Germany’s Hand in Sudan’s War
By Roman Deckert
Source: rosalux.de
While public discourse in Germany and many other European countries primarily revolves around issues of flight and migration — and continues to shift to the right — the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and the causes of displacement linked to it paradoxically remain largely unnoticed. Since a power struggle between rival military factions in Sudan escalated into a nationwide war two years ago, around 14 million people have been displaced by the violence, nearly four million of them to neighbouring countries. Thirty million people — almost two-thirds of the population — are dependent on humanitarian aid, five million children as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women are severely malnourished, and nearly two million are at imminent risk of starvation. The death toll to date is estimated to be over 150,000.
The United Nations’ humanitarian aid plan estimated a need of 4.2 billion US dollars for 2025, yet in the first half of the year, the fund has not even received a quarter of that amount. This is partly because the US government completely halted its contributions shortly after President Donald Trump took office. Until then, the now defunct USAID was also the main supporter of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), local solidarity committees that have taken over providing for the population’s basic needs across much of the country. At the same time, however, other Western countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have also drastically cut their humanitarian budgets. By far the largest donor is the Sudanese diaspora, by means of remittances sent to the ERRs.
The Legacy of Colonialism
As with many previous conflicts, the causes of the current civil war are complex, yet it is widely accepted among researchers that Sudan continues to suffer from the legacy of colonialism. British imperialists once operated according to the principle of divide and conquer, especially after the brutal suppression of the egalitarian White Flag League in 1924. As a result, the colonial rulers installed an elite from the country’s centre, whose networks continue to exploit the marginalized peripheries to this day. Germany contributed to this colonization insofar as Bismarck and his successors strongly supported British conquest plans to prevent France and Belgium from advancing to the Upper Nile.
Peace researcher Alex de Waal has identified the second main cause of the civil war as the “militarization of the political marketplace.” This refers to the dilemma that, in Sudan, only those who can muster a powerful militia gain access to power and resources. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), as the regular government army, have outsourced counterinsurgency to militias since the 1980s, and itself focused instead on building its own business empires. Sudanese Marxist Magdi Elgizouli describes the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), created by the SAF specifically to suppress the rebellion in Darfur, as a neoliberal private army with extensive economic interests.
It is therefore no coincidence that the militia’s key combat vehicles — Toyota Land Cruisers equipped with heavy machine guns — are colloquially known in Sudan as “Thatchers”. Nor is it a coincidence that the name of the feared RSF predecessors can be traced back to a West German assault rifle: according to de Waal and other experts, the Janjaweed militias took their name from the Heckler & Koch G3. Countless photographs show both the former Darfur fighters and current RSF mercenaries armed with the Bundeswehr’s former standard-issue weapon. Its successor, the G36, has also appeared in Sudan — on the RSF’s side and even in the hands of SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan himself.
Germany’s Role
The images of German weapons amidst the ruins of the capital, Khartoum, symbolize the significant role the old Federal Republic played in the militarization of Sudan during the Cold War — a conflict that played out as a hot war in Northeast Africa. Several factors converged here. First, it was a coincidence that Sudan gained independence on 1 January 1956 — just days after the Hallstein Doctrine was proclaimed in Bonn. The Adenauer government aimed to prevent the diplomatic recognition of the GDR by the newly decolonized states. Sudan became the first test case of this new strategy and held additional geostrategic importance as Egypt’s “backyard.”
Notably, it was the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) that first established links with Sudan’s Interior Ministry in 1957 and soon opened a legal residency in Khartoum. The first BND resident, Erich Olbrück, had learned his espionage skills working for Nazi Germany’s Reich Security Main Office. After the Second World War, the former SS Lieutenant Colonel, like many other Nazis, worked in Egypt, where he also came into contact with Adolf Eichmann’s deportation expert Alois Brunner. Olbrück organized training programmes for Sudanese partners and supplied surveillance equipment to monitor the GDR trade mission. The BND’s engagement lasted over thirty years and formed the nucleus for the establishment of Sudan’s “security” apparatus, which has since spread insecurity rather than security.
According to CIA records, Olbrück also ensured that the German Federal Ministry of Defence under Franz Josef Strauß (CSU) became the most important arms supplier to the military regime following the SAF coup in 1958. This began with the construction of an ammunition factory near Khartoum by the state-owned firm Fritz-Werner, which also built arsenals in countries like Iran, Colombia, Myanmar (then Burma), and Nigeria. Shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall, the SAF received a record package of equipment and training assistance worth 120 million Deutschmarks. This primarily included large quantities of G3 rifles and MG1 machine guns — better known as the “Hitler saw” — as well as the delivery of an entire fleet of over 1,000 trucks. Strauß internally issued the directive to build up Sudan as a regional bulwark against Soviet-led Eastern Bloc influences, leveraging “the formidable reputation of the German soldier.”
