Germany’s Role in Sudan’s War
Sudan Events – Agencies
While public discourse in Germany and many other European countries continues to revolve primarily around issues of flight and migration—drifting further to the right—the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, and the displacement it causes, remains largely out of sight. Since the power struggle between rival military factions in Sudan escalated into a nationwide war two years ago, some 14 million people have been displaced by violence, including nearly four million who fled to neighboring countries. Thirty million people—about two-thirds of the population—depend on humanitarian aid. Five million children, along with pregnant and breastfeeding women, suffer from acute malnutrition, while nearly two million face the imminent threat of famine. The death toll is estimated to have already surpassed 150,000.
The UN humanitarian response plan projected a need of $4.2 billion for 2025, yet by midyear, less than a quarter of that amount had been received. This shortfall is partly due to the U.S. government halting its contributions shortly after President Donald Trump took office. Until then, USAID—now defunct—had been the primary backer of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), grassroots solidarity committees that provided essential needs across the country. At the same time, other Western countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, drastically cut their humanitarian budgets. Sudanese in the diaspora remain the single largest donors, channeling remittances to support the ERRs.
The Colonial Legacy
As with many previous conflicts, the roots of Sudan’s current civil war are complex. Yet scholars broadly agree that the country continues to suffer from the legacy of colonialism. British imperial authorities long pursued a “divide and rule” policy, particularly after the brutal suppression of the egalitarian White Flag League in 1924. As a result, colonial administrators empowered an elite drawn from central Sudan whose networks continue to exploit marginalized peripheries today. Germany contributed to this colonial project: Bismarck and his successors strongly supported Britain’s conquest plans in order to block French and Belgian advances up the Nile.
Peace researcher Alex de Waal identifies a second root cause of the war as the “militarization of the political marketplace.” In Sudan, only those able to mobilize a powerful militia gain access to power and resources. Since the 1980s, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have outsourced counterinsurgency to paramilitaries, while focusing instead on building their own commercial empires. Sudanese Marxist Magdi el-Gizouli describes the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—originally created by the SAF to crush the Darfur rebellion—as a neoliberal private army with vast economic interests.
It is no coincidence that the RSF’s signature fighting vehicles—Toyota Land Cruisers mounted with heavy machine guns—are commonly known in Sudan as “Thatchers.” Nor is it coincidental that their predecessors, the Janjaweed, took their name from a West German assault rifle. According to de Waal and other experts, the Janjaweed were named after the Heckler & Koch G3. Countless images show both Darfur fighters of the past and today’s RSF militiamen armed with Germany’s former standard-issue weapon. Its successor, the G36, has also appeared in Sudan—carried not only by RSF fighters but even by SAF commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Germany’s Role
Images of German weapons amid the ruins of Khartoum highlight the crucial role played by the former Federal Republic of Germany in militarizing Sudan during the Cold War—a conflict that flared hot across northeast Africa. Several factors converged. Sudan gained independence on January 1, 1956, just days after the Hallstein Doctrine was proclaimed in Bonn. Chancellor Adenauer’s government sought to prevent newly decolonized states from recognizing East Germany. Sudan became the first testing ground of this strategy, with added geostrategic importance as Egypt’s “backyard.”
Notably, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was the first to establish ties with Sudan’s Interior Ministry in 1957, soon opening a legal station in Khartoum. The BND’s first resident officer, Erich Ohlbrock, had learned his craft as part of Nazi Germany’s Reich Security Main Office. Like many former Nazis, he later worked in Egypt, where he came into contact with Adolf Eichmann’s deportation specialist Alois Brunner. Ohlbrock organized training programs for Sudanese partners and supplied surveillance equipment to monitor East Germany’s trade mission. The BND’s involvement continued for more than three decades, forming the nucleus of Sudan’s “security” apparatus—an institution that has since spread insecurity rather than safety.
CIA records show that Ohlbrock also facilitated arms deals through West Germany’s Defense Ministry under Franz Josef Strauss (CSU), making Bonn the regime’s main weapons supplier after the 1958 military coup. This began with a munitions factory outside Khartoum, built by the state-owned firm Fritz-Werner, which also constructed arsenals in Iran, Colombia, Burma, and Nigeria. Shortly after the Berlin Wall went up, Sudan received a standardized aid package worth 120 million Deutschmarks, including vast quantities of G3 rifles, MG1 machine guns—nicknamed “Hitler’s saw”—and over a thousand military trucks. Internally, Strauss directed that Sudan be developed into a regional bulwark against Soviet influence, capitalizing on what he called “the great reputation of the German soldier.”
Strauss’s successor, Kai-Uwe von Hassel, embodied the continuity of German militarism. He hailed Sudanese as the “Prussians of Africa.” Born to a Schutztruppe officer in German East Africa who had participated in the genocidal suppression of the Maji-Maji revolt, von Hassel celebrated the colonial legacy even as West Germany deepened its military ties with Sudan.
Civil Wars and Beyond
Even after the Hallstein Doctrine was abandoned in 1969, Sudan’s militarization continued—despite growing rebellion in the south and the army’s scorched-earth tactics. By the time the first Sudanese civil war ended in 1972, at least half a million people had been killed. West Germany’s liberal-social coalition government was more cautious than its predecessors, yet large quantities of German weapons still reached Khartoum indirectly—via Saudi Arabia. The SAF received hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks worth of equipment, especially G3 rifles and trucks. Fittingly, the first shot that ignited Sudan’s second civil war in 1983 was fired from a G3.
East Germany, meanwhile, supplied rebels with Kalashnikovs via Ethiopia. By the time that war ended in 2005, an estimated two million people had died. Sudan’s two civil wars were, in many ways, proxy wars between East and West Germany. Yet this does not absolve Sudanese leaders themselves of responsibility. Films like Goodbye Julia—the first Sudanese feature ever screened at Cannes—lay bare deeper societal issues: entrenched racism rooted in the slave trade, conservative values, extremist Islamism, toxic masculinity, and patriarchy. Still, Sudan’s militarization undeniably carries a German imprint.
Though Germany halted direct arms exports to Sudan three decades ago, it now sells far larger volumes to Gulf states engaged in their own proxy war there. In 2024, Germany’s ruling coalition.
