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He goes by "Hunter” on the messaging app Telegram. And the young German makes no secret of his political orientation. He’s from a "NatSoc Family,” he claims, writing in English – a family with national-socialist sympathies. Where they live in the German state of Saxony, he writes, there are fewer "non-whites” than in western Germany, and the far right is gaining ground, "especially the militant scene.”

In a chat with a Telegram user claiming to share his views, "Hunter” goes into detail. He writes that he is training a group of teenagers and young men between 13 and 25 and posts photos of them marching in camouflage. Sometimes, they drive to Poland or the Czech Republic, apparently for target practice. He is planning to conduct detonation tests in the woods with a mixture of diesel and manure, he claims. His role model: Timothy McVeigh, the man who blew up a federal building in the U.S. state of Oklahoma in 1995.

* All messages are excerpts from chats, some have been anonymized

The actual name of this Neo-Nazi from Eastern Germany is Jörg S. What he doesn’t know while chatting: His alleged sympathizer is an undercover agent for the FBI, the U.S. domestic intelligence agency. Through their liaison officer in Berlin, the FBI tips off the German intelligence service and the public prosecutor.

After months of investigation, the police arrested Jörg S. in November 2024 together with seven other men. They are purported to have founded the terrorist group called the "Sächsische Separatisten” (Saxon Separatists). Jörg S.’s lawyer declined to comment. In previous statements he disputed any accusations of terrorism, claiming the defendants were a "relatively harmless hiking group.”

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 17/2025 (April 17th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

The authorities are convinced that Jörg S., 24, and his associates belong to a militant far-right subculture that in recent years has been attracting young men from around the world. Their groups have names like "Atomwaffen Division” (Atomic Weapon Division), "National Socialist Brotherhood,” or "The Base.” They long for the day when the state order will collapse, and they propagate violence against Jews, Blacks and migrants.

The "saints” that they venerate are right-wing terrorists like Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Stephan Balliet, who attacked a synagogue in Halle in 2019 and subsequently killed two people in the neighborhood.

AfD politician Björn Höcke with terror suspect Jörg S.

[M] Elsa Hundertmark / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: Vue Critique

Experts have termed the phenomenon "militant accelerationism.” Followers of this ideology believe in the decline of the West and try to speed up the process through acts of violence. The loose network of channels and chat groups is often referred to as "Terrorgram,” since they communicate using the Dubai-based messaging app Telegram.

They occasionally post photos of themselves wearing skull masks. Their digital pamphlets are teeming with swastikas and violent fantasies. Germany must "fully descend into chaos” before "something normal” can reemerge, the Neo-Nazi Jörg S. wrote in a chat. At one point he fantasized about a "white jihad.”

Photos posted in chats by right-wing extremists

[M] Elsa Hundertmark / DER SPIEGEL

The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), a non-profit organization in Berlin, recently ascertained just how large this subculture is. Their findings are alarming: According tothe study, which was made available to DER SPIEGEL prior to publication, there are at least 164 active chat groups that can be attributed to the "Terrorgram” network.

CeMAS counted 651 German users in these groups who have sent over 317,000 messages since 2022. According to the experts, 83 of them are "heavy users,” which points to an "increased potential for violence.”

One group in which German users were particularly active was named "Terror Wave.” Their members hid behind pseudonyms like "Gestapo Officer” or "Proud Nationalist.” The mass murderer Breivik "dindu nuttin wrong,” one of them wrote. Middle Easterners should be "killed like pigs,” wrote another. In the chat, the users shared info on how to make explosives. It has since been taken offline.

Miro Dittrich, right-wing extremism expert with CeMAS

Right-wing extremist expert Miro Dittrich of CeMAS

Miro Dittrich, an expert on right-wing extremism at CeMAS, speaks of the "most dominant current in right-wing terrorism” today. He says that it has long been clear that there are many Germans active in this online terrorist network but adds that he had not expected such high numbers. "Policymakers and the security services need to act,” he says. "Other countries are ahead of Germany in combating these structures.”

What began 10 years ago in the U.S. with an ominous "Atomwaffen Division” has now grown into a worldwide movement. New subgroups are constantly popping up on Telegram. This makes it difficult for the authorities to monitor them.

Since 2021, a hard core group has formed in the global Neo-Nazi subculture: the "Terrorgram Collective.” The group produces digital hate-pamphlets of up to 268 pages – one of the suspected contributors being a German user. The readers of these pamphlets are incited to blow up bridges and radio towers, or they are provided instructions on how to build a "dirty” bomb out of radioactive uranium. "Terror is the language of the unheard,” one of the documents states. In the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, the "Terrorgram Collective” is now classified as a terrorist organization and some of its leading figures have faced criminal charges.

Acts of violence from around the world testify to the danger posed by this parallel world:

In February 2025, a 17-year-old from the U.S. state of Wisconsin allegedly killed his mother and stepfather in order to get money for a planned assassination. In a manifesto found on his phone, he called for the initiation of a revolution to "save the white race." In a chat obtained by DER SPIEGEL, he asked for tips on how to carry out drone attacks with explosives.

In August 2024, an 18-year-old live-streamed a knife attack on the attendees of a mosque in the Turkish city of Eskişehir, which resulted in five injuries. He wore a skull mask and a protective vest with a black sun, popular symbols in the scene. According to investigators, he distributed "Terrorgram” pamphlets online.

In November 2022, a 16-year-old broke into schools in Aracruz, Brazil, and killed a child and three adults. The attacker likewise had connections to the online hate network. Because Telegram would not release the full user data, a judge temporarily blocked the platform in Brazil.

In October 2022, in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, a 19-year-old shot two people outside a bar frequented by homosexuals. In a manifesto published online, he described being influenced by the network’s propaganda. People in the scene proclaimed him "Terrorgram’s first saint.”

In Germany, investigators have already foiled multiple attacks. A Nuremberg court convicted a young man – active in the chat group "Feuerkrieg Division” (Fire-War Division) – of planning to commit terrorism. His online moniker was "Heydrich,” after the SS war criminal and Holocaust organizer Reinhard Heydrich. Similarly, in Brandenburg, a teenager from the "Terrorgram” scene received a juvenile sentence of nearly four years for planning a bomb attack.

A memorial following the attack in Bratislava in 2022

[M] Elsa Hundertmark / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: Vladimir Simicek / AFP

Equipment used by the attacker in Turkey in 2024

[M] Elsa Hundertmark / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: AliYerlikaya  / X

What CeMAS expert Dittrich finds especially disconcerting is how young some of the members of these chat groups are. "Many are underage,” he says, "some even 12 or 13 years old.” It alarms him to see such young people involved in a subculture that calls for attacks and venerates perpetrators. "If you belong to this scene, you’ve reached the end of a spiral of radicalization.”

In a chat from October obtained by DER SPIEGEL, members of a "Terrorgram” group announced an attack on a synagogue in Berlin. A boy was said to be planning a gun attack on the Jewish house of worship. "I'll wish him good hunting," posted one user. When the police intervened, they realized that the boy in question was a 13-year-old from North Rhine-Westphalia. The suspicion of a planned attack was not confirmed.

"A lot of teachers have little idea what their students are up to on the internet,” says Dittrich. "And oftentimes, unfortunately, neither do the parents.” Recognizing the codes of the scene is not always easy for outsiders.

SHTF is one of their abbreviations. It stands for "Shit Hits The Fan” and refers to Day X, the day when everything will fall apart. Day X will be followed, according to the ideology of the scene, by the "boogaloo” – a civil war from which the whites will emerge victorious.

Blocking channels that glorify terrorism is an effective measure, says Dittrich. But now as ever, Telegram takes this measure too rarely, as shown by the new study, Dittrich argues.

For years, the platform has faced accusations of not doing enough to counter extremist content. For this reason, the French police decided in 2024 to take a drastic measure and arrest the company’s CEO, Pavel Durov, during a layover of his private jet in Paris. The investigators accused Durov of tolerating criminal acts and failing to provide adequate data on suspects to the authorities.

Shortly thereafter Durov pledged to "significantly improve" his platform's measures against criminals. Since then, he has been permitted to leave France. When contacted, Telegram denied that it is a safe haven for violent extremists. The company says it has blocked 74,000 groups and channels related to terrorist extremism and calls for violence thus far in 2025, and that it removed more than 35.6 million extremist posts in just three months in 2024.

Reporting by DER SPIEGEL has revealed that multiple members of the "Terrorgram” network are politically linked. "My name is Luka. I'm 19, I come from Germany and I'm also German,” wrote a young man in one of the associated chat groups in summer 2024. "I hate LGBTQ and immigrants,” he added and posted photos of himself doing the Hitler salute. He plans to go into politics, he wrote, "as a young politician for the AfD.”

Right-wing extremist Luka Z. in a chat post (left), and standing together with AfD Bundestag member Matthias Helferich.

[M] Elsa Hundertmark / DER SPIEGEL

The man in question is Luka Z. from a small town in Brandenburg. According to his own statements, he became a member of the right-wing extremist political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) a few months ago. Photos show Z. with an influential party functionary from Eberswalde, as well as with AfD Bundestag member Matthias Helferich, who once described himself as the "friendly face of National Socialism.” Z. was also present at a demonstration of the right-wing extremist group "Deutsche Jugend Voran” (German Youth Ahead).

Some of the online circles that Luka Z. apparently moves in are even more extreme. For example, he participated in a chat group made up of Dutch Neo-Nazis. The group’s logo depicts a man with an assault rifle and a skull mask along with a swastika and the slogan "defend the white race.”

Luka Z. posted photos in the group, showing himself with a baseball bat. "Destroy the f* and immigrants,” he wrote in English under one of the pictures. He has, he claimed, already used the bat to clobber Antifa activists, breaking legs and a hand.

Apparently, he got along especially well with the administrator of the Dutch Neo-Nazi group. Luka invited him to his house near the German-Polish border. The Dutch user replied: "Kamerad, we are going to drink some German beers in your house." The person in question was 17 years old. In mid-March he was convicted in the Netherlands for incitement of terrorist crimes and membership in a terrorist organization. He belonged to the group "The Base,” which since July 2024 has stood on the EU’s list of terrorist organizations.

When approached for comment, Luka Z. claimed that the Dutch administrator never visited him and that he had nothing to do with "The Base.” The portrayal of his attack on Antifa activists was "somewhat overdramatized.” He claimed that he had withdrawn from these groups since joining the AfD around the turn of the year. People from the party had supposedly caught wind of the chats and told Luka that their content was too extreme. Now he understands that they were right, he said.

A changed man? Messages obtained by DER SPIEGEL contradict this story. As late as March, Z. was still active in a "Terrorgram” chat group and posted a video with a swastika and a black sun. After being confronted with this information in mid-April, Z. suddenly disclosed that he had left the AfD, claiming that he was "tired” of politics. The regional AfD leader of Brandenburg merely stated that "Mr. Luka Z. is not a member of the AfD.”

