The peaceable darling of postwar Europe, Germany is quietly one of the largest arms exporters in the world  — and it has been since long before its billions of dollars’ worth of arms provision to Ukraine. Despite domestic disarmament following World War II, German manufacturers would soon peddle their wares abroad. The industry is supposedly governed by the principle of restrictive sale, meant to prevent German manufacturers from supplying weapons to countries responsible for major human rights violations or countries that may utilize those weapons in wars of aggression — but these restrictions have worked far better in theory than in practice.

Since 1990, Germany has made repeated weapons sales to authoritarian governments that, under German and EU guidelines, should not have been granted licenses for arms export — including Egypt, Algeria, Brazil, Indonesia, Qatar, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and, above all, Saudi Arabia, which is one of the main importers of German weapons. Again and again, from the 8888 Uprising in Myanmar to the Arab Spring in Bahrain, states have used German weapons to slaughter civilians en masse.

The sales continue, with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of German weapons ending up in the Middle East and North Africa annually. The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, for example, was able to legally purchase $240 million worth of anti-tank missiles and military vehicles in 2007 —  not to mention his illegal acquisitions, which included German-made G36 machine guns. Neighboring Egypt, now under the rule of the repressive president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, purchased billions of dollars’ worth of warships and air defense systems in the waning moments of former chancellor Angela Merkel’s tenure in 2021 —  making it a record year for German arms sales.