Israel’s biggest arms company wants to build its largest production facility in a sleepy East German town. “Not many people want to work for a genocidal arms company in their hometown,” said Noah Boehme, an 18-year-old high schooler who joined a group of his neighbors organizing in opposition to the facility. When he isn’t in class or studying, Boehme says he devotes much of his time to planning or attending protests. One cold, rainy day in October, he traveled over an hour from Sangerhausen to Leipzig to participate in a protest against arms production in East Germany as part of the nation’s renewed rearmament efforts. “For me personally it’s a very big deal,” said Boehme, “and also for the people who are here today. But I totally get that [a lot of people] just want to sit in their home and drink hot tea.”
Dressed in a beige canvas work coat and red gaiter, Boehme stood apart from the others in the crowd, who were mostly wearing black. He waved a flag telling a weapons company that recently opened a facility in Leipzig to “Piss Off!”
Boehme and his compatriots are representative of a growing number of Germans discontent with the country’s race to rearm. Ensuing political debates surrounding remilitarization projects not only reinforce disagreements with political parties on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but are also serving as ripe ground for infighting, especially within Germany’s rising far-right faction, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD. As these discussions play out in legislative forums, people on the ground are caught in the middle, working to get their voices heard in a meaningful way.
The demonstration Boehme attended was organized by a group formed to oppose a facility operated by US-Israeli defense startup Covenant. Reports of the factory began circulating in August and in September, the company announced a $70 million contract from the US Navy to produce its flagship Anthem missiles at factories in Dallas, Israel, and Saxony, which borders Saxony-Anhalt, where Sangerhausen is located.
Covenant quickly opened up shop at its Leipzig factory in October and plans full-scale production by January 2027.
Boehme came to represent his group from Sangerhausen called “Keep Elbit Out,” which opposes a proposed facility operated by the titular Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest defense firm. He said that he and the other protesters were acting out of solidarity with the people of Palestine and to stand against the presence of any companies that benefit from the genocide in Gaza.
Last year, an Amnesty International report identified Elbit Systems as one of 15 companies that have “[contributed] to Israel’s unlawful occupation, genocide, or other crimes under international law.” The report outlined Elbit’s role in supplying the Israeli Defense Forces with surveillance and armed drones used in its occupation of Gaza.
Elbit was the only arms company that responded to Amnesty’s report, rebuking its characterization and stating that it supplied “a sovereign, unsanctioned government, recognized by the international community.”
Organizers with the Keep Elbit Out movement claim that 80% of Sangerhausen’s residents stand in opposition to the project. And Boehme said that many people living in and around Sangerhausen see Elbit as an enemy of peace. He remarked on the fact that people from all corners of the community — schools, churches, and political organizations — came together against the proposed facility.
That coalition was put to the test after the AfD’s decisive victory in Saxony-Anhalt’s state elections in September, when peace activists in the region realized the facility’s fate lies largely in the hands of the far-right faction.
Though the AfD is known chiefly for its xenophobic domestic policies, supporting forced removals of most asylum seekers and refugees, the party remains isolationist in its approach to foreign relations, notably as an advocate for pulling support from Ukraine. The party’s manifesto for 2025 emphasized the need for Germany’s armed forces to shift its reliance from foreign-made weapons systems to domestic products and expressly opposed “the planned deployment of long-range US weapon systems … in Germany.”
With this record in mind, voters in Saxony-Anhalt hoped that the likely AfD leadership would want to thwart the Elbit project. However, the AfD leader for Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, refused to play into these expectations, offering explicit support for the project. “We do not condemn the production of military equipment across the board,” said Siegmund at a press conference, “because we will naturally need the appropriate resources for future repatriation and deportation campaigns.”
This put him at odds with the AfD’s important political ally, a small, ostensibly left-leaning party called the Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason, or BSW. Despite the party’s small stature in the state government, having won only five seats in the parliament versus AfD’s 29, it’s the only faction willing to vote with the AfD and enable them to form a joint majority needed to pass laws and resolutions.
Claudia Wittig, who co-leads the BSW in Saxony-Anhalt, told Inkstick that she didn’t even think the weapons produced at the facility could be legally used to support deportation initiatives, and that Siegmund’s proposal shouldn’t be taken seriously. “It was fairly obvious that [Siegmund] didn’t know the first thing about it,” said Wittig. “I think he was surprised by the question and didn’t know what to say, so he just fell back on whatever he usually says when people ask him something, which is something on migration.”
She added that a large swath of the AfD supports the project in the anticipation that it will bring jobs to Sangerhausen and Saxony-Anhalt, but said that the company continues to withhold exactly how much investment it will bring to the area.
Elbit Systems did not respond to a request for comment on how the facility will impact the community of Sangerhausen.