Among those involved in the suspected terrorist group "Sächsische Separatisten” were three AfD members, some of whom sat on the city council or worked for a member of state parliament. After the arrest of the men last fall, the party announced their expulsion.

The involvement of Jörg S., the putative head of the outfit, with the international "Terrorgram” scene appears to have been particularly intimate, both on- and offline.

Investigators discovered that he shared photos of the 2022 Bratislava attack in a chat group. In the images, one could clearly see the bodies of the two victims on the sidewalk in front of the LGBTQ bar. "LMAO,” Jörg S. commented.

The former military airport in Brandis-Waldpolenz

[M] Elsa Hundertmark / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: 126Edward / Wikipedia; Christian Grube  / IMAGO

In December 2022, he received a visit from a suspected member of the "Vorherrschaft Division” (Supremacy Division) from the U.S., another group from the parallel world of "Terrorgram.” During his trip to Germany, the American right-wing extremist apparently made a stop at the Bundestag. The authorities were also able to follow his tracks to the decommissioned military airfield Brandis-Waldpolenz near Leipzig.

After being tipped off by the FBI, the German investigators kept Jörg S. under close supervision. In summer 2024 they observed the men doing a kind of urban warfare training on the former airfield in Saxony. A few months later the police arrested the suspects.

Whether the authorities can rely on support from the U.S. in the future is doubtful. Under President Donald Trump, the FBI’s efforts to combat right-wing extremist groups have been scaled back. "The Germans,” says terrorism expert Dittrich, "have to get a handle on the problem themselves.”

Translated from the German by Charlie Zaharoff

The solder who calls himself "Little Hu” looks like a child, with round facial features and a slender upper body. He grins into the camera as he sits down on a stool wearing his army boots, next to him a bunkbed and lockers of a kind familiar from military barracks. "You’re sure?” a comrade asks him. Hu nods. Then the shaver begins to hum and thick black hair rains down from his head until all that’s left is short stubble. "Cool shit!” Hu says excitedly. His almost bald head now has the letter "Z” shaved into it, the symbol of support for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 17/2025 (April 17th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

And that is why he is here, Little Hu, born in 2005, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China from the eastern coastal province of Guangdong – and a soldier for the Russian Federation.

The Chinese soldier "Little Hu" in a social media video

The 19-year-old is one of likely hundreds of Chinese who have joined Putin’s invading army. Many of them document their daily lives on the battlefield on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. There is a video of a soldier showing the inside of a tank. In another, a fighter films his comrades during a tactical meeting. And Little Hu comes up over and over again.

In one clip, posted two months after the video of him getting his head shaved, he reports from "behind the front,” as he says. He has a small wound on his left cheek. "From shrapnel,” he says matter-of-factly. Hu has copied the flags of China and Russia into his profile. According to his IP address, he is in Ukraine. In his profile, he writes: "Thank you for your attention and your likes.”

Kyiv in early April. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is sitting at a long table in a gold-ornamented room inside the presidential administration building in the Ukrainian capital. He is surrounded by two dozen journalists. In front of the Ukrainian president are photos of men with buzz cuts and bare chests, a copy of a Chinese passport with each of them.

It is the moment when Little Hu becomes a player in global geopolitics – the moment when he is no longer just a teenager from Guangdong but seems to be a representative of the whole of China and its stance toward Ukraine. Because one of the passport copies on Zelenskyy’s table belongs to Hu.

"The Chinese question,” Zelenskyy says, "is a serious one.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv

The day before, Zelenskyy had posted a video on his Telegram channel of a Chinese prisoner of war. It shows a man describing his combat deployment in a mixture of Chinese, English and hand gestures. "And then … my commander … boom,” the soldier says, swinging his hands, which are bound with zip ties. The Geneva Convention forbids parading prisoners of war before the cameras, but Zelenskyy defies the prohibition. He seems to want to make a point. Ukraine, he writes in the post alongside the video, has taken two Chinese prisoners, but "many more” are fighting for Russia.

Back in the gold-decorated room, he now wants to prove his claim. Ukrainian intelligence, he says, has established the identities of 155 Chinese men who are serving or who have served in the Russian military. Most of them, intelligence officials believe, were recruited in the second half of 2024 and belong to a number of different units, generally with a low rank. In addition, there are 13 men who, according to the Ukrainians, were in selection process for a regiment within the 20th Guards Motor Rifle Division at the start of April, Hu among them.

"We think there are many more,” says Zelenskyy. It is completely out of the question, the Ukrainian president continues, that Beijing is unaware of the issue, particularly given that recruitment efforts for military service in Russia are openly promoted on Chinese social media. Zelenskyy says that he isn’t accusing Beijing of having ordered these men to fight for Moscow. But the list of those involved, he insists, clearly shows that the Kremlin wants to pull China into the war.

It is a horror scenario. Should it come to that, yet another nuclear power would be at war in Europe. But is the claim true?

The fact that Russia recruits fighters from allied or neutral countries is nothing new. There are proven cases from Cuba, Yemen, India and Bangladesh. North Korea’s military even sent an estimated 10,000 troops as part of an official mission. But soldiers from China, a global power and Russia’s most important partner, haven’t yet been involved. Or have they?

Zelenskyy’s announcement didn’t surprise her, says Chai Jing. Until 2015, she was one of the best-known reporters in Chinese state television, but her career came to a sudden end when she published a film about smog in China and the health problems it creates. After going into exile in Spain, she now operates a YouTube channel. In mid-March, she uploaded a documentary about Chinese soldiers serving in the Russian army. "They are quite high-profile on social media,” Chai writes in an email.

Subtitled Russian recruitment videos have been circulating in Chinese networks for some time. One of them shows how a bored taxi driver, a fitness trainer and a supermarket employee suddenly discover their inner warrior. The clip is accompanied by heroic music and ends with the slogan: "You’re a man. So be one!”

Passports of Chinese prisoners of war captured by the Ukrainians

Did Little Hu also see such clips? His passport, signed in the scribbly handwriting of a schoolboy, was issued in September 2024. It is quite possible that his trip into war was the very first time he left China.

His videos make it clear that he quickly regretted his decision. In one spot, he is cursing as he trudges through a snow-covered landscape. "My recommendation to people who are in China or Russia and thinking of joining the Russian army: Don’t do it!” He says he is in training in Rostov-on-Don, the Russian city not far from the Ukrainian border. "The food is terrible, you only get two meals a day, and if you’re not fast enough, you get nothing,” he complains.

DER SPIEGEL contacted Hu and two dozen other apparent soldiers on Douyin, some of whom have proper fan groups with hundreds of chat participants. In all cases, the IP addresses of the presumed fighters indicate that they are on Russian or Ukrainian territory.

Most of the responses are negative, with something of a soldierly tone to them: "Are you fucking with me?” "Screw off.” An account presumably belonging to Hu also responds. Asked if the deployment has met his expectations, he writes only: "No.” Then, he goes silent.

One of those contacted, though, opens up. On Douyin, he calls himself "Rabbit in the Bear Pit.” Videos show a man with a propensity for silliness. In one clip, he has stuffed animals shoved into the pockets of his military vest, another shows comrades dancing in a forest. The war is different than he thought it would be, he writes, "the ground was covered by the sleeping.” What? "By the eternally sleeping,” he specifies. Almost everyone in his unit is dead, he explains. He, too, urges his compatriots not to enlist.

He answers questions for two hours, soberly and without emotion. His responses come quickly – perhaps the conversation is a welcome change of pace. None of his comrades speak Chinese, he writes, adding that he is unable to speak English and his Russian is still poor. Still, he sends hisnom de guerrein Russian: "Koshmar,” meaning "Nightmare.”

Douyin user "Rabbit in the Bear Pit," aka "Koshmar."

He declines to provide his real name and the city where he comes from, but does say that he is in his mid-30s and had gained military experience in China prior to his service for Russia. He says he has been fighting for Russia for almost two years, initially as a mercenary with the Wagner Group and now as a member of a special forces unit in the Russian army. It is not possible to verify his claims. He says the first battle he took part in was in Bakhmut, where fighting continued from summer 2022 to spring 2023. After spending more than a year at the front, he says, he is now in a barracks in Russia.

Why did he join the Russians? He responds that his motivation was money rather than conviction. He says he also would have fought for Ukraine, just that to do so he would have needed an EU visa to travel into Ukraine through a European country and he doesn’t meet the criteria for such a visa. He has debts in China, he writes, more than a million yuan, the equivalent of over 120,000 euros. The restaurant he once operated went broke in the pandemic, he says. "Debt collectors were after me day and night, all my bank accounts were frozen. I had to flee.” In Russia, he says, he earns the equivalent of 2,000 euros per month. It is an amount similar to the earnings claimed by a Chinese soldier interviewed in Chai Jing’s documentary, who says he was receiving 1,800 euros per month.

"Koshmar” writes that he misses his family in China. But he cannot afford to return, he says. If he dies in the war, then at least his debts will be paid – "thanks to the compensation payments to my family.”

Financial hardship seems to be a common factor. Zelenskyy’s list includes a 42-year-old named Wang from the northeastern province of Jilin. An entry can be found in a Chinese court database involving a man from the same province with the identical first and last names and the same birthdate. The item in question is an enforcement order, issued in instances, for example, when a convicted person hasn’t paid a fine. The order was issued on January 17, 2025. It is conceivable that Wang, too, joined the Russian army to escape his debts.

That some Chinese have sought better fortunes in the military of their neighboring country is hardly surprising. China is currently in the grips of an economic crisis. The pandemic hit the country hard, and youth unemployment is so high that the government ceased publishing statistics for a time. It seems reasonable to assume that some frustrated young Chinese booked a ticket to Moscow.

The fighters appear to be foolhardy mavericks, many naïve, some reckless. They are apparently hoping to find adventure in the Russian army, their idea of comradery, the thrill of violence. Chai, the former television reporter, points out, however, that there are also Chinese fighting in the Ukrainian foreign legion, though likely far fewer than in the Russian military. She has produced a documentary about them, too.

During his appearance in Kyiv, Zelenskyy says nothing about them. Instead, he speaks of the Chinese soldiers in the same breath as the troops sent by North Korea. They were Russia’s first major error, he says. The recruitment of the Chinese is the second.

It is a somewhat fallacious comparison. Relative to the number of North Koreans sent by dictator Kim Jong Un, there aren’t many Chinese in the Russian ranks. There are just 170 documented cases – too many to simply dismiss the accusations as "groundless,” as the leadership in Beijing tried to do. A Foreign Ministry spokesman rebuked the claims as "irresponsible.” But when measured against the 1.4 billion population of China, it’s not a lot. And in contrast to the North Koreans, the Chinese are apparently coming on their own. That doesn’t make the People’s Republic a participant in the war.

