A plaque at Amsterdamer Straße 10 in Berlin's Wedding district marks where Otto and Elise Hampel once lived. The childless working-class couple began scattering handwritten anti-Nazi postcards around the city after Elise's brother Kurt was killed in France in 1940. Arrested, sentenced and executed at Plötzensee prison on April 8, 1943, they became the model for Hans Fallada's 1947 novel Alone in Berlin. Today, a large reproduction of one of their postcards stands on Müllerstraße 147, near Rathaus Wedding.
Their story has gained new resonance. About a 30-minute walk from their old flat, on Scheringstraße, a former car-parts factory belonging to Pierburg has been renamed Rheinmetall Waffe Munition and is being converted to produce 155-millimetre artillery shells. It sits in a dense residential neighbourhood beside a school, a playground and Humboldthain park — which is exactly why locals are protesting outside it.
The site's military past runs deep. A plaque nearby commemorates Louis Schwartzkopff, who moved his locomotive works into Wedding in 1867; the company became the Berliner Maschinenbau-Actien-Gesellschaft (BMAG), a major torpedo producer during the First World War. Yet "Red Wedding" was a hotbed of anti-war politics: BMAG workers joined the 1916 protests over Karl Liebknecht's persecution, and on November 9, 1918 — the day the Kaiser abdicated — a young BMAG toolmaker and socialist youth leader, Erich Habersaath, was shot dead near the Maikäferkaserne barracks alongside two comrades. A street has carried his name since 1951. Under the Nazis the factory used forced labour, then returned to civilian products after the war: typesetting machines, bottle-blowing equipment, eventually automotive parts.
The Wedding conversion is part of a wider pivot. As Germany's car industry falters, defence budgets have swelled. Schaeffler targets 10 percent of its €24 billion turnover from military work; Deutz supplies engines for Patriot systems; Continental is partnering with Rheinmetall to retrain displaced car workers. Rheinmetall itself was founded in Düsseldorf in 1889 to make ammunition, grew again through two world wars, and has seen sales jump from €7.7 billion in 2024 to €9.9 billion in 2025 — including more than €130 million in EU funding under the ASAP scheme. In June it agreed to sell its civilian Power Systems division, Pierburg included, to Munich's AEQUITA.
For visitors, the piece is a reminder that Berlin's everyday neighbourhoods carry dense, uncomfortable history — memorials to wartime resistance, industrialists and murdered workers sit within minutes of one another. A slow walk through Wedding, taking in the Hampel plaque, the postcard mural and Schwartzkopff's U-Bahn station, tells a story about Germany's military-industrial century better than any museum. It also frames the current debate: critics ask how an ammunition plant ended up next to a park and a school, why Germany has approved nearly $930 million in arms exports to Israel this year, and why cultural and social budgets are being cut by some €3 billion in 2025 while defence spending climbs. The source argues defence spending may be necessary — but not like this, and not here.