Boehme shares the broader concerns, telling Inkstick that many of his neighbors are worried that the jobs the factory will create are for people with more qualifications than many of Sangerhausen’s residents. Members of the town council said that Elbit told them the facility may bring 400 jobs, but Wittig says that number isn’t concrete. Boehme said he and his fellow organizers also question how many of those employed will actually be from Sangerhausen, rather than just commuters.
Like in many small towns around the world, Boehme said, opportunities are hard to come by in Sangerhausen, and that many people who grow up there are anxious to leave. He argued that the Elbit facility wouldn’t convince anyone to stay.
A surprising revelation came in early October, when Oliver Kirchner, who co-leads the AfD’s group in Saxony-Anhalt with Siegmund, said at an event that he opposed the factory’s establishment and wanted to work with the BSW to allow the people of Sangerhausen to decide on the project’s fate in a referendum.
According to Boehme, this division has similarly manifested in AfD’s voter base, as he said that multiple people approached his organization saying that they were disappointed with the party’s framing on the issue, having voted for them in the state election just weeks prior. He said that he and his fellow organizers were hesitant to allow these people to join. The movement emphasizes anti-fascism as a foundational principle, and Boehme finds support of the AfD to be antithetical to this stance.
This contradiction underpins many of the criticisms of BSW’s decision to work with the AfD.
Most political groups in Germany maintain a policy against working with far-right parties — the blanket refusal to cooperate is dubbed the “Brandmauer,” which means “firewall.” But as the AfD becomes more prevalent, exceptions are being made across the political map.
The conservative Christian Democratic Union is notably divided on the firewall policy, and offers tacit support for the AfD’s deportation policies. But the BSW rejects the firewall, with its party leaders stating before the recent elections that they were open to working with all political parties in order to govern.
BSW is an offshoot of Die Linke, Germany’s democratic socialist party, but aligns with the AfD on social and geopolitical issues. BSW members in Saxony-Anhalt bucked the political norm after the September elections when its leaders said they were willing to work with the AfD. But Wittig and the other BSW members clarified that they would not form a proper coalition with the right-wing AfD. Instead, they said that the party would collaborate with the AfD on a case-by-case basis.
The first case came in the form of a joint resolution penned by the two parties calling for an end to military aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia.
“If you travel through eastern parts of Germany, you will see on the bridges over the highways members of the AfD with peace signs. In reality, they don’t represent peace because they [support] Putin and the Putin regime,” said German sociologist and professor Klaus Dörre. He remarked on the fact that many East Germans feel slighted by the federal government after continued disinvestment in the region; funds which they believe are being wasted on continued German support for the Ukrainian military. Dörre says parties like the AfD, as well as the BSW, are capitalizing on these sentiments by taking a clear stance against the war while other political movements, like Die Linke, remain ambivalent towards the issue.
When asked about the resolution’s purpose and whether it would have any material impact on Saxony-Anhalt and its residents, Wittig said that it was mostly symbolic, serving to illustrate the people of Saxony-Anhalt’s opposition to conflict in the East. “I think this is kind of the political DNA of my party,” said Wittig of the resolution, “we are fundamentally a peace party.” She told Inkstick that she was also working on another law proposal with members of her party based on a passage in Saxony-Anhalt’s constitution requiring all state activities to “promote the welfare of the people, [and] to serve peace.”
The tentative legislation argues that the multiple cases against Israel in the International Criminal Court concerning its actions in Gaza, and Elbit’s role in those alleged war crimes, call into question the company’s commitment to “serving peace.” Citing this phrase, the proposal calls for the state government to “suspend all arms industry production until a documented review of its impacts on peace, international law, security, the environment, and budgetary policy has been completed.”
But in order to get this law through state parliament, Wittig and her colleagues rely on politicians from other political parties in the region to sign on to them, which they have been unwilling to do as long as the AfD is involved. “They don’t want to work with us,” Wittig told Inkstick, “because they have this idea that you cannot do the right thing with the wrong people.”
For her part, Wittig remains optimistic that lawmakers from the other parties will come around sooner or later and partner with the BSW and AfD on these initiatives, but continues to meet resistance.
Eva von Angern, chair of Die Linke in Saxony-Anhalt, said in response to the proposal that her party would not work with the BSW if the party maintained its relationship with the AfD. Both parties, however, are active in the Keep Elbit Out initiative, and regularly attend and speak at the organization’s events. “The BSW planning to work together with the AfD is completely shit,” said Boehme, “I hate them for that.” He made sure to specify that his stance on the issue wasn’t indicative of his organization’s official policy, but expressed frustration with the BSW’s willingness to work with the AfD when it could still form a coalition with the CDU and Social Democrats.
Wittig believes that her party’s presence in the state parliament has emboldened members of the AfD who oppose arms production to break from those in favor of it, opening the door for an actual political effort to block the Elbit project and more like it.
For Boehme and his neighbors, that could mean keeping rearmament out of their backyards. But it also bears the cost of legitimizing the rising tide of fascism in German politics.