Strauß’s successor, Kai-Uwe von Hassel, who embodied the continuity of a distinctively German militarism throughout the country’s regime changes, praised the Sudanese as “the Prussians of Africa.” The CDU politician was born to an officer in the colonial Schutztruppe (Protection Force) in German East Africa, who had participated in the genocidal suppression of the Maji-Maji uprising. The core of the Schutztruppe, in turn, consisted of Sudanese mercenaries. Known as askaris, their loyalty served as an important argument for the revanchist colonial movement after the First World War, so much so that even Hitler mentions them in Mein Kampf. When the general of the Schutztruppe, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, died in 1964, von Hassel had two former askaris flown in for the funeral. In his eulogy, von Hassel called Lettow-Vorbeck — whose campaigns had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives — a role model for the Bundeswehr.
The Civil Wars
Even after the Hallstein Doctrine ended in 1969, the building up of arms in Sudan continued — despite the rebellion in the south escalating and the SAF pursuing scorched-earth tactics. Thanks to Israeli support, the insurgents also fought with German weapons that came from Wehrmacht stocks in Eastern Europe, which the Haganah (the precursor to the IDF) had obtained in 1948 as part of Operation Balak. By the time it ended in 1972, the Sudanese civil war had claimed at least half a million lives. The social-liberal coalition West German government was more cautious on arms exports than its predecessors, yet a substantial fraction of the trade was now handled indirectly, via Saudi Arabia. Through this detour, the SAF received West German military equipment worth hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks, again primarily G3 rifles and military trucks. It was anything but a coincidence that the first shot that triggered the Second Sudanese Civil War in 1983 was fired from a G3. The GDR, in turn, armed the rebels with Kalashnikovs via Ethiopia. By 2005, around two million people had died in the conflict.
The fact that the first two Sudanese civil wars were also proxy wars between East and West Germany should not be used to deflect Sudanese responsibility. For instance, the feature film Goodbye Julia — which premiered at Cannes shortly after the war’s outbreak, the first Sudanese production to be shown there — poignantly highlights some of the main issues of Sudanese society: deep-seated racism rooted in the nefarious history of the slave trade, profoundly conservative and radically Islamist values, toxic masculinity, and patriarchy. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Sudan’s militarization is also a legacy of German militarism.
German arms exports to Sudan ceased thirty years ago, but it now exports significantly more weapons to the Gulf States, which are currently waging their own proxy war in Sudan. In 2024, Germany’s traffic-light coalition government (the SPD, the Greens, and the FDP) approved arms shipments worth nearly 150 million euros to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), despite the UAE being the RSF’s key supporter. Saudi Arabia, the primary sponsor of the SAF, also received approval for purchases of a similar scale. Qatar, also allied with the SAF, received over 100 million euros in weapons in 2024 and around 166 million euros of purchases were approved in the first quarter of 2025. The ineffectuality of agreed upon end-user regulation is evidenced by reports that French military technology has been passed on to the RSF via the UAE.
“Dubai is like you,” reads a current tourism campaign slogan that that is surely offensive to leftists. But it lays bare the West’s complicity with the UAE, which also pursues a neo-imperial agenda in other African countries. It’s not only Instagram influencers, reality TV shows like Die Geissens on RTL2, or the jerseys of football clubs like HSV that promote the emirate’s luxury lifestyle surrounded by Lamborghinis, mega-yachts, and glistening skyscrapers as the ideal of late capitalism. In 2022, then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz agreed during a visit to Abu Dhabi to nothing less than “the revitalization of the strategic partnership” between Germany and the UAE, despite the latter having been a driving force behind the SAF and RSF coup against Sudan’s civilian transitional government the previous year. The Green-led Foreign Office later indicated that it had tried behind closed doors to influence its strategic partner regarding Sudan. Evidently such an attempt at feminist diplomacy was unsuccessful.
Sudanese socialist Muzan Alneel emphasizes that only the Sudanese themselves can save Sudan; however, she also points out that international solidarity can play a role. Die Linke in Germany can support Sudanese civil society’s struggle for a just peace by highlighting the glaring contradictions in German foreign policy. It should also forge transnational networks focused on Sudan, as Germany — despite its exceptionalist tendencies — is just one of many states in Fortress Europe that allow themselves to be co-opted by the Gulf monarchies’ petrodollars for the sake of whitewashing.