On the other hand, Zelenskyy has good reasons for turning public attention to the Chinese fighters, with the most important being Donald Trump. The U.S. president has made Kyiv’s nightmare scenario a reality by turning to Russia. Many in his Republican Party view U.S. support for Ukraine as a waste of energy and money – and believe that China is the real danger.

Zelenskyy, it seems, is attempting to convince them that Ukraine is anything but a sideshow. That the war against his country is directly linked to China. Which is true – but not because of the fighters.

Officially, China insists that it is neutral, but in reality, Beijing is one of Moscow’s closest partners. China provides its neighbor with important dual-use products, goods that can be utilized for both civilian and military purposes: semiconductors, drones, vehicles. Without them, Putin could hardly continue his war. Since the invasion, Chinese President Xi Jinping has met with his Russian counterpart several times. The "no-limits partnership” proclaimed in early 2022 between their two countries has since deepened. Xi’s next trip is likely on the immediate horizon. He is expected to take part in May 9 celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. The military parade on Red Square is expected to also include North Korean troops. The Kremlin’s propagandists will, no doubt , do their best to get the most out of the event.

Xi’s interactions with Zelenskyy, by contrast, have been limited to a single phone call. During that call, in spring 2023, the two heads of state agreed that a special emissary from China should travel to Ukraine. The man chosen for the post, the career diplomat Li Hui, had served as his country’s ambassador to Russia for 10 years starting in 2009. He now frequently spends several days in Moscow, but his visits to Kyiv have generally been just a few hours long. People who have met him describe Li as someone who sticks closely to the talking points. During his first visit to Kyiv, Zelenskyy received him in person. Now, per murmurs in his office, the president considers personal meetings with Li to be a waste of time.

The Ukrainian president’s tone regarding Beijing has also changed. At a June 2024 conference in Singapore, Zelenskyy accused China of being "an instrument in the hands of Putin.” In September 2024, he brusquely dismissed a Chinese-Brazilian peace plan, which was unacceptable for Ukraine, as "destructive.”

Still, Zelenskyy has used such direct criticism sparingly. But now, for the first time in the war, he not only has two Chinese troops in Russian uniform, he also finds himself in the desperate position of having to attract the attention of the U.S. government.

And that attention is currently focused on China. Ever since Trump enacted punitive tariffs on countries around the world, China first and foremost, the back-and-forth between the two superpowers has ramped up almost daily. Zelenskyy apparently believes that publicly going after China is his best chance to reach Trump.

And it also likely explains the press conference held on a recent Monday afternoon in Kyiv by the SBU, the Ukrainian intelligence agency. The two men whose capture Zelenskyy had announced on his Telegram channel are led into the packed hall of the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform: a man with the last name of Zhang, born in 1988, and another named Wang, born in 1991. They are wearing the same uniform jackets they had on during their interrogation videos. Their handcuffs have been removed. Armed men in masks are standing in the background.

Press conference in Kyiv with Chinese prisoners of war

The event raises a number of questions. Is it really true, as an SBU spokesman insists at the beginning, that they are speaking of their own free will? This is impossible to verify, nor is the spokesman’s claim translated for them. That makes it all the more difficult to know what to make of their statements. The two apparently understood very little of what happened to them. Nobody, it appears, spoke Chinese in the Russian army and communication took place using gestures. They don’t even seem to know for certain what their unit was called, "because from the beginning to the end, we were never clearly told what unit we were in,” says Wang. It seems to have been the 7th Motor Rifle Brigade, a unit in occupied Luhansk.

From the bits and pieces gleaned about the men’s lives, it at least becomes clear that they joined the Russian army of their own accord. There is no mention of geopolitics in their accounts.

How did they know that one could become a soldier in Russia? From social media, says Wang. "It was in July of last year. I had been unemployed for months, so I started scrolling through Douyin.”

It is a long road from Panbowl Branch Road in Jackson, Kentucky, to the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Even further than the distance itself might indicate. From the house where JD Vance spent his childhood summers, it is 782 kilometers to the vice president’s residence. The villa in the heart of Washington was built in 1893 and is situated in a 30-hectare (75-acre) park, at the entrance to which stands the Master Clock, displaying the time accurate to 100 picoseconds. In front of the house on Panbowl Branch Rd. are overflowing garbage bags, the skeleton of a gas barbecue and a smashed cooler with no lid. The roof looks like it might collapse at any moment, which is why the owner prefers living in a trailer propped up on stilts next to the structure. That, at least, is what locals say in the town below.

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 18/2025 (April 25th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

In his book "Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance writes warmly of his time in Jackson. He describes the place in the Appalachians as an island of calm in the chaos of his youth, growing up with a drug-addicted mother and her constantly changing boyfriends. "There’s something about the mountains that holds a person’s soul,” says Stephen Bowling, head of the library in Jackson where Vance did research for his bestseller.

The house in Jackson, Kentucky, where Vance spent his childhood years.

But a drive down Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway towards Jackson provides a clear indication of how one of the world’s most powerful men grew up. The beauty of the mountains stands in stark contrast to the poverty of those living in the region, who spent decades mining coal and who now frequently survive on welfare checks or by selling parts from the wrecks lying around in the numerous informal junkyards. Jackson is located in a county considered one of the poorest in the country and which is no stranger to catastrophe: first the Civil War in the 19th century, then the collapse of the mining industry, and now fentanyl, the synthetic drug that has become one of the leading causes of death in the area.

Several men in U.S. history have made it to the White House from modest backgrounds. Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, Bill Clinton grew up with an alcoholic, gambling addicted stepfather in a god-forsaken corner of Arkansas. But nobody has gone through what Vance has, whose drug-addled mother drove off with little JD in the backseat and, unable to beat addiction, had her family provide urine samples on her behalf.

Vance’s rise looks a lot like an American fairy tale, as proof that anyone in the U.S. can still find success with enough effort. He had teachers who encouraged him and patrons who supported him. He joined the Marine Corps and studied law at Yale in one of the most renowned law schools in the world. Vance’s friends, his former comrades in the Marines and his ex-schoolmates all express great pride in his success. "It means the American dream still exists,” says Bradlee Avots, a former officer in the Marines under whom Vance served in Iraq. "It means that you can always become greater than the circumstances you grew up in.”

Strangely, though, success has not reconciled Vance with his country. The vice president is currently using his power to smash the America that made his rise possible in the first place. He wants to destroy the system, and Trump, who has proclaimed the 40-year-old Vance as the heir to his Make America Great Again movement, has given him the means to do so. Rarely in United States history has a vice president wielded so much power.

Vance doesn’t just have direct access to Trump, who invites him to lunch in the White House almost every week. The vice president is also present at virtually all of Trump’s meetings with other heads of state and government. In late February, it was Vance who started the spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that has inflicted lasting damage on the relations between the two countries. At the Munich Security Conference, instead of identifying Russian President Vladimir Putin as the greatest danger to Europe, Vance instead pointed to what he has diagnosed as an attack on the freedom of opinion on the Old Continent. It was a speech that established the foreign policy tone of the new Trump administration and shocked Paris, Berlin and Brussels.

But Vance hasn’t just trampled all over the established conventions of foreign policy. The government he belongs to has deported migrants to prison in El Salvador with no due process – a prison which, as the local government has said, can only be left in a coffin. The vice president is also driving the ruthless assault on the independence of American higher education facilities. An addresshe held in fall 2021 before the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando was called "The Universities Are the Enemy.”

The universities, he intoned, "lend credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas” that exist in the United States. "If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” And that is what the Trump administration is now doing.

Where does the fervor come from? For many years, Trump’s MAGA movement had no hard ideological core, a lack that primarily had to do with the movement’s leader. Trump has always been more entertainer than politician. A real-estate shark who organized beauty pageants and then achieved fame through a television show. The president does, to be sure, have political instincts that have long guided him, such as his belief that Europe and China are taking advantage of the U.S. and that America would be better off limiting its ties to the rest of the world. But for most of his life, he was the New York playboy who leaked his own seamy secrets to the city’s tabloids. Not even his most loyal fans would claim that Trump is a staunch conservative.

Vice President JD Vance visited the pope on April 20, one day before the pontiff died.

The same cannot be said for Vance. The vice president is a deeply religious man who converted to Catholicism in 2019 and visited Pope Frances in Rome the day before his death. He is a reader of books who doesn’t acquire his knowledge solely from watching Fox News in the evening. Vance has been influenced by the political scientist Charles Murray, who wrote an extremely controversial book about the ethnic distribution of intelligence, but who also penned "Coming Apart,” an early warning about social divisions in the U.S. He is a fan of the conservative writer Rod Dreher, who is a sharp critic of identity politics. And he has written about René Girard, the philosopher of human desire. The vice president has completed an intellectual journey that has led him to the fringes of the right-wing spectrum and to flirtations with ideas that were only recently considered unthinkable in the White House. Like many on the American right, he has a taste for provocation, intended to expose the left’s hyper-sensitivity, but which also serves to break through new taboos.

In mid-January, just before Trump was sworn in for his second term, a small publishing house called Passage Publishing held a party in the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The company is the publisher of "Storm of Steel,” the English translation of Ernst Jünger’s memoirs from World War I, along with the works of the British-Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Onits website, the publishing house says it was founded "as an alternative to the increasingly close-minded worldview of modern mainstream publishing.” In right-wing circles, however, Passage Publishing has achieved a certain amount of renown for putting out the essays of Curtis Yarvin, a former computer scientist who long wrote a blog under the pseudonym "Mencius Moldbug” and who became a thought leader of a milieu that goes by a number of different names – "Post-Liberalism,” "New Right” "Dark Enlightenment” – but which has one thing in common: a deep aversion to the progressive zeitgeist of recent years.

The party was a who’s who of the ultra-right. Trump’s former chief advisor Steve Bannon was there. Jack Posobiec was on the guest list, the man who promulgated the – absurd – theory that Hillary Clinton was operating a child-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria. His book "Unhumans” argues that liberals shouldn’t be treated as human beings because they are trying to start a war against all that is good and decent in the world. Vance praised the tome by saying: "In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.” Posobiec and his co-author, Vance continued, "show us what to do to fight back.” When Vance showed up at the party, he greeted the blogger Curtis Yarvin by saying: "Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” To which Yarvin answered: "Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”

That, at least, was the account given by Yarvin inan interview with Politico.

Blogger Curtis Yarvin has served as an inspiration for JD Vance.

When asked about it later, Yarvin said: "My main goal with JD Vance is honestly not to cause him any trouble." The 51-year-old lives in a nice house in the hills above San Francisco Bay. To describe him as eccentric would be a gross understatement. "Lord Yarvin,” as his acolytes call him, views questions as merely pesky interruptions to his never-ending torrent of ideas. As his wife levitates through the living room in a cream-hued silk kimono, Yarvin talks about his communist grandparents in Brooklyn. For him, recent American history – the protests following the police killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, the complaints about racism – are just the reincarnation of a power mechanism mastered by the communists in the U.S. of the 1930s. "It represents kind of the natural desire of a patron to aggrandize himself,” says Yarvin. "Having as many clients as possible, preferably who are prepared to do violence on your behalf.”

