.” Lindner promised more personnel, modern equipment and improved digital networking. "We are upgrading. We are strengthening customs,” Lindner promised.
But the finance minister is also responsible for cutting government spending, and customs is usually the first security agency to experience those cuts. Last year, the interior senator from the city-state of Bremen, Ulrich Mäurer, and his cabinet colleague from the judiciary, Claudia Schilling, both of the SPD, sent a letter to Lindner begging for more resources for more people to support the Port of Bremerhaven on the search for cocaine smuggling. Lindner rebuffed their request.
Frank Buckenhofer, who is in charge of customs officials within the Gewerkschaft der Polizei, a police union in Germany, isn’t surprised. Senior customs officials, he says, still see their people as being responsible for bringing in money for the state and not as an agency on the frontlines of the battle against the mafia. "Customs,” says Buckenhofer, "is miles away mentally from saying: We have a huge problem with cocaine smuggling. We have to deploy far more controllers and investigators.”
Erdmann, the police officer in the new port security center, knows that cocaine investigations have their limits – namely if such investigations delay port operations. "The port is the heart of the city,” he says. And that heart must beat. The more interventions, the slower the pulse. And the slower the pulse, the fewer container ships will be sent to Hamburg. That is something that even the Hamburg police don’t want.
But simply waving containers through also carries a price, one that is well known. In Rotterdam and Antwerp, attentions were long focused almost exclusively on the competition with other ports. More turnover, new records in TEU, the unit for standard containers. The two countries have paid a high price in the form of crime. Now, they are upgrading their ports with video surveillance, drones and mobile scanning devices.
Sunday, though, is the day of rest. And there are also other days during the week when nothing happens. It is only permitted to be in operation when the radiation protection officer is on duty. There are four of them, but in cases where one is sick and another on vacation, the facility is often out of operation. When it comes to mobile scanners, which can peer electronically into containers as they move past, there is thus far just one, stationed in Lübeck. In serves all of northern Germany.
Once again, customs officials do not comment, this time for "tactical reasons.” Customs, however, are fully aware that the Port of Hamburg has a security problem. Chief investigator Schrader recently admitted in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that "we have neglected port security in the past. We were a bit naïve.”
It was a new development that a cocaine gang was sending its lackeys with complete impunity – people who are young, foolish, indifferent, and available for hire to do anything needed in the neighboring country, including even arson and murder.
They are the foot soldiers the mafia uses to intimidate its opponents, including its largest opponent: the state. A Hamburg customs official says that they discovered a man hanging around on the fire escape of the main customs office a few months ago. When asked who he was, it became clear he was Colombian, and he quickly withdrew, a smile on his face. The customs official says it was a warning: We have our eyes on you.
Officials in Bremerhaven have reported broken windows in the customs office and a shot fired at a sniffer dog. Threatening the state and its officials has become routine for organized crime operations.
The Federal Criminal Police Office only recently presented a special report on the practice, focusing on how those involved in organized crime seek to intimidate police officers, judges and state prosecutors. The initial focus was on clan criminality. A survey among officials in German states found an "accumulation of cases” in which "employees of police authorities have been threatened, sometimes subtly, sometimes directly,” according to the report.
Such as a clan member standing in front of a police officer’s front door, sending a clear message: We know where you live. There have also been instances of the tires of investigators’ private vehicles being slashed. Or a car appearing in the rearview mirror, trying to force an officer off the road. "Blatant hostility and threats” have also become the norm for judges and public prosecutors. Including death threats.
Ultimately, though, the repertoire of gang leaders tends to emphasize killing over threats. As it always has. The best enemies are dead enemies. In June 2022, for example, a drug gang lured a Serbian man from Offenbach to Marbella. They wanted to beat money out of him that he owed. But when the gangsters began scrolling through his mobile phone and realized that he worked for the Frankfurt police, they liquidated him with two bullets.
