An 84-year-old German man has been fined €250,000 (£212,796.10) for keeping stockpiles of Second World War-era weaponry in his basement – including a 45-ton tank.
The conviction under Germany's War Weapons Control Act was handed down in Kiel, a city in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, and regards an investigation from 2015.
As we reported at the time, a search for stolen Nazi art at the elderly man's home actually turned up multiple items of military hardware in his underground garage.
Among the arsenal were the Panther tank, a torpedo, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, machine guns, automatic pistols, and 1,500 rounds of ammunition.
Example of a restored Panther tank in Breda, the Netherlands (Maurizio Fabbroni / Shutterstock.com)
The defendant, who was not named due to German privacy laws, also received a suspended prison sentence of 14 months and was ordered to sell or donate the tank and flak cannon to a museum or collector within two years, as reported by AP News.
Though its guns were not operational, the tank could be driven – a fact the pensioner made no effort to hide. The mayor of the nearby Keikendorf municipality reported: "He was chugging around in that thing during the snow catastrophe in 1978."
According to the English-language DW News, though most German tanks were destroyed during the war, survivors were taken by the Allies to be probed for strengths and weaknesses.
An example was found in Surrey, England, in 1977 and the German war memorabilia collector had it shipped home, where it was restored at a cost of 500,000 marks.
It took the German military 20 men and nine hours to remove the tank and arsenal from the garage. The Panther was hitched to an armoured recovery vehicle and hauled out to be loaded onto a trailer.
Punishments under the War Weapons Control Act depend on the armaments' functionality. The defence argued that although the confiscated items were officially classified as weapons of war, this was not enough to prove that the defendant had broken the law.
The judge, however, pointed to expert testimony that the tank's gun, though corroded with rust, could be cleaned and restored to working condition within a matter of days.
The man's lawyer told the court he is not a Nazi sympathiser, and that the tank's restoration had been his "life's work." ®
Germany will be the host of the first publicly known European exascale supercomputer, along with four other EU sites getting smaller but still powerful systems, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) announced this week.
Germany will be the home of Jupiter, the "Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research." It should be switched on next year in a specially designed building on the campus of the Forschungszentrum Jülich research centre and operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), alongside the existing Juwels and Jureca supercomputers.
The four mid-range systems are: Daedalus, hosted by the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology in Greece; Levente at the Governmental Agency for IT Development in Hungary; Caspir at the National University of Ireland Galway in Ireland; and EHPCPL at the Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET in Poland.
Germany's government is looking to attract chipmakers to the country by offering €14 billion ($14.7 billion) in financial support, apparently spurred on by global semiconductor supply chain problems.
The move follows the European Chips Act from the European Commission and Intel's decision earlier this year to build a new fabrication plant in Germany.
The latest announcement was made by Germany's vice chancellor and federal minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck at a business event in Hanover, according to Reuters, who said that his government wants to attract chip makers with €14 billion ($14.7 billion) in state aid.
Germany's BSI federal cybersecurity agency has warned the country's citizens not to install Russian-owned Kaspersky antivirus, saying it has "doubts about the reliability of the manufacturer."
Russia-based Kaspersky has long been a target of suspicious rumors in the West over its ownership and allegiance to Russia's rulers.
In an advisory published today, the agency said: "The BSI recommends replacing applications from Kaspersky's virus protection software portfolio with alternative products."
Intel has reportedly opted to build a new chip manufacturing mega-fab at a site in Magdeburg in eastern Germany, after considering locations in France, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands.
The chipmaker has previously said it was looking to invest up to €80bn in new semiconductor fabs in Europe. Germany was high on the list of potential locations, with sites considered in Bavaria as well as Magdeburg and Dresden.
According to Reuters, Intel has now settled on Magdeburg, but there is no official announcement yet from the chip giant, with a decision due to be made public on 4 March. We contacted Intel for confirmation but the company declined to comment.
Intel's doing a European version of Amazon HQ2: enticing governments to pledge more and more funds to subsidize the construction of chip mega-plants along with ever-growing packages of benefits.
Recent reports have named Germany, Italy, and France as potential spots for new Intel super-fabs, factories, and offices. Italy just now reportedly established a $4.6bn fund to lure Intel and its chipmaking to the nation.
The EU has noted that the continent doesn't have an advanced chip manufacturing industry like that of Asia or the US. Meanwhile, Intel has said it is looking to establish leading-edge fabs in Europe with investments potentially reaching €80bn.
International trade sanctions threaten to cut off Deutsche Bank from its near-shore IT support and software development unit in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
The global bank's Russian technology centre employs around 1,500 staff, including software developers and systems maintenance experts who work on its global trading business and main corporate banking system.
According to The Financial Times, the €25bn revenue bank is weighing up options as sanctions threaten to cut off the centre of expertise from the rest of its operations.
A deal that would have brought a German silicon wafer manufacturer under Taiwanese control has been scuppered by German regulators – with help from China.
The deal, announced in September 2020, would have seen Taiwan's GlobalWafers combine with Germany's Siltronic. Around $5 billion was to change hands – the sale price representing a 48 per cent premium for Siltronic shareholders. GlobalWafer holds around a third of the global market and the deal would have made it the world's second-largest player.
As is nearly always the case with foreign takeovers, the deal required signoff from German regulators, who moved … slowly.
Taiwan’s GlobalWafers has announced a cheery change of plans after its acquisition of Germany’s Siltronic fell through thanks to German authorities' failure to sign off on the deal - expansion of on existing facilities instead.
“GlobalWafers foresees total capital expenditures of New Taiwan dollar (NTD) 100 billion (approx. USD 3.6 billion) from 2022 to 2024, including substantial greenfield investments,” the wafer-maker announced on Sunday.
Capacity expansion for 300mm wafer and Epitaxial wafer (EPI), 200mm and 300mm Silicon on Insulator wafers (SOI), 200mm Float-Zone wafers (FZ), Silicon carbide (SiC) wafers (including SiC Epi), Gallium Nitride on Silicon wafers (GaN on Si) and other large-size next-generation products are all under consideration, across Asia, Europe and the United States.
A 29-year-old man alleged to have been part of a group that blew up at least 15 cash machines in Germany managed to kill himself and injure an associate last year while filming a video tutorial on how to blow up ATMs, according to European authorities.
Europol in a statement this week said the Dutch and German police had arrested a total of nine suspects over the course of an 18-month investigation that concluded earlier this week.
The inquiry began in February 2020, according to Europol, after authorities in Osnabrück, Germany, took note of unusual orders of ATM machines from a German ATM vendor.
Christmas was (probably not) ruined for several German children yesterday after thieves bust through a toyshop wall in Lippstadt and escaped with dozens of Lego sets said to be worth a total of €35,000.
Despite the "picture of devastation" and metre-wide opening left in the wall, investigators are struggling to piece everything together.
"The hole was right at the end of the Lego section. They must have jumped in here and then proceeded very specifically," Jana Schumacher, manager of the Toys World store, told Der Spiegel (auf Deutsch).
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