It's not always particularly easy to follow Yarvin’s train of thought. It is an endless chronology from Elizabeth I to Hitler and Stalin. In the middle of it, he has to drive his son to soccer practice, but that doesn’t keep him from continuing his stream of consciousness. Instead of just having a journalist from Germany as an audience, he now also has a teenager in cleats, who silently stares out the car window as his father explains how the world works.

In 2021, Vance cited Yarvin’s work during a podcast with the blogger Jack Murphy – which is astounding insofar as Yarvin’s approaches democracy with a mixture of ennui and arrogance that recalls early 20th century Germany. "If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” is a statement typical of Yarvin. When he speaks, he sounds like an amalgamation of Carl Schmitt, the right-wing philosopher from the Nazi era, and the cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler. His comments on slavery ("a natural human relationship”) have even managed to earn Yarvin fringe status on the otherwise scandal-resistant American right. Those who follow Yarvin have turned away from both democracy and established societal conventions.

In Silicon Valley, though, he achieved cult status over the years among investors who were uncomfortable with the prevailing zeitgeist. In a climate where even the slightest verbal misstep could morph into a scandal, "radical chic” was suddenly far right. And Yarvin delivered. His criticism of Anders Breivik did not focus on the fact that the Norwegian mass murderer slaughtered 77 people – but on the attack’s failure to produce acollapse of Norwegian "Eurocommunism,”as he wrote.

Yarvin developed ties with the PayPal founder Peter Thiel, for whom Vance worked for a time after graduating from university and who later donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio. The tech-billionaire Marc Andreessen, who famously turned away from the Democrats during the 2024 campaign and joined the MAGA camp, isa fan of Yarvin’s convictionthat Washington bureaucracy must be destroyed. Ever since Vance was elected along with Trump, the ideas of the "Dark Enlightenment” have had a seat at the table in the White House.

Yarvin believes that Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the U.S. through World War II, was the last truly influential American president. "FDR, unlike Alexander the Great or Julius Ceasar or Napoleon, actually conquered the world,” Yarvin says. Josef Stalin may have led the Soviet Union, he says, but FDR never saw him as his equal.

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin in Yalta in February 1945.

When FDR died shortly before the end of World War II, Vice President Harry Truman took over, who, in Yarvin’s narrative, wasn’t even close to having the ability to keep all the influence FDR had wielded inside the White House. This was the moment, according to Yarvin’s theory, that the power shift took place that continues to the present day – one in which a bureaucracy holds sway over Washington, no matter who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. It was the moment that the "Deep State,” as Trump and Vance refer to it, was born.

Yarvin also coined the term "cathedral” to refer to what he describes as aliaison between journalism and left-wing academia– a union which, he believes, determines the zeitgeist and is similar in its effect to a dictatorship. In a 2021 essay, he uses the fictional countries of Mundana and Mutopia to describe how the cathedral works. Whereas Mundana is an absolutist monarchy in which dissidents are hunted down with the help of the secret police, Mutopia is a progressive, liberal democracy. "Mutopia is governed by a permanent administrative state which implements policies designed by liberal professors at prestigious institutions and supervised by liberal journalists at prestigious institutions. These are hard gigs to get, and great gigs to have. Andno oneneed supervise the professors and journalists – they areself-watchingwatchmen. Nice!”

There is a kernel of truth in Yarvin’s analysis, namely that an intellectual monoculture has developed at American universities over the last several decades. The number of conservative professors has plunged dramatically.A 2021 survey foundthat just 3 percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences consider themselves to be conservative. At the same time, radical theories have become popular at American institutions of higher learning that don’t just criticize the liberal constitutional state, but even view it as an instrument of white, patriarchal power. From that, however, both Yarvin and Vance have drawn the rather audacious conclusion that the United States is now nothing more than a faux democracy – a country run by a bureaucracy that is permeated through and through by left-wing ideology. That is what Yarvin calls the "cathedral,” what Peter Thiel refers to as the "Ministry of Truth,” and what Vance has labeled "the regime.”

"I've always been very sympathetic to this idea that we don't have a real constitutional republic anymore,” Vance said in a2021 interview. "What we have is an administrative state, right? The administrative state controls everything.” That’s why it is necessary to make a radical break, he continued, and to start a revolution from above. "If we continue to let bureaucrats control the entire country, even when Republicans win the elections, then we've lost,” Vance said. If he could give Trump one piece of advice, it would be the following: "Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, not let him enforce it.”

At the time of that interview, Vance hadn’t even been elected to the Senate yet. But today, his comments read like a blueprint for the program that Trump has pursued during his first 100 days in office. The president has broken up entire federal agencies and threatened judges who have dared to question decisions made by the White House. Many in Washington have begun speaking of a constitutional crisis. Trump appointed a secretary of education whose primary task is that of dismantling the institution she runs. It is a plan that Yarvin christened "RAGE” back in 2012: "Retire All Government Employees.” Yarvin, though, added his advice that the United States be run like a company. He believes the country needs a CEO, which, as he allows, is essentially the same thing as a dictator.

Does Vance agree? His people insist that Trump and Vance have a mandate to fundamentally change America. The president, they say, didn’t just win the popular vote, they also emerged victorious in all of the swing states. Trump, according to their narrative, managed to prevail against a hostile media environment and a slew of indictments and legal proceedings. From Vance’s standpoint, it’s not Trump who is flouting democracy, but those who would put hurdles in their path.

But what value is a democracy when the White House no longer respects its rules? The president has mentioned on more than one occasion that he might be interested in a third term, which the Constitution clearly doesn’t allow. For Vance, the political rivalry is not primarily a battle for majorities but a war between good and evil. In 2021, he wasprofiled by theAmerican Conservative,a magazine that has become the intellectual voice for the MAGA movement. In the piece, Vance refers to himself as a reactionary and vents his rage at liberal America. "I think American politics is either going to be a place of permanent, effectively institutionalized civil war that ends in genuinely bad things,” he said, or the "modern ruling class” must be overthrown. "I don’t think there’s a common ground between the reactionaries and the regime,” he says.

In early April, Vance made an appearance at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that wrote "Project 2025,” essentially a roadmap for the second Trump administration. Vance was thereto introducea series of documentary films by his friend Rod Dreher, who spent many years as a columnist for theAmerican Conservativeand is currently living in Budapest as a fellow at the Danube Institute. The film is based on Dreher’s book "Live Not by Lies,” which Vance, in his speech, called one of the most influential books he has ever read. In it, Dreher criticizes the "new totalitarianism” of the American left, which, he avers, differs only in form from the old Soviet regime. "It’s not establishing itself through 'hard’ means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags,” Dreher writes. "This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”

If there is a term that the second Trump administration has repeated as a kind of mantra, it is "national emergency.” The president has used this alleged emergency to justify his unsparing crackdown on migrants, the expansion of domestic raw materials exploitation and the tariffs with which he has sent the global economy into a tailspin. An examination of the writings of Yarvin, Dreher and Michael Anton provides one with an understanding of where this feeling of impending doom comes from – and the source of the conclusion that almost any means is justifiable to ward off the leftist "regime.”

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Anton was appointed director of policy planning at the State Department in Trump’s new administration, but in September 2016, the former investment banker created a furor with an essay entitled "The Flight 93 Election,” a reference to the United plane that was hijacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001, likely with the intention of flying it into the White House or Capitol – only for the plane to crash into field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the terrorists.

In the essay, Anton described the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton as a life-or-death decision. "2016 is the Flight 93 election,” he wrote. "Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You – or the leader of your party – may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

"Flight 93” was one of the first texts to present the fight against the Democrats in such drastic terms. In Vance, Trump chose a vice president who amplifies the messianic character of the MAGA movement – the belief that it is up to this government to create a new America in which the boundary between good and evil is clearly defined and where one’s opponents must be given no quarter because doing so would be a display of weakness in this existential fight.

It is not without irony that Vance has declared liberal America to be his enemy. He spent his youth in Middleton, a town in Ohio which, like so many places in the Midwest, has been devastated by globalization. Middletown became wealthy through the steel industry, which lured Vance’s grandparents out of the Kentucky mountains with its well-paid jobs. But the industry began its steep decline in the 1980s, and the paper mills also shut down.

When you drive through town today, many of the villas still bear witness to past prosperity, but the center of Middletown looks almost like it has been bombed out: Vacant lots gape where shops once stood and empty stores have been boarded up. "Even the pawnshop is closed,” says Steve Dillman, who operated several grocery stores in Middletown until it was ultimately no longer profitable.

The city center of Middletown, Ohio is no longer what it once was.

It would have been simple for Vance to blame the demise of his hometown on the Democrats and their neoliberal policies. The argument that the Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama betrayed the workers of the Rust Belt is a matter of faith within the MAGA movement. But in his book "Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016, Vance blames the locals for their own misery, not the politicians. "People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,” Vance writes. "You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

Despite this criticism, Vance shares the view of many "hillbillies” that educated and prosperous America looks down on them. As a teenager, Vance worked for a time in one of Steve Dillman’s grocery stores. "A friend of mine recommended that I give him a job,” Dillman recalls. "He was always smiling, quiet, never caused any trouble. Everyone that worked with him liked him.” At first glance, you could almost interpret that job working for Dillman as the start of an incredible ascent, as the archetypal American story of a person born into the working class who, despite all of the difficulties aligned against him, still made it to the top. The story of a boy whose teachers, recognizing his intelligence, encouraged him, and who was given a job by a store owner who liked him.

As a teenager, Vance lived just a short walk from Dillman Foods. It’s not a wealthy neighborhood by any means, but it’s not bad either. His grandparents’ home on McKinley Street is a simple wooden house with a narrow front porch and two small windows looking out from the second floor. But the simple structure cannot compare to the villas where the families lived who could shop on credit at Dillman’s "He began to discover the differences in classes and of citizens in the town, how they were treated in businesses,” says Dillman. It was a realization that began eating at the 16-year-old. "I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac,” he writes in his book. "But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own damned tab.”

The house in Middletown where JD Vance was raised.

After finishing high school, Vance joined the Marine Corps. "September 11, 2001, had a big influence on a lot of us,” recalls one of Vance’s comrades, who would later serve with him in Iraq and who still counts the vice president among his friends. "We wanted to defend our country.” He says he still remembers how many young men from Ohio were at bootcamp in Parris Island, South Carolina, where young recruits received training ahead of their deployment. The time he spent in the Marines was a formative period for Vance. Just like in the supermarket back home, he performed his duties without fault. After bootcamp, he was sent to Haiti and then to Iraq, where he was responsible for press relations. "He was very smart and very mature,” says Bradlee Avots, Vance’s commander.