Such was Fauzi K.’s story as to why he decided to come to the police. As one of those involved in the kidnapping of Ahmad C., he also testified about what had taken place the previous day. It was the beginning of a case that Cologne’s chief criminal investigator, Michael Esser, would later describe as "one of the most difficult” in the history of the North Rhine-Westphalian police. One which exhibited a "new dimension of violence that, as far as I know, has never before been seen in Germany.”
The testimony from Fauzi K. was the first glimpse investigators got into the cabinet of horrors that had thus far been limited to the drug wars in the Netherlands. This time, it isn’t a container full of torture devices in the southern Dutch province of Brabant, like the one police found a couple of years ago. This chamber of horrors is right in the heart of Germany, in Cologne. And on the morning of Fauzi K.’s testimony, the victim, Ahmad C., was still in the hands of the gangsters.
What exactly was going on? It was a gang war of the most brutal kind, complete with kidnappings, torture and arson attacks, all of it filmed as a video for use for threats and blackmail, according to the investigative file, which DER SPIEGEL has seen.
This time, it wasn’t about cocaine, but marijuana. But the lines between the two are fluid. After all, the "Mocros” in the Netherlands got started with hash and marijuana from their old homeland of Morocco. They provided the drug for the coffeeshops in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and since they already had the contacts and the transportation routes, they also used them for cocaine. Anything to bring in a bit of cash.
As far as investigators have been able to piece together, the drug war in North Rhine-Westphalia began when a young Kurdish man from Cologne began dreaming of a rapid rise as a drug kingpin. He was still a small fry, with perhaps 10 men under him. But suddenly, an opportunity apparently presented itself to play in the big leagues.
Europol director Catherine de Bolle; handcuffs in a container used for torture in the Netherlands
De Bolle, the Europol director, also isn’t surprised that Dutch hardcore methods have crossed the border into Germany. Violence is on the rise. Why should it stop at the borders?
The Federal Criminal Police Office has recently established a taskforce to address the challenge, called "Sicario,” Spanish for contract killer. It is also the title of an American film about Mexican cartels. The taskforce is addressing the most pressing question: How can bombing attacks, contract killings and prison breaks of the kind seen in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Sweden be prevented from coming to Germany as well?
What can be said with a fair degree of certainty: The power of the gangs is essentially unlimited and their weaponry is growing increasingly warlike: machine guns, hand grenades, anti-tank missiles – and it’s not just for intimidation. "Inhibitions against using such weaponry are vanishing. We see huge problems ahead,” says one investigator. In Baden-Württemberg, state police have begun approaching hundreds of potential gang recruits from the criminal scene.
The site of a bomb attack in Cologne on September 16.
Xidir, or "X1”, was the boss in the villa, Fauzi K. told the police. Above him were two mobsters in the Netherlands, who issued orders over the phone, one who went by the alias "Whiterocket” and another who was called "Panda.” All three names appear in a Signal group in which the perpetrators were chatting during the kidnapping. Investigators are also in possession of the threatening message sent to Rabil C., the brother of Ahmad C.
"Whiterocket” apparently issued an ultimatum: "Son of a whore: 1.5 or my goods – 3 hours.” Five exclamation points.
Rabil C. asks back if "Whiterocket” wants war.
He responds: "It already is war, you motherfucker.”
Rabil C. insisted that he knows nothing about the dope. "You have the wrong guy.” But "Whiterocket” held quite a different view. At one point, the kidnappers threatened to cut off Ahmad C.’s fingers and then his toes, telling his brother: "You’ll find it amusing.” It went back and forth like that for hours.
Ultimately, the police showed up in time. Though it is still unclear who has the marijuana, or whether Ahmad and his brother Rabil C. had anything to do with the theft of the weed or whether the Netherlands gang were mistaken.
