Baden-Württemberg in fourth place nationwide

Only three federal states exported more armaments than Baden-Württemberg in 2020. The total of the exports of war weapons and other armaments by companies from the southwest amounted to around 928 million euros last year. This can be traced back to preliminary figures from the Federal Ministry of Economics in a response to a request from the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag, which the German Press Agency has received.

Schleswig-Holstein recorded the most approved arms exports with around 1.5 billion euros in armaments. This is followed by Lower Saxony (1.2 billion euros) and Bavaria (1.1 billion euros), which also received more than one billion euros in export goods for the domestic armaments industry.

In comparison to the previous year, arms exports fell significantly in almost all federal states. In Baden-Württemberg, these were around 2.1 billion euros in 2019, making the southwest in second place nationwide. Only Bavarian companies exported around 4 billion euros more armaments in 2019.

The chairwoman of the Left in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag, Sevim Dagdelen, said that the high level of arms export permits in 2020 could not hide the comparison with the same period last year. “The hotspots for profiteers from dirty deals with states that massively violate human rights and are caught in armed conflict are still in the western federal states.” These should finally promote the conversion of the arms industry to civilian production instead of the business of death, said Dagdelen .

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