But his service in Iraq deepened his skepticism of his own country. "I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance would later write inan essayfor the Catholic magazineThe Lamp."I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.” It is a justifiable position given the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq. But it also deepened his view that a "regime” held sway in Washington that was fundamentally untrustworthy – a position he still holds today.

In late March, he visited the military base in Quantico, Virginia, where up-and-coming Marine Corps officers receive training. His helicopter touched down on the gigantic airstrip two hours later than planned and the vice president – clad in jeans, hiking boots and a green outdoor jacket – jumped out to greet the hundreds of young Marines who had been waiting since that morning. He saluted before hopping onto a stage and saying that he never managed to make it into Officer Candidates School at Quantico. "It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to run for vice president. I thought maybe it was time for the colonels and generals to listen to the corporals for a change.”

Vice President JD Vance during his visit to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia in March.

Vance, as vice president of the United States, still sees himself as a rebel against the establishment. At the presentation of the film of his friend Rod Dreher in early April, Vance said: "The way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth.” It almost sounds as though Vance was still the boy from Ohio struggling for success in the face of adversity.

Perhaps that is the key to understanding Vance. He has a chip on his shoulder, one that leads him to read condescension into any bit of help he receives, seeing it as a patronizing gesture from a powerful establishment that assures itself of its own respectability by promoting little JD. During anappearance in 2016, he said that one of the motivating factors behind writing "Hillbilly Elegy” was that he had felt like a "cultural outsider” at Yale. Four years later, he wrote of his time in law school: "I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying.” Yet another disappointment. Another betrayal. In 2021, that sentiment morphed into a claim that no reasonable American could send their children to the universities that propelled his own rise. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are giving our children over to our enemies and it’s time we stop doing it,” he said.

InVance’s narrative, it is the liberal camp that radicalized, not him. A turning point for him, he says, came in fall 2018 when the Democrats sought to block the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh – a conservative jurist for whom Vance’s wife Usha worked after completing her degree at Yale – with an "incredible campaign of character assassination.” If someone like Kavanagh can be dragged through the mud with a decades-old story, Vance said, then couldn’t it happen to anyone in the right-wing camp? "The thing I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt – there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power,” Vance told theNew York Times.

There is, however, another explanation for Vance’s transformation. Opportunism. There is a long stream of earlier articles, interviews and leaked text messages documenting Vance’s disdain for Trump. Vance referred to him as the "American Hitler” and as the "opioid of the masses.” When Trump kicked off his first campaign for the Republican nomination in February 2016, Vance penned an opinion piece forUSA Todayin which he wrote: "I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” There was hardly anyone from the conservative camp who was harder on Trump than Vance. But when he decided to run for the Senate from Ohio, he needed Trump’s support. So he made a pilgrimage to his residence in Mar-a-Lago, became friends with Trump’s son Don Jr. and publicly renounced his own words.

It was such a transparent flip-flop that Vance bashing became a genre of its own in the liberal American press. "JD Vance Joins the Jackals,” was one headline. Another: "The Moral Collapse of JD Vance.” The most rueful piece was written by David Frum, the former speech writer for George W. Bush. As a law student, Vance had once written for Frum’s website.The pieceexudes no anger, just disappointment in a person who so clearly sacrificed his principles to his ambition. "Many who knew the early Vance ponder the question: What happened to him? I don’t overthink that question; the answer seems obvious enough.”

Vance, if you will, has traveled the opposite direction in his assessment of Trump: He was initially disappointed only to then recognize the opportunities. Trump is 78 years old, and at last summer’s Republican Party convention in Milwaukee, he essentially declared Vance to be the heir to the MAGA movement. But Vance’s fate is now closely linked to that of the president. The radicalism of this administration could also drag Vance’s career into the abyss.

Vance’s friends on the right-wing fringe believe that the new administration’s fight against the "regime” is still far too hesitant. Liberal Washington may be shaking in their boots before Elon Musk and his wrecking crew, who have already fired thousands of civil servants on behalf of Trump. But Curtis Yarvin, for his part, believes the Tesla CEO hasn’t understood the vast scope of Trump’s mission. "Everyone accuses him of being on the far right,” Yarvin says of Musk. But that is a great misunderstanding. "He’s just a Democrat of 20 years ago. Elon Musk is a Bill Clinton Democrat.” It’s not meant as a compliment.

From Yarvin’s perspective, Musk and his team aren’t focused on fundamentally changing the government. Rather, they are satisfied with merely saving a couple billion dollars and promulgating fear. Yarvin expresses it with the following metaphor: "It’s like some late barbarian tribe that’s somehow slipped past the Roman army and gotten into Rome, like 500 of the. And what are they going to do? Barbecue a goat in the Pantheon, rape some girls, steal some shit. Like: 'Where are the legions? There are no legions. Let’s fuck some shit up!’”

At the moment, though, it doesn’t look like the Americans are in the mood for yet more chaos. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen steadily since his inauguration and are now deep in the red. As a candidate for the vice presidency, Vance addressed a number of issues that are important to many Americans. The exodus of well-paid factory jobs to China and Mexico. The endless wars in the Middle East for which young men from Ohio and Kentucky must risk their lives and not the sons from the Upper East Side in New York. The unwillingness of the Europeans to take care of their own security. The excesses of an elitist, dogmatic left.

But Vance, whose writing about America and his own biography was so nuanced in his book, has become an extremist himself during his voyage through politics. He has become a right-wing crusader. His administration’s trade policy is in the process of plunging the global economy into chaos. Vance favors a form of isolationism that has many Europeans questioning whether NATO, the most successful military alliance in modern history, still has a future. And in response to the illiberalism of the woke left, Vance has responded with an attack on the freedom of academia the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen since Joseph McCarthy’s inquisition on the search for communists in the 1950s. Do the Americans really want the kind of culture war the vice president is fomenting – a counterrevolution from the right?

There was a time when Vance had a watchful eye for the dark pitfalls lurking in a Trump presidency. "I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives,” he wrote in a 2016 essay a few months before Trump was elected president in 2016. "Maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspaper’s obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon.” But that day, he wrote, will come. "And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of 'Make America Great Again’ for real medicine.”

The question then becomes, why should they vote for Vance? A man who has become far more addicted to the Trump drug than many hillbillies have to fentanyl.

Eva Neidlinger, 34, is telling her story in a café in Babelsberg, the story of her and her great-grandfather. She reaches into her purse and unfolds a silk kerchief in which she has wrapped the pictures that her great-grandfather took so many decades ago. She pushes her teacup to the side and spreads the photos out on the table. Women in headscarves can be seen along with men in traditional clothing – and her great-grandfather in uniform. The uniform of the Wehrmacht, the military of Nazi Germany.

For a long time, she had known nothing of her great-grandfather, nor was she all that interested in him. Why would she be? Nobody in her family talked about him. These days, though, he’s almost the only thing she is thinking about – a function of the vicissitudes of life in general, and of her life specifically.

After finishing high school in Bavaria, she left for Switzerland in 2008 where she worked for a nongovernmental organization for several summers. It was a place where young people from all over the world came. She can’t really explain it, but she felt especially drawn to the Ukrainians. "I’m still friends with them today.”

[M] Scherl / SZ Photo, C. Schlegelmilch / akg-images, Sergey Ryumin / Getty Images

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 19/2025 (May 3rd, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

She visited her friends in Ukraine many times, even later when she was studying film direction at the Film University Babelsberg. One of her first documentary films told the story of a local politician in Ukraine who believed his country was on the cusp of a promising future. Shortly after it was finished, the Russian army invaded Ukraine. Eva Neidlinger’s friendships changed, becoming weighted down with her fear for the safety of the people she knew.

A bit over two years ago, she joined her family in Bavaria for Christmas. They all started talking together about the family’s history and about how they had turned out the way they had. And suddenly, this great-grandfather came up. Hardly anyone knew anything about him, just that he had apparently been killed as a Wehrmacht soldier during World War II "somewhere in the east.”

Wehrmacht troops marching into Kyiv in 1941.

German troops on the outskirts of Kyiv in 1941.

But then, her grandmother pulled out this box of photos that her great-grandfather had left behind. In the pictures, Eva Neidlinger saw places in Ukraine that she knew well: The Derzhprom building and Freedom Square in Kharkiv, the typical roofs of the rural areas surrounding Poltova, the coast of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. Her great-grandfather must have marched through Ukraine as a Wehrmacht soldier.

And that meant that he was an aggressor in a war that violated international law. "I wonder – did he see the land as part of the new 'Lebensraum’ (living space) for the Germans, as it was referred to back then? And what is my view, as a German today, of Ukraine?” says Neidlinger.

She pulls out the journal that her great-grandfather kept during the war – a great aunt had given it to her a few months before. Neidlinger is currently in the process of deciphering the diary, since her great-grandfather wrote it in the Sütterlin script used at the time.

She is planning on bringing the photos and the diary with her to Ukraine in the coming days. Together with Ukrainian curators and two additional artists, she is preparing an exhibition in Kyiv entitled "Memory.Interchange” in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. The show opens on May 9, the day after the end of World War II in Europe will be commemorated there. The exhibits, including Neidlinger’s family artefacts, are intended to trigger a discussion about the war back then but also about the current war Russia is waging against Ukraine.

Neidlinger hopes that she will someday be able to find out what her great-grandfather did as a soldier in the country. She wants to gain a better understanding of the responsibilities that arise from the past for her as a German – including responsibility for German attitudes toward Ukraine.

The Wehrmacht occupied the territory of Ukraine and turned the country into one of the main theaters of fighting during World War II, with over 8 million deaths including an estimated 5 million civilians. With the knowledge of the Wehrmacht, and sometimes even with its help, GermanSonderkommandosrounded up Jews and shot them, ultimately slaughtering around 1.5 million Jews on Ukrainian soil in this "Holocaust of Bullets.” Soldiers also took food from the starving population. Among the aims of the German war of annihilation was securing both the country’s grain supplies and the beautiful Crimean Peninsula.

Eva Neidlinger with the copied diary of her great-grandfather.

Neidlinger’s ancestor was one of 17 million Wehrmacht soldiers. Most of them did not join voluntarily, but that changes nothing about the atrocities they committed. For men of military age living in Germany during World War II, it was normal to serve in the Wehrmacht. It was also part of normal life during the Nazi period to take part in crimes – or at least accept them by looking the other way.

The evidence is widely known: In 1945, ever fifth German adult was a member of the NSDAP, even though the party didn’t accept everybody and ceased admitting new members for many years. Concentration camps like Buchenwald, Dachau and Neuengamme were easily visible and located near towns and villages. In the territory of the German Reich, there were more than 20 concentration camps and over 1,000 satellite camps. In excess of 13 million people were pressed into service as forced laborers in factories, on construction sites, in small companies, on farms or in households and were thus part of everyday life in Germany. The possessions of deported Jews were expropriated and publicly auctioned off – with much of this looted property still being bequeathed to younger generations today.