That is what makes the situation so dangerous – that the gang seems not to care about the difference between a suspicion and actual proof. First kidnapping and torture, and then we’ll see what happens. There are now more than 30 legal proceedings against 20 defendants. Just recently, bombs again went off in Cologne, Düsseldorf and outside of Bonn.
Just as the police battle against this gang will continue, the state’s fight against organized drug crime has only just begun. Is it now being taken seriously? The gangs are certainly taking it seriously and are continuing to arm themselves. They are using new crypto phones and various messaging services. They use one phone to arrange a meeting point and another to set the time, making it difficult for investigators, even if they manage to crack one of the phones.
The gangs are also looking for weak links in the investigative agencies, hoping to infiltrate them – and have apparently found some success. In the ongoing gang war in North Rhine-Westphalia, a police commissioner in Bonn is under investigation because he allegedly logged into his work computer on behalf of the cocaine mafia. The official has been suspended.
IIn the second-largest cocaine investigation Germany has yet seen – a 16-ton find in the Port of Hamburg in 2021 – 12 suspects went underground before a raid. The district court in Hannover found it "plausible” that there may have been a mole among the investigators, but proceedings against a state prosecutor found nothing.
And the state? Is it now taking the battle against organized crime seriously?
It should. "If we don’t do more, we will lose this fight,” says de Bolle, the Europol boss. And you can see, she says, where that can lead in South and Central America. In places, she says, "where the state no longer has the monopoly on violence.”
A wolf may have been hit by a car in Eitorf and fatally injured.
"The territory of the pack extends over about 200 square kilometres," says Oliver Dreger. Within this space, the wolves travelled long distances. "Now they are migrating even more," says Dreger. The reproductive season is beginning, and in addition, the time has come for the young animals from 2020 to leave their territory and look for a new one.
Last year, the female of the pack had given birth again. Seven cubs could be genetically identified, according to Dreger. The father is a male newly immigrated from Bavaria who joined the pack. The animal with the identification "GW1896M" has been proven to have had several sheep kills in Windeck, Hennef and Eitorf. According to Dreger, it is still uncertain where the "old" male has remained.
A jobs massacre is unfolding in the German auto industry, the likes of which the sector has not seen since the Second World War. For some time now, manufacturers in Germany and their suppliers have been using the transition to electric vehicles (EV) to cut jobs and increase exploitation. In the meantime, they have fallen behind in the global competition because their competitors offer cheaper and technically more sophisticated models.
On Friday, the Munich-based Ifo Institute reported a further decline in business expectations in the German automotive industry based on a company survey. To ensure that their returns continue to rise, shareholders are now unequivocally demanding that the 800,000 or so workers employed by manufacturers and their suppliers must take a beating.
No jobs, no social benefits, no working conditions, no wages are safe. Studies predict that up to 40 percent of jobs will be lost as a result of the switch to EVs, which would mean more than 300,000 jobs going.
The harbingers of this earthquake are becoming ever clearer. In 2022, the Federal Statistical Office reported a year-on-year decline in employment of just over one percent, or 11,800 employees, in companies producing motor vehicles and motor vehicle parts. Most recently, 774,300 people were employed in this sector, 60,000 fewer than in the record year of 2018.
The supplier industry is particularly affected. The decline in employment there was 6 percent compared to the previous year, the sharpest fall in percentage terms since 2005. With an average of 273,900 employees, the level of employment among suppliers fell to its lowest level since 1997.
Reports in recent weeks indicate that this trend is set to worsen.
The Volkswagen Group has sales problems, especially with its electric models. At a general meeting in its Wolfsburg headquarters at the beginning of the week, VW brand boss Thomas Schäfer declared that “the VW brand” was “no longer competitive.”
The “efficiency programme” pushed forward by VW Group CEO Oliver Blume aims to save €10 billion by 2026 and increase the VW core brand’s return on sales from 3.4 percent to 6.5 percent. This can only be achieved through massive job cuts. Schäfer emphasised that it was therefore necessary to “tackle the critical issues, including personnel.”
