Camp in Cologne, gluing in Bonn, blockade in Hamburg: the movement against rearmament is growing faster than the excuses against it

At the beginning of September, around 300 activists from the “Rheinmetall Disarmen” alliance blocked the access to the Liège barracks in Cologne-Longerich. At the same time, people from “Peacefully Against Genocide” stuck themselves in front of a Rheinmetall branch in Bonn. The police broke up the unannounced gathering by force, and several criminal proceedings for “serious breach of the peace” are ongoing. At the weekend, over 3,000 people marched through downtown Cologne, with pyrotechnics, water cannons and the entire choreography of German protest police. Next stop: Hamburg, September 24th to 26th, against the NATO exercise that is turning the city into a military test site for the third time in a row.

This is not a camp for people who like to sleep outside. It is an answer to a number that no one in the Bundestag says out loud because it is too banal: The regular defense budget has risen from 46.9 billion euros in 2021 to over 53 billion euros in 2025 - without the separate "special fund" of 100 billion, which runs completely outside the debt brake and is planned to run until 2027. That's a total of more than 86 billion euros for procurement, equipment and devices alone by 2025. This is not defending a country. This is an investment program for an industry that happens to be called Rheinmetall and whose headquarters are an hour's drive from Cologne.

The narrative is always the same: “turning point”, “decades of neglect”, “whatever it takes”, as Merz put it at the beginning of the year. What is missing from this story is the question of who actually benefits from 100 billion euros in special funds when ammunition factories conclude contracts years in advance and the arms company multiplies its share price while at the same time the budget is cut elsewhere. Rheinmetall Disarmen calls this in its 2026 call “Fight the warmongers” – not because the word sounds dramatic, but because it describes the material relationship between the rearmament budget and corporate profits.

What is remarkable about this protest is its endurance and its diversification: not just the large registered demo, but decentralized actions of civil disobedience - blockades of barracks, sticking to factory gates, targeted disruption of a NATO maneuver. This is the right answer to a policy that sells armament as having no alternative: to disrupt it in the specific places where it is produced and practiced, instead of just arguing against it on talk shows. The police reacted accordingly harshly - unannounced gatherings were broken up and allegations of “excessive aggression” were raised, as was the case at the first camp in 2025.

The resistance to German rearmament will not be decided by better arguments in the Bundestag. It is decided by camps that come back every year, by blockades that do not stop despite repression, and by the simple refusal to accept the “turning point” as a natural event rather than a political decision. Anyone who takes to the streets in Hamburg in September against the NATO maneuvers is not defending abstract pacifism - they are defending the idea that rearmament budgets are a democratic decision that can also be reversed.

Sources

Rheinmetall Disarm – Call 2026
WDR: Demo against Rheinmetall, metal balls hit the police
taz: Protests by “Disarm Rheinmetall”
Time: War opponents demonstrate in Cologne
BMVg: Defense budget
Stern: Defense budget development