And: On the Righteous Among Nations list kept by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem to document those who helped Jews survive the slaughter, only 659 of the 29,000 entries are German.

Such facts, though, frequently remain strangely abstract. In the stories passed down, the perpetrators, accomplices or sympathizers are usually not from one’s own family. In 2002, the study "Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi” was published, compiled by a team led by the social psychologist Harald Welzer. The study documents how in the stories that families told of their ancestors, anti-Semites were frequently transformed into resistance fighters.

In the comprehensive MEMO study from 2020, 23.2 percent of the respondents stated that there were perpetrators among their ancestors, but 35.8 percent said they had victims in their family. The study was compiled by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence Bielefeld (IKG) on behalf of the EVZ Foundation.

In 2020, the weekly newspaperDie Zeitcommissioned a representative survey. In response to the question "What was your family’s position on National Socialism at the time,” 30 percent of the respondents answered "opposed,” only one in five said they "accepted” it and just 3 percent identified their own ancestors as "supporters of National Socialism.” More than a third said they didn’t know.

Last Tuesday, IKG and EVZ presented their new MEMO study. Once again, respondents make a clear distinction between the population at large and their own family. Only 20 percent "strongly disagree” with the idea that the prosperity of many families is still based on crimes committed during National Socialism. Yet almost 80 percent "strongly disagree” with the notion that their own family’s prosperity can be traced to such crimes.

It seems as though there is an unspoken agreement that dealing with the Nazi period can be outsourced to the memorial sites and museums and that families themselves are absolved from doing so in all but the most drastic cases.

Some ancestors of the worst war criminals have gone on record. Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank – who was a leading NSDAP politician, Hitler’s personal legal adviser and, as head of the General Governate of occupied Polish territories, earned the moniker "Butcher of Poland” – wrote several books about his family. Albert Speer, the son of the eponymous Nazi architect and armaments minister, spoke about his father in an interview with DER SPIEGEL.

Bettina Göring, the great-niece of Hermann Göring, an influential Nazi from the very beginning, wrote a book about her great-uncle last year. Kai Höss, grandson of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, also spoke with DER SPIEGEL last year after the film "Zone of Interest” hit the big screen, a movie in which his grandparents play a central role. These descendants faced up to the guilt of their ancestors because it was important to them. But the guilt of those ancestors was also far too obvious to deny.

Beyond such cases, however, there are countless families in which it is far trickier to establish the culpability of ancestors or even to find out exactly what they did in Hitler’s Germany. But for as long as so many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of average Germans refuse to recognize that a dictatorship can only last for 12 years if ordinary people support it, the picture will remain skewed.

Because if the majority of Germans are uninterested in accepting the truth about their own family histories, are they even able to identify the reasons for which democracy can fail today? Do they understand how anti-Semitism worked, how an entire group of people was marginalized? Are they able to adopt an acceptable approach to the current war in Ukraine if their knowledge of the National Socialist crimes committed in Ukraine remains abstract? What about the extremely complicated conflict in the Middle East?

Still, a kind of countervailing trend has been visible for a while now. Eighty years after the end of the war and of National Socialism, younger people like Eva Neidlinger are becoming curious about their family’s stance toward Adolf Hitler back then. The example of her great-grandfather’s deployment in Ukraine, says Neidlinger, made it clear to her how much many families don’t know. "And that has political consequences.”

A few weeks ago, Neidlinger attended a research seminar, where she learned how to work in archives and to approach historical documents. Historian Johannes Spohr, 42, has been giving such seminars since 2011 and says interest as recently been growing. A new generation is now joining in, Spohr says. In the past, his seminars were mainly attended by the grandchildren of the World War II generation, but now, great-grandchildren like Neidlinger are also enrolling.

Professional researcher Johannes Spohr at the Federal Archives.

Spohr has made a career out of helping descendants with their research into the Nazi period. He goes to archives on their behalf and sifts through documents – and along the way, he frequently finds out why they set out on this journey.

During the coronavirus pandemic, he says, many people finally found the time to clean out their cellars and attics, and many of them stumbled across old photos and documents with Nazi stamps for which they had no explanation. "And then came the 2022 full Russian invasion of Ukraine. People began hearing strange place names that were familiar from family stories.” Starting in 1941, Wehrmacht soldiers marched through places like Kharkiv, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk – and all these names were suddenly dominating the nightly news.

Many of his customers are also concerned about the political situation in Germany and the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, says Spohr. "They ask themselves if there are connections between the unprocessed Nazi legacy and the present.”

There is no single statistic that proves a growing German interest in their families’ National Socialist pasts. The number of queries at the Federal Archives, which holds files on institutions and people from the Nazi era, has remained consistently high at around 75,000 per year, with many of them focused on individual people. The Federal Archives are also, though, a central research site for the descendants of victims as well.

And yet there are a number of indications which, when taken together, seem to show that things are changing in Germany. The Working Group for Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust, an association for the descendants of both perpetrators and victims, has doubled in size, to 160 members, since the pandemic. That is, to be sure, not a huge number of members in absolute terms, but the trend is interesting. The association has been offering online events since the pandemic and has thus become better known among younger people. And the younger members, the association says, have mostly joined for political reasons – out of concern for Germany’s shift to the right.

Files and documents from the Nazi period. As the elderly generation passes away, their successors are stumbling across boxes of old keepsakes.

Indeed, digitalization has broadly lowered the barrier for those interested in looking into their ancestors’ histories. Files can be ordered over the internet and sometimes even read online. Addresses, contact persons, literature and brochures can all be found on the web. Still, any such search requires intuition, patience and knowledge about where to look.

Melanie Longerich, a journalist who works in the NS Documentation Center in Cologne, says it is a frequent occurrence that descendants are interested in the Nazi past of their ancestors but don’t really know how to proceed in their search for information. It is something that Longerich, 52, has also seen from comments generated by the podcast she produced together with her coworker Brigitte Baetz, in which they talk about how people can approach the project of investigating their family’s history during National Socialism.

For the history of her own family, she didn’t initially need much in the way of research skills. When her grandmother died in the last 1990s, she found a photo of her grandfather wearing an SA uniform. One year later, she received the diary kept by her grandparents for their children, which made clear the privileges they enjoyed thanks to their loyalty to the regime – such as a lavish wedding celebrated together with SA comrades and at which the Deutschlandlied was sung.

The grandfather, who had been unemployed for a long time, also received a public servant position thanks to his contacts. Jews had been forbidden by law from holding public servant jobs and the positions made available by the purge were frequently given to party loyalists. "It had always been said in the family that this grandfather was an asshole, that he drank and beat his children. But how exactly he had profited from the Nazi period, what he had done – his children never asked those questions, even though there was this diary in which he wrote it all down. But nobody ever read it,” says Longerich.

It was only after her grandmother’s death that Longerich began asking questions about the past – which is rather typical and one reason why family research now appears to be on the rise. Stephan Lebert and the psychologist Louis Lewitan mention the phenomenon in their book – "Der blinde Fleck” or "The Blind Spot” – which was published in April. "The armor of silence” about the culpability of ancestors begins to break down once those ancestors are no longer alive, the publisher’s announcement notes: "Because they no longer have to fear confrontation with their grandparents or parents, more and more people have begun researching their family history and examining how it has affected their own lives.”

Many grandchildren of people who lived through the Nazi period are currently clearing out the apartments and homes of parents who have either moved into care homes or passed away. Some find documents from National Socialism that their parents stowed away because the knowledge they held was simply too painful or intimate. Because of the time that has passed and the generational distance, grandchildren are less reluctant to approach the past, particularly once their parents are no longer alive.

The result has been the questioning of family narratives that may have been far too lenient with the truth. Those who either became aware of crimes or took part in them themselves frequently handed down their own versions of events to their children – sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Memories, as research has shown, are easily distorted and tend to conform to one’s wishes.

Children, meanwhile, have an extremely intimate relationship with their parents, says the Cologne-based doctor and psychotherapist Peter Pogany-Wnendt, the descendant of Holocaust victims who is a member of the board at the Working Group for Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust. First and foremost, he says, because children are existentially reliant on their parents during the first years of their lives. "The close bonds remain even if they don’t get along well” – which means, he says, that the stories told by parents are often not questioned.

The following generations, however, are far less encumbered by the emotions experienced by those who were children during the war and by their parents. Great-grandchildren, for example, each have eight great-grandparents, but have only ever known them in the rarest of cases. "The elderly often still feel directly guilty or are preoccupied with the question as to the guilt of someone else in the family,” says Eva Neidlinger. "My temporal detachment allows me to set aside questions of guilt, even while acknowledging them. For me, it’s more about a sense of responsibility for the future.”

Private Nazi-era document from Eva Neidlinger's family

Furthermore, says Neidlinger, her generation is far more familiar with psychological issues than their forebears. "It used to be the case that going to therapy was much more of a taboo, but today it has finally become the norm.” For this reason as well, she says, great-grandchildren are interested in what their ancestors went through. They want to know more about what shaped their families and themselves.

Normann Bötel and Bastian Klug are also looking into the lives of their great-grandparents. The two 28-year-olds met years ago on the internet, playing video games together. Bötel is a graphic artist and Klug is a research assistant in philosophy at the University of Giessen. They quickly realized that they shared a number of common interests. During an online interview – with one joining from Giessen and the other from Hamburg – they say that they started talking to each other about Germany’s rightward shift.

"Many in our generation are afraid of the future,” says Klug. "The AfD targets these people on social media, enticing them with topics like homeland, roots and identity.”

Bötel and Klug want to establish a kind of counteroffer. They are behind the multimedia project "Worüber wir nicht reden” or "What we’re not talking about,” a film and a fictional diary. The diary is based on interviews with 16- to 29-year-olds and is written from the perspective of a young person who learns that grandpa was a war criminal. The person is horrified that family members defend the grandfather, but also learns more about themselves through this confrontation with the past.

One’s own identity is not merely the product of pride and identification with perceived greatness, is the message Bötel and Klug want to impart, but also comes from a confrontation with one’s own past, as painful as that might be. They submitted their project for the "Talent Award” bestowed by the German Art Directors Club and know that they are going to win a prize, but they will only learn which one at the ceremony in late May.

Items from the multimedia project "Worüber wir nicht reden"

Photos from the multimedia project "Worüber wir nicht reden"

May 8th marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, and there are at least some people still around who can remember the war and the Nazi era. It is an opportunity to talk to them – perhaps one of the last significant anniversaries to do so. The political situation this time around is also different than on previous anniversaries: The AfD party, elements of which are right-wing extremist, will be present for the anniversary ceremony in the Bundestag, and the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East will continue.

All of that has an effect on those who set out to learn more about the Nazi generation. They are eager to hone their current political views with knowledge about the past.

But it also reinforces those who have never wanted to know about the past, and who are even less inclined to embark on a search now.