At the VW software subsidiary Cariad, 2,000 of the 6,500 jobs will be cut over the next two years.
VW’s Zwickau site, which employs 10,000 and is the first to exclusively produce electric cars, is cutting back production due to weakening demand. Production of the ID.3 and the Cupra Born is being paused for the rest of the year, as the production target has been completed. After the temporary contracts of 269 employees were not extended this year, 500 temporary jobs are to be cut next year.
Meanwhile, the IG Metall union and the works council are working at full speed on new mechanisms to cut thousands of jobs. VW personnel director Gunnar Kilian, who came over from IG Metall, warns: “We have to reduce our costs and manage with fewer staff.” He wants to make the targeted use of partial retirement to cut jobs.
Works Council Chairwoman Daniela Cavallo supports the cutbacks and wants to implement them in a “socially responsible” manner. VW brand boss Schäfer urges: “Now we have to finalise the key points of the agreement together with the employee side by the end of the year.”
At Ford in Cologne, it is still not clear which electric model will be built and when in the completely remodelled factory. Thousands of jobs will be cut in research and development and administration. In development alone, around 1,700 of the 3,600 employees are to leave the company over the next three years. The research centre in Aachen, which most recently employed a good 200, will be closed in just over six months.
At a plant meeting on Thursday, it was announced that the entire product development operation at the Cologne-Merkenich site will be outsourced to a separate limited company. This is usually the first step in downsizing or divesting a business unit.
Meanwhile, the works council in Saarlouis is winding up the Ford plant there. Since the company announced a year and a half ago that the plant would be closed, the works council has been stringing along the workforce until investors supposedly arrive and at the same time cutting jobs. This year alone, 650 jobs have been cut, and on January 1 the number of employees will fall by a further 250 to 3,850.
Nobody believes in new investors anymore. The works council, led by Markus Thal, is crafting a so-called “social collective agreement” for 2,850 employees in Saarlouis, who will lose their jobs by mid-2025 at the latest. A thousand are to be able to continue working on a short-term basis until 2032.
In the meantime, it is apparent that Opel will disappear from the market in the short- rather than the medium-term. Sales of Opel and its British sister brand Vauxhall have almost halved to 428,000 vehicles in Europe in the last seven years. Since the takeover of Opel by the French group PSA (Peugeot/Citroën)—now Stellantis—in August 2017, many thousands of jobs have been cut at the car manufacturer.
In particular, the development centre and the administration in Rüsselsheim are gradually being wound down. At the end of 2021, 7,000 people still worked there, but parts have now been sold and thousands of jobs have been cut. Last week, around 100 employees in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) department were informed, in part via video conference, that their department would be closed.
In Italy, the Stellantis Group, which was created in 2021 through the takeover of Fiat Chrysler Automotive (FCA) by PSA, plans to cut 15,000 of the remaining 45,000 jobs.
ZF Friedrichshafen, Germany’s largest supplier after Bosch, is currently playing out all possible redundancy scenarios in order to put pressure on its 165,000 employees worldwide. In this context, the management is threatening to cut more than 7,000 jobs at the Saarbrücken plant. Around 10,000 employees there currently still produce transmissions almost exclusively for vehicles with combustion engines.
The 590 workers at the Eitorf site near Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia and their 350 colleagues in Gelsenkirchen will lose their jobs over the next few years. The Group Works Council expects the shock absorber plant in Eitorf to close its doors by 2027 at the latest.
The ZF site in Gelsenkirchen, which has long been threatened with closure, will close even faster. As production of the remaining steering systems and cable harnesses is now coming to an end, ZF management says that “the basis for production at the location will be lost in the coming months.” In these two ZF plants, job security will end at the end of the month.
Piston specialist Mahle (with almost 72,000 employees at the end of 2022) is also restructuring its production. It was only in August that the Stuttgart-based company sold its entire thermostat division with around 600 jobs. Thermostats are used to regulate the cooling water temperature of internal combustion engines and are therefore less in demand with the move to EVs.
