Garden house of the head of Rheinmetall, an arms supplier to Ukraine, set on fire in Germany

German left-wing extremists have set fire to the garden house of the head of Rheinmetall, a major German arms manufacturer, in protest against the sale of weapons to Ukraine.

Source. This was reported by Telegraph.

An anonymous statement posted on social media said that activists set fire to Armin Papperger's summer house in Lower Saxony because, as they wrote, he was profiting from the so-called Zeitenwende (turning point), i.e. Germany's new security strategy towards Russia.

"Rheinmetall is one of the beneficiaries of the so-called Zeitgeist and has various old types of tanks that can now be sold to Ukraine at a huge profit, along with ammunition," the group said in a statement.

The old tanks are likely to be German Leopards, which were stored in warehouses in Belgium for many years and sold to Rheinmetall for repair and refurbishment after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As the British Telegraph suggests, the arsonists may be somehow connected to the Red Army Faction (a German left-wing radical organisation known as Baader-Meinhof), as the post ends with the call to "Free Daniela!".

This refers to a high-ranking Baader-Meinhof member, Daniela Klette, who had been in hiding for over 30 years and was arrested in February 2024.

Rheinmetall, the fifth largest arms company in Europe, recently opened a plant in Niedersachsen to produce shells for Ukraine.

It has also been reported that Rheinmetall will build an ammunition plant in Lithuania as the country seeks to strengthen its defence arsenal amid Russian aggression.