Coming Soon: A German Explosion

“Everyday life in Germany has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take.” That was the verdict of Dr. Sven R. Larson in the European Conservative last month, and it’s worth taking seriously.

A perfect storm of economic decline, a migrant crisis and a government that suppresses free speech are leading to a dramatic explosion.

Shortly after that article, news leaked that Volkswagen is planning to close four of its German factories and eliminate 100,000 jobs—15 percent of its global workforce. Reuters said it would be “the largest restructuring in automotive industry history.”

It’s a huge deal for a company that has never closed a factory in Germany.

Worse, the leaks revealed the results of an internal poll of nine members of VW’s management and supervisory boards. Six said they do not believe the company has a future. Its shares are down 25 percent so far this year.

It’s the latest piece of bad news for Germany’s manufacturing industry:

• Germany’s steel federation warned in May that the sector is at a “turning point” due to high energy costs and declining demand.
• In April, the government was forced to halve its economic growth forecast for the year to just 0.5 percent—compared to 2 percent for the U.S.
• Germany lost 127,300 industrial jobs over the last year, according to a May study by consultancy EY. That’s a fall of 2.3 percent.

The EY report also highlighted a 10 percent drop in foreign businesses launching projects in Germany. “In Germany, the high tax burden, high labor costs, expensive energy and at the same time a paralyzing bureaucracy are slowing down investment events,” warned Henrik Ahlers, head of EY Germany. Germany’s “inability to reform” gave it a global reputation. “Unfortunately, not much remains of the image as a strong quality location and economical rock in the storm,” he warned.

This isn’t just making Germans poorer; it’s hurting their self-image. It is hard for Germans to take obvious pride in their pre-1945 history. So instead they take pride in their economic miracle—Germany’s comeback as a manufacturing powerhouse in the decades after the war.

Migrant Crisis

Some in Germany want to take pride in the way they welcomed in Syrian migrants. But many also see its effect on German society. Around 16 percent of those in Germany don’t have German citizenship—yet they account for 34 percent of crime suspects. Around 900,000 Syrians live in Germany, and 115,000 of them were identified as suspects by police in 2024.

Syrians in Germany commit crimes at a rate 16 times higher than an average German. For those from Afghanistan, its 14 times.

In some states, half of all violent crime suspects are non-Germans.

Incidents of rape are rising alarmingly. In 2018, there were about 8,000 reported cases. In 2025, it was 14,000. Migrants are significantly overrepresented in sexual crimes.

The impact on a high-trust society is huge. For example, France has had issues with people dodging fares on public transportation for decades. Germany’s rail system was built on the assumption that most would be honest and buy a ticket. There were no checkpoints or turnstiles—just occasional inspections. That’s one mild example, but it is shown in many less tangible ways. The influx of large numbers that play by different rules means that the trusting society many Germans grew up with is gone.

Not Allowed to Complain

Many are outraged. The German filmmaker Uwe Boll has produced a new film, Citizen Vigilante. It shows migrants brutally killing Europeans—based on examples of real-life attacks. It then shows those migrants being killed by a blond-haired, blue-eyed former American soldier.

Boll made the film because of migrant attacks in Europe. He said:

If you look at what happened in Hamburg, where the rapists walked free without any penalty, the coverage in the media was like “Oh, the poor perpetrators.” It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track. There is a huge difference between so-called “hate speech” and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter any more.

Boll says he is not encouraging people to take matters into their own hands. Instead, in the words of his protagonist to Interpol: “If the politicians who pay you do not fight against Islamism and the woke Left, the population will soon do as I do and carry out a great cleanup themselves.”

Boll is warning of an explosion too.

Germany’s film classification board refused to give the movie any rating—effectively banning it from release in the country—before backing down after weeks of pressure.

German police are fed up but too afraid to say so publicly, investigative journalist Liv von Boetticher told Die Welt last week. Once the cameras weren’t rolling and they were off the record, the “pretty much unanimous opinion was: It’s getting worse and worse,” she said.

• One police officer told her, “The Germany we know is disappearing.”
• Another said, “In Germany it is open season for robbery and rape.”
• “Even the most serious crimes often have surprisingly few consequences,” she was told. “Far too often, perpetrators more or less get away with it.”
• “Some police officers have even told me, quite literally, ‘We’ve already lost this country,’ or ‘This country is finished.’”

The inability of German elites to stomach any debate or major criticism of their handling of the country is a major part of this “pressure cooker.”