Just a few weeks ago, Mahle concluded a new future collective labour agreement with IG Metall, which rules out compulsory redundancies at the German sites until 2025. But in Germany, jobs in large companies are rarely destroyed using compulsory redundancies. An army of trade union officials and works council reps are working on plans and mechanisms to achieve this using different means.
Mahle is now also taking a different approach. In Wustermark, Brandenburg, where pump systems are produced, the company has converted the site into a limited company. IG Metall has announced that Mahle could separate the entire site from the corporation and sell it.
The 410 employees of Vibracoustic in Weinheim (with around 12,000 employees worldwide) were informed in mid-November that their jobs would be relocated to France and India. They manufacture rubber anti-vibration systems and air suspension systems to reduce noise and vibrations in vehicles.
The tire industry in Germany is also under threat of redundancies. There are currently 12 tire factories in the country, four of which are to be closed in the coming years.
The US company Goodyear is ending its production in Fulda and Fürstenwalde, which have a total of 1,800 employees. French manufacturer Michelin is closing its truck tire plants in Karlsruhe and Trier by the end of 2025. In addition, the production of new tires and semi-finished products will be discontinued in Homburg. Michelin is relocating its customer centre from Karlsruhe to Poland. More than 1,500 will be affected.
The automotive supplier and tire manufacturer Continental had previously announced it would be eliminating 5,500 administrative jobs worldwide, 1,000 of them in Germany. From 2025, €400 million are to be saved annually. Continental employs more than 100,000 people in the automotive business, around a quarter of them in administration.
These announcements are just the tip of the iceberg. But with all this bad news, the managers and executive board members can count on the support of their “social partners”, i.e., the trade unions and the works councils, with whom they will “coordinate” the jobs massacre.
IG Metall and its works council reps take on the task of suppressing opposition within the companies and sabotaging any struggle in defence of jobs. They promote the reactionary view that workers and their exploiters share the same interests and that production sites can only be maintained by working together with the management to reduce “costs” and cut wages and jobs.
The trade unions and their works council reps divide workers between plants and play those in one country against those in all the others, like the Ford works council in the so-called bidding contest between Saarlouis and Valencia to see which plant would cut the most costs. In the end, there is nothing left on either side. While workers are made redundant with a pittance, the shareholders stuff their pockets, and the works council and trade union officials also make a handsome return.
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A 23-year-old student shed seven stone after she was bullied at school for being obese
One of the worst bullying experiences she had involved a boy stabbing her in the stomach with a pencil
telling her it couldn’t hurt because of her size
She was bullied between the ages of 12 and 18, Media Drum World reports, and now credits the schoolmates who bullied her for shaping her identity.
Her weight loss mission was prompted by a family holiday when a relative made a nasty remark about her “big thighs.”
Denk previously tried her hand at fad diets in a bid to lose the weight, however, despite shedding some pounds, she admitted that the restrictive mindset this created only made her feel worse about herself in the long term.
She reached her heaviest weight in 2015, at 18st 13lbs.
Through a healthy, balanced diet and a high intensity CrossFit-centric exercise regime, Denk was eventually able to lose seven stone.
She now skips breakfast, eating just two meals a day: one between 4pm and 5pm and another around 9pm.
How Denk has the willpower to survive those mid-morning snack attacks after a gruelling workout is beyond us.
Since losing the weight, Denk has appeared on Curvy Supermodels, a competitive German TV show which follows a similar format to America’s Next Top Model but exclusively for plus size models.
Denk, who describes herself as an influencer on her Instagram bio, reached the top 30 in the competition.
"I'm really blessed and thankful to my body for everything!" she wrote in an Instagram post.
"Whoever says I'm not accepting my body is wrong! I'm just feeling better living #healthy and working out," she added.
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