In July 2026, some 3,000 people marched through a working-class district of Berlin against a factory that, on the Saturday of the protest, stood empty. Behind its wire-wrapped fence, a former car-parts plant is being rebuilt to machine artillery shell casings — the first munitions production in Wedding since 1945. It is one node in Europe's largest, and fastest-growing, defence industry. This is where Germany makes its weapons — and how close that is to where people live.
On a side street in Wedding, a few hundred metres from the Humboldthain S-Bahn and surrounded by apartment blocks, the old Pierburg auto-supplier is being converted into Rheinmetall Waffe Munition. Car components are being phased out; in their place, metal casings for artillery shells — to be filled with explosive later, in Lower Saxony.
Residents say they were told little. The plant is now watched by drones. Two neighbourhood groups have launched a petition; a district that has spent years fighting rising rents is now fighting a weapons plant.
Zoom in. The works sits against Volkspark Humboldthain — its open-air pool (the Sommerbad), its playgrounds — with apartment blocks pressing in on every side. This is what "in a residential area" really means: artillery shell casings machined a short walk from where children swim and play.
The company stresses no explosives are handled here — the casings are filled later, in Lower Saxony. For neighbours, the objection is simpler: a weapons plant should not share a fence with a Freibad.
Wedding is a template. Across Germany, struggling automotive plants are being repurposed for defence as civilian orders fall and arms orders surge. In Osnabrück, a Volkswagen site faces a stark choice the unions themselves phrase as “tanks or minibuses.” In Görlitz, a rail-carriage works is eyed for military conversion.
For workers, it can mean keeping a job. For the anti-arms movement, it means the war economy is arriving quietly, factory by factory — often inside cities.
Germany has built arms inside its cities for generations. Diehl has forged munitions components on Nuremberg's Äußere Bayreuther Straße since 1917; Krauss-Maffei builds tanks in Munich; Renk has powered them from central Augsburg for decades. The neighbourhoods grew up around these plants — old, familiar employers.
Wedding isn't unprecedented either: the same site made shell parts in WWI and used forced labour under the Nazis. What is different is that it is new again — a civilian car plant flipped back to munitions, right next to apartments, a park, a playground and an open-air pool, in a district with no living memory of weapons-making. Longevity normalises; sudden conversion alarms.
Zoom out, and the Wedding plant joins a dense national network: tank and howitzer works, missile plants, submarine yards, ammunition and propellant sites, radar and optronics labs — clustered around Munich, Kassel, Kiel, Bremen and the south-west.
It is Europe's biggest defence industry: roughly 200 firms in the trade body, an estimated quarter-million jobs including suppliers, and a record €13.3 billion of arms exports approved in 2024. A striking share of these sites sit within a short drive of a large city — the exception is explosives and proving grounds, pushed into the countryside.
Grouped by owner, the map has a clear centre of gravity. Rheinmetall — the group behind Wedding, Unterlüß and much of Europe's ammunition — runs more sites here than anyone, and in 2024 booked roughly €9.8 billion in sales, far ahead of the field.
Below, mapped sites per company (bars) with approximate 2024 defence revenue. KNDS, MBDA and Airbus are multinational groups; figures are group-level.
Draw a 10-kilometre ring around each site and the overlap with populated areas is hard to miss. The vehicle plants sit inside Kassel and Munich; the shipyards line the harbours of Kiel and Hamburg; and now a munitions line runs inside Berlin.
The sites nearest to a major city centre:
Filter by manufacturer or category, toggle proximity rings, and click any point for detail. Everything outside Germany is masked — only national territory is shown. Conversion sites from the story are marked with a ring.