Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo

Author:Ioan Grillo [Grillo, Ioan]
Language: eng
Format: epub

The gun maker Heckler & Koch sits in the quaint town of Oberndorf in the hills of the Black Forest. I walk there with another peace activist, a reverend called Ulrich Pfaff, who is sprightly in his seventies, marching up the steep green paths that surround the H&K factory. He points out where I have to avoid stepping or I could be arrested for trespassing.

It’s a smaller factory than Cugir’s in Romania and higher tech. With sophisticated machinery, it has only about 750 workers to churn out millions of guns.

Perched in the beautiful Neckar Valley, the town of fourteen thousand boasts a dynamic history of gun making. In 1874, smiths here founded Mauser and built the most popular infantry firearms of the era, which they sold to governments from Turkey to China. Latin American generals were fans of Mausers, and soldiers wielded them in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and, of course, Mexico.

When Hitler rose to power, Mauser became gun maker for the Reich and used prisoners from labor camps for shitty jobs outside the factory walls. When the Allies won, they took machines from the factory, and Mauser was shuttered. However, three of Mauser’s former workers founded their own company, H&K, in 1949, which was ready when Germany was allowed to restart its weapons industry a few years later.

In the mid-1950s, H&K developed the Gewehr 3, or G3, an infantry rifle that was embraced by NATO along with dozens of armies, competing with the Kalashnikov and the M16. The weapons spread, supported by what Jürgen describes as a “military-industrial-political” complex that developed in Germany. There are now an estimated fifteen million G3 rifles in eighty countries, arguably making it the second most popular gun after the Kalashnikov. The quaint town in the Black Forest supplied the wars of the world.

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