Historian Oliver von Wrochem, who is head of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial east of Hamburg and conducts research seminars and dialogue seminars on ancestors in the Nazi era, says there is a consistently high level of interest in such seminars, but believes that the group of those wanting to learn more about the past is but a "growing minority.” Unfortunately, he says, "there are opposing forces that want to remember the suffering of the German majority population and the consequences of the defeat for this group – and who are demanding an end to the "cult of guilt.”

The result is something of a mixed picture on this anniversary. There is curiosity, openness and questions – but also reservation, denial and defensiveness. Will grandchildren and great-grandchildren take advantage of the opportunity and break the silence in their families? Or will the possible culpability of one’s own ancestors for the collapse of the first German democracy, for the hatred and exclusion, for the crimes committed – will all that be forgotten because it seems unimportant or too embarrassing?

On a recent morning in Berlin, the historian Johannes Spohr heads off to work. A client of his wants to learn something about an ancestor. Spohr heads to the Federal Archives in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin, checks in at the security desk, enters the main building, puts his bag in a locker and sets his laptop in a basket emblazoned with the German eagle. At the file counter, he is handed a number of blue folders and he makes his way to the reading room to examine what is inside. There are four other men sitting there, all far apart from each other, poring over their own files. They don’t even look up when Spohr is photographed for this piece.

One of the documents that Spohr sets on his table is faded and worn, old lettering making clear what it is about. Spohr is accompanied by an archivist who is supervising the photo shoot – and both ask that we refrain from taking photos of the document or even writing about it.

Like most of Spohr’s clients, this one, too, is interested in learning the truth, but also wants protection from it – or at least from possible public reactions.

Eva Niedlinger has devised an artistic expression to portray this mixture of curiosity and reticence that is so typical of Germans 80 years after the end of the war and National Socialism. She recently took part in the "Enkel:Innen” art project organized by the Schloss Wiepersdorf Cultural Foundation, where descendants of Holocaust survivors worked together with descendants of perpetrators on creating art works. Neidlinger came up with the idea of wrapping the human sculptures in the castle park.

What is wrapped can become visible. But someone must decide to unwrap them.

Marion Schmidt had actually traveled to one of the most important gatherings of researchers to present recent developments at her university. The annual event held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is one of the most prestigious scientific conferences in the world, with AI researchers, astrophysicists, biologists and others making the pilgrimage to Boston.

Together with her colleagues from the Center for Tactile Internet at the Technical University of Dresden, Schmidt was eager to share their recent results, including smart gloves with the ability to recognize early on the next object a person is likely to grab.

Ultimately, though, says Schmidt, the podium discussion focused less on her research results and more on possible career opportunities in Germany. She says she felt almost like she was at an academic recruiting event: "Young students wanted to know how university studies in Germany work. Professors were asking how they could get an appointment at a university.”

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 18/2025 (April 25th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

Schmidt is the head of communications for TU Dresden and part of the university leadership. She was able to tell a NASA researcher, who was afraid of losing her job as soon as the following week, that five new professorships would soon need to be filled: Together with the German Center for Astrophysics, TU Dresden will be introducing a new course of study. Perhaps she might be interested? Initial contacts have been made.

Might NASA experts soon be coming to Saxony? Will AI researchers be leaving Stanford for Karlsruhe? Boston-based biomedical experts to Bavaria? Some appear to be thinking about it – while others are making concrete plans. This year’s AAAS conference seemed to hint at a potential brain drain – an emigration of academic elites out of the United States.

Many researchers are looking for a new home because the Trump administration has launched a broadside attack on science in the U.S. Undesirable students who do not hold American passports are to be deported.

Students like Mahmoud Khalil, who helped organize pro-Palestinian student protests at Columbia University in New York and who has been accused by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio of undermining U.S. foreign policy. Khalil’s defense attorneys deny the accusation, citing freedom of expression. Or the South Korean Yunseo Chung, who has been living in the United States since she was seven years old and took part in demonstrations.Under Trump’s leadership, Washington is also planning to slash financial support, with universities like Harvard, Columbia and Cornell losing hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, in funding. Some universities, not knowing where the money will come from in the future, have responded with hiring freezes, delayed infrastructure investments and cancelled commitments for doctoral positions.

Harvard University alone stands to lose several billion dollars in federal funding and its academic integrity is at stake. The Trump administration recently demanded that Harvard change its admissions processes and that it share all relevant data with the authorities. In addition, Washington demanded that student rights be curtailed and international students who break the rules be reported to the authorities. Harvard President Alan Garber refused to accept the conditions and instead filed a lawsuit against the government.

Undeterred, Trump doubled down. As a non-profit institution, Harvard enjoys wide-ranging tax privileges. But the White House now wants to have that status reviewed. Were its tax-free status revoked, Harvard could owe billions in taxes on its assets.

Trump is also shutting down the most important source for medical research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have a budget of almost $48 billion and send about 80 percent of that total onward to U.S. universities and research institutes in the form of grants.

In early April, though, 1,300 agency employees were laid off and the NIH was ordered to cut $2.6 billion in spending this year. In total, the NIH budget is to be slashed by 35 percent. Other agencies under the aegis of the Department of Health have suffered a similar fate, including the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration.

The consequences will be vast, and they will affect every part of the country. Research doesn’t just produce improved therapies and better medical drugs, it also stimulates the economy. According to a report by United for Medical Research, every dollar of NIH funding produces a profit of $2.56 – a return that stock market investors can only dream of. State funding also guarantees more than 408,000 jobs across the country.

Where are the researchers supposed to go? Some would like to lure them across the Atlantic to Germany. Including Patrick Cramer.

Max Planck Society President Patrick Cramer is seeking to attract U.S.-based scientists to Germany.

On a Monday in early April, Cramer, the President of the Max Planck Society, attended a reception in the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. He had spent the previous week touring through the U.S., visiting Stanford University and colleges in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Finger sandwiches and sparkling wine were served, and then Cramer stepped up to the podium. "We are going to launch a Max Planck Trans-Atlantic program,” he told the audience. Several new research centers are to be set up to promote cooperation with leading U.S. institutions and additional positions for postdoctoral researchers will be offered. It is a well-aimed move: The young scientists he is targeting frequently have to generate funding for their research themselves and are particularly affected by the measures taken by the Trump administration. Cramer’s announcement was well-received by the American academics who attended the event.

Following World War II, the U.S. invested more money in academic research and development than any other Western industrialized country. It is a strategy that has produced 400 Nobel prizes for the country, far more than any other.

According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, the U.S. was responsible for 27 percent of global research and development activities in 2019, followed by China with 22 percent. Japan (7 percent) and Germany (6 percent) were well behind. Trump’s attack on science and the universities threatens to reverse that trend.

Indeed, more and more scientists who thought they would be spending their careers in the United States are now on the search for a new academic home. We got in touch with four of them.

Neuroscientist Danielle Beckman: "Colleagues often cry."

Beckman works as a neuroscientist at the National Primate Research Center in Davis, California

Eight years ago, I came to the U.S. from my home country of Brazil after completing my doctorate. At the time, many of my colleagues dreamed of working in the U.S. The country was a place full of opportunities for us, the center of research – even though Donald Trump was also president at the time. Now it feels like being on the sinkingTitanic.

My research focuses on Alzheimer's, dementia and Long Covid. In the lab, I study monkey brains: I dissect and prepare them to look at them under the microscope and learn about the diseases.

In Brazil, I mainly worked with mice. But I wanted to do research on primates because it is more relevant to the treatment of humans. That is another reason why I moved to a U.S. university. That was possible here.

Unfortunately, there's not much left of it. Grants and research funding are being cancelled and decisions on applications are being postponed indefinitely. Our lab was supposed to receive $2.5 million, then the funding was abruptly cancelled. The whole team was counting on the money; it was supposed to last for the next three years. Now, people are likely to be laid off. The lab may even have to close down completely.

I don't know any researchers who have not been affected by the government's cuts. The mood at the university is depressed, colleagues often cry. Those who voted for Trump are now regretting it. They didn't expect him to restrict science so severely. Many of us who research neurological diseases were particularly surprised.

It seems as if Trump wants to take revenge for what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. When words like "vaccination,” "COVID” or "prevention” appear in our research proposals, they are not approved.

Doctors marching in protest in New York. The Trump administration has pushed through major cuts to medical research.

For the first time in my life, I don't feel welcome in the U.S. It makes me angry that what I have worked hard for is no longer valued. I made it through Trump's first term; I won't make it through the second.

A professor from Germany who, like me, is researching Long Covid has contacted me. In the summer, I will be moving to Munich. I'm currently taking care of the work visa and the move. It's a lot of work, but I'm sure it will be worth it.

I was ready to settle permanently in the U.S. Now, I have to change places again and start over just to be able to continue my work. That makes me sad.

For universities in Europe, this is an opportunity. They can now recruit people from the U.S. and strengthen their own research.

But the U.S. is jeopardizing its supremacy in research. They are not only chasing away scientists like me who have been here for a long time. They are also scaring off young researchers who would otherwise have come here. I no longer know anyone abroad who still dreams of doing research in the United States.

Climate researcher Colin Evans: "I applied immediately."

Evans is a climate scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York

I saw the posting at the perfect time, about a week after Trump won. I found it online in mid-November and was really excited. It was a position studying climate extremes over Ireland and I applied immediately.

I primarily study weather and climate phenomena like extreme precipitation and heat. But given the current state of affairs and attacks on climate science, it feels like I won't be able to continue this research in the coming years – and that's assuming my position remains at Cornell.

Our institute has so far been largely funded by grants from the National Oceanic an Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation. These institutions are being gutted, with many climate scientists already having been fired and more expected. They are reviewing grants with key terms like "climate” and "greenhouse gas,” and they will likely be cancelled.

When I started my doctorate in 2017, it was Trump's first term, and climate researchers were already avoiding specific terms, changing "climate change" to "climate variability,” for example. But it is a lot worse now. I've seen folks who are usually pretty outspoken suddenly go silent.

Demonstrators at Harvard University against interference by the Trump administration.

I knew this was coming. As much as Trump tried to distance himself from "Project 2025" during the election campaign, a lot of us saw that Trump was absolutely in favor of it. The manifesto is a direct attack on climate science and institutions like the NOAA and the National Weather Service. And Trump isn’t the only one who supports it. Vice President JD Vance said that "the universities are the enemy.”

So I was all the more excited when the employer in Ireland contacted me for an interview. Then, at the end of February, they informed me that I was the top candidate. I was incredibly humbled and excited. And more than anything, relieved. When I told my current supervisor, he was both sad to lose me, but also slightly relieved that he won't have to worry about my salary in the coming months.

I've signed the employment contract and received permission to work and reside in Ireland. We are all excited: my wife, my four-year-old daughter and me. It’s a huge step and a big change. But it’s one we think is best for us and, most importantly, for our daughter.