Germans are banned from insulting their political leaders on social media by Section 188 of the German Criminal Code, passed in 2021. Last year, almost 4,800 criminal cases were launched under this law. Even if someone is ultimately found innocent, they would still have been through a punishing ordeal.

• Police raided a man’s house after he called the former Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck a “moron.”
• One man was fined over $2,300 for calling Chancellor Friedrich Merz a liar.
• Another had to pay $115 for calling a politician a “pompous fool.”
• Another was prosecuted for posting a meme showing Merz as Pinocchio, before his case was dropped after public outcry.

‘A Perfect Storm’

It’s this lack of any kind of outlet that prompted Dr. Larson’s warning. “[I]f anything, increasingly hardline political persecution will continue to lead Germany into the dark realm of tyranny,” he wrote, continuing:

What we can expect, in other words, is for the German government to ignore the formation of a perfect storm of societal decline. Instead of recognizing the real threats to Germany’s future, the government in Berlin will continue to fight the symptoms of that decline: growing support for AfD [Alternative für Deutschland], declining morale in police and perennial budget deficits.

The German elite’s methods of suppression will become harsher and more unforgiving. A government that transitions from democracy and freedom to totalitarianism and suppression of dissent will sooner or later, with eerie predictability, try to dictate the nation’s economy in the same way it dictates politics and public opinion.

At that point, Germany’s political decline will escalate to an economic implosion.

He’s right. The only group that will discuss all these problems is the AfD. It wants to limit migration, shake up the German economy, and it tried to repeal Germany’s censorship law.

No wonder it is close to having an absolute majority in at least one German state. While every other German party flounders, the AfD is going from strength to strength.

Yet this is also a party with major baggage—to put it mildly. Its top leaders deliberately use Nazi slogans. They give speeches about the need to be proud of the “accomplishments” of their soldiers in World War ii and want to end commemoration of the Holocaust. But in pressure-cooker Germany, many voters don’t mind handing power to a Nazi-sympathetic party if it solves their problems.

Those who know Germany well have warned of this kind of explosion for decades. Niklas Frank, son of the Nazi war criminal Hans Frank, told the bbc in 2017:

As long as our economy is great, and as long as we make money, everything is very democratic. But let’s wait, and hopefully not see, if we have five to 10 years of heavy economic problems, and the swamp is a lake and is a sea, and we swallow again everything.

A Rising Beast

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry and his predecessor Herbert W. Armstrong have warned about this change in Germany for even longer. “If a real crisis develops, will the Germans call for a new führer?” Mr. Flurry asked in the December 1991 Trumpet issue. “Your Bible says that is going to happen! That crisis will probably be triggered by an economic collapse in the U.S.”

We’re close to that crisis now. The strongman is almost here. “The rise of this extreme party [the AfD] is just one sign of a German society in trouble,” Mr. Flurry wrote last August.

“It’s this strong, charismatic leader that Germans, and many other people across Europe, are desperate for,” he wrote in that same article. “They see their country spinning out of control.” Nor is this just a German phenomenon. “People don’t trust European bureaucrats,” he wrote. “They want a strong leader to rescue them. They are calling for a new ‘Charlemagne’ to lead the European Union.”

All the way back in 1950, Herbert Armstrong described European nations becoming “distrustful of America and thinking more and more about uniting themselves into a united states of Europe.” To do that, they needed a “new supreme leader—the successor of Adolf Hitler—to rise up and assert himself and take command.”

How closely these longstanding forecasts match the Europe of today. These men talked about an “explosion” and “a government that transitions from democracy and freedom to totalitarianism” for decades.

Why? Because this is what your Bible says will happen in Germany.

Revelation 17 describes a beast—an empire in biblical symbolism—led by a woman, or a church. It rises and falls repeatedly. This could only be describing the Holy Roman Empire that has repeatedly dominated Europe.

“And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space,” states Revelation 17:10.

When God revealed this prophecy to Mr. Armstrong, five of these kings were past and Hitler was on the scene. One more resurrection is to come. Verse 12 describes 10 kings, showing this final strongman rules a union of 10 nations. This is why in 1945 Mr. Armstrong said Germany would rise again as part of a sort of “European Union.”

The EU currently has 27 nations. It will take some kind of crisis to shake it down to 10. That could happen in the same “explosion” that brings this strongman to power.

Germany, and all Europe, is ready to explode. That strongman will be here very soon. God says He is raising him up to correct the sinning peoples of Britain and America. Now is the time to understand what is happening, before it is too late. Read our free book A Strong German Leader Is Imminent.