Russia’s Secret War and the Plot to Kill a German CEO
On a clear night at the end of April 2024, arsonists slipped into a tidy residential neighborhood in Hermannsburg, a German village of about 8,000 people surrounded by flat farm fields, heathland nature reserves and military bases. Under the cover of darkness, they arrived at a large redbrick home, where they set fire to a clapboard garden house and a towering beech tree out front. They escaped undetected before the fire brigade arrived. Neighbors awoke the next morning to the smell of still-smoldering wood.
The home belonged to Armin Papperger, the chief executive officer of Rheinmetall AG, Germany’s largest defense company. Papperger, a stocky, white-haired 62-year-old engineer, wasn’t home at the time. In fact, he hadn’t been there since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, local residents say. The war had made Papperger a busy man: He was turning a sleeping industrial giant into an international defense juggernaut on track to bring in almost €10 billion ($11.6 billion) in revenue that year.