I start in Ireland at the beginning of June. Overall, I will be earning slightly less than here in the U.S. But the cost of living, aside from housing, is lower in Ireland. The salary reduction is worth it to me. I want to be able to engage in climate research without worrying each day whether or not my position is going to be terminated. We need to get the climate crisis under control.

Climate researcher Benjamin Santer: "For the first time since 1983, I find myself without an academic home."

Santer is a former climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California

I'll soon be 70. But now, I'm going to start a new life again and move to a different continent. I want to continue doing research. I want to keep sharing my findings with the public without fear of reprisals.

For over four decades, I have been seeking to identify human fingerprints in climate data. I started doing this work in Germany. Starting in 1987, I spent five years in Hamburg at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology under Professor Klaus Hasselmann, who received the Nobel Prize in 2021 for his work in climate science. It was in Hamburg that I first used the fingerprinting methods developed by Hasselmann.

In 1992, I switched to the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, where I was asked to be the lead author of a key chapter in the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We concluded at the time that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” In the following years, we helped identify a clearer picture of human fingerprints on climate.

Columbia University faculty protesting against the Trump administration's actions against the university.

But during Trump's first term, everything changed. The president and his team spread many false claims, saying that the causes of climate change were unknown, or that there had been no significant warming since 1998. We demonstrated in detail, in peer-reviewed scientific studies, that these claims were false. In response, the first Trump administration made two complaints about my behavior and the funding for our attribution research team at Livermore was cut.

I decided to step down from a leadership role to allow my younger colleagues to continue their work and left Livermore. I then worked for two other institutions and continued to find strong evidence of human effects on climate. I recently ended both affiliations after Trump was elected for a second time – to protect my colleagues from reprisals. Now, for the first time since 1983, I find myself without an academic home.

But I want to keep working. Not for the money; I have enough for a decent living. But because it's so important to get to the bottom of the effects of human-caused climate change and talk about it with other people. And because science is a defining part of my identity.

That's why I'll be moving to Europe soon. I plan to apply for a special skilled worker visa and return to research. To do this, I'll be selling my house in Oregon and leaving behind friends and family. It will be particularly hard to say goodbye to my son. We're very close, but he sees his future here in the U.S. I don't – not under this president.

Researcher Adam Siepel: "I'm white, male and heterosexual. Therefore, I'm not as vulnerable as other scientists."

Siepel is a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York

I analyze large amounts of genetic data, for cancer research, for example, or to understand patterns of gene expression.

When our politicians claim we're in a race against China for scientific supremacy, I believe them. But why are they then taking measures that are destroying our scientific infrastructure in America?

The mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services and at the National Institutes for Health, which fund medical research, shocked me. The people who still work in these agencies barely communicate with the outside world. Hardly any researcher who submits a research grant application now knows whether their application will even be processed or whether it will end up in the trash.

A protest in Manhattan against the Trump administration's massive cuts to scientific research.

I, personally, was lucky: The grants for my research projects were approved several months ago. I'm also in a comparatively stable position. I have many years of experience, good working conditions and an institute behind me that only partially relies on funding from our national government. Furthermore, I'm white, male and heterosexual. Therefore, I'm not as vulnerable as other scientists.

But the way science and universities are being treated here scares me. Other researchers and institutes are now having to lay off employees because they no longer receive funding for their work and don't know if the money will ever come back.

Many ideas for successful products and services have emerged from government-funded research projects at universities. Often, professors and students found a small startup based on a promising project – which then develops a product and grows into a larger company. If we in America no longer support these projects, it will set us back in competition with China or other countries.

The development of young academics is also being hampered: This would normally be the season for recruiting student and research assistants or doctoral students. But many institutes are afraid to hire these people because they don't know if they can pay them.

This has consequences: Not only is work in the laboratory left undone due to a lack of staff. But many young scientists are wondering whether they should pursue a different path outside of academia. Or whether they should leave the U.S.

My wife and I are also seriously considering it. In the past few weeks, I have contacted research colleagues in Canada, Spain and Switzerland, and I will soon call one or two acquaintances in Germany. I described the situation here in the U.S. and asked them to let me know if anything happens in their area. It's not easy to find anything comparable to my position. And there are also family reasons that make it difficult for us to say goodbye, especially our elderly parents. Otherwise, we probably would have left already.

If the politicians in charge continue as they have in recent months, they will be surprised at how quickly a brain drain can occur. Then we in the U.S. will have to seriously fear for our scientific dominance.

It’s two hours after midnight. The extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila is trudging through the death zone on K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, following the beam of her headlamp.

To her left, the mountainside plunges almost vertically, hundreds of meters into the depths. Above her on the right is an enormous hanging glacier, known as a serac, groaning and cracking menacingly in the freezing cold.

She is only about 400 meters from the top. One final steep ascent and Harila will have reached her goal.

The Norwegian woman is aiming to complete a staggering, record-breaking project. Within just three months, she has climbed all of the highest mountains in the Himalaya and Karakorum. When she reaches the peak of K2, Harila will have summitted all 14 8,000-meter peaks on the planet, faster than anyone ever before.

Titelfotos: Florian Gaertner / DER SPIEGEL; Guglielmo Mangiapane / REUTERS

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 20/2025 (May 10th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

Chunks of ice are continually plunging down from the serac above, which is why Harila and her guide, Tenjen Lama Sherpa, are trying to get through the passage, known as the Bottleneck, as quickly as possible.

But suddenly, their path is blocked. In a narrow traverse, the track up the mountain has collapsed. Harila, as she recounts, looks down into the abyss, and freezes. A man is hanging there from a rope. He is upside down.

His legs are apparently injured. He lost his backpack in the fall and he is also no longer wearing gloves – at minus 20 degrees Celsius in the thin air of the death zone, at an altitude of 8,200 meters.

The man, a Pakistani expedition helper, is named Muhammad Hassan. He was part of a team of Sherpas that climbed up K2 to set fixed rope for the climbers attempting to make it to the summit on this day.

Harila stands motionless in the traverse. She can hear Hassan moaning in pain. And she has to make a decision. Between the man hanging there on the rope, a man she doesn’t know and who isn’t part of her team. Or the summit.

K2, with an altitude of 8,611 meters, lies in the Karakorum mountains in northeastern Pakistan on the border with China. It is revered by mountaineers – and feared. Since it was first climbed in 1954, 96 people have died on its slopes. Swept away by avalanches, killed by falling rocks in camps high on the mountain or frozen to death during the ascent. There have been falls in which entire rope teams have been wiped out.

Still, a steady stream of adventurers attempt the climb every year. No other 8,000-er has as much to offer mountain climbers as K2. Those who conquer the summit pyramid earn no small amount of respect in the world of alpinists.

In July 2023, tents belonging to 12 expedition organizers are set up at K2 base camp on the Godwin Austen Glacier. Some 200 climbers have booked the climb, more than ever before.

The women and men are from Europe, the U.S., Asia and South America, and they have each paid up to $70,000 for the tour. Among them are businesspeople who have never before set foot on an 8,000-meter mountain, professional mountaineers like Harila, a multimillionaire from China and a teenager from Nepal.

A high camp on the shoulders of K2.

Extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila climbed all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks in just 92 days.

Base camp lies at an altitude of 5,150 meters, a provisional campsite at the end of the world, including field kitchens, lounge tents with internet access and even a bar serving beer.

July 2023 sees an unseasonable amount of snowfall up on the mountain. Sherpas and high-altitude porters climb up time and again to prepare the route and install fixed ropes for the clients.

The guests acclimatize to the altitude with short day hikes, getting ready for their ascents. After each one of these trips, young mountaineer-influencers report back to their followers, relating just how exciting it is to be deep in the Karakorum.

Kristin Harila arrives at base camp at the end of July. July 23 saw her standing on the 13th peak of her quest, the 8,051-meter tall Broad Peak, a neighbor of K2. She takes a short walk through the camp and then vanishes into her tent to gather the strength she will need for her last big performance.

Harila is from a town in northeastern Norway where the sun never climbs above the horizon in the winter and temperatures sometimes plunge to minus 20 degrees Celsius. In her youth, she was a successful cross-country skier and even qualified for the national team. After her sporting career came to an end, she worked as a manager in a number of different companies.

In 2015, she climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya and discovered her passion for high-altitude mountaineering. Four years later, she was ascending peaks in Nepal and the Andes. In 2022, she summited Mt. Everest for the first time. By then, she had begun approaching mountaineering like a competitive sport.

During one of her expeditions, she came up with the idea of trying to set a new record. She sold her apartment, started looking for sponsors and found an expedition organizer, Seven Summit Treks in Nepal, to organize her race through the death zone.

She got started in April 2023, and by the middle of July, she had managed to climb 13 of the 14 8,000-ers by the middle of July. Many in the mountaineering community were astonished by Harila’s courage, stamina and tenacity. But there were critics as well, because of the huge amount of logistical support she received, the number of oxygen bottles she went through and the fact that she sometimes flew by helicopter from one mountain to the next.

Here on K2, Harila is accompanied by Tenjen Lama Sherpa and other Sherpas, experienced mountaineers who, taken together, have climbed a number of 8,000-meter peaks. The team also includes weather experts, a cook, high-altitude porters, doctors and a cameraman.

K2 in the Karakorum is considered one of the most difficult of the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks to summit.

Kristin Harila with other climbers on the peak of Shishapangma in April 2023.

The men immediately set about making preparations for summit day. They have to hurry. According to the weather report, July 27 and 28 will see promising conditions. After that, a storm is expected to roll in.

But the fixed rope for the mountaineers to clip into during the ascent hasn’t yet been set from Camp 3, at an altitude of 7,350 meters, to the summit.

A team of Sherpas and high-altitude porter are assigned to take care of the job. All of the large expeditions make men available for the rope-fixing team.

Muhammad Hassan, who will later be fighting for his life in the death zone, is chosen by his expedition for the job. His task is to carry rope for the Sherpas.

There is a strict hierarchy among expedition helpers. As a high-altitude porter, Hassan is rather low down on that hierarchy. His job on the expedition team has been to carry oxygen tanks and other equipment from base camp up to the camps higher on the mountain.

Now, as a member of the rope-fixing team, he sees an opportunity to move up. If he does a good job, he might even be able to guide clients to the summit as a Sherpa in the future. The job high up on the mountain is a dangerous one, but Hassan isn’t afraid. He wants to prove himself so he can finally earn enough money for his family.

Hassan’s hometown is in one of the poorest regions of Pakistan. He lives with his family in a small, multi-family dwelling. Electricity comes from a generator and there is a communal kitchen with an open fireplace. His three young children do the washing up in the river flowing through the valley.

Muhammad Hassan, engaged as an expedition helper, was unfamiliar with the harsh conditions in the death zone.

Before he set off for K2, the Pakistani agency he works for sent him $765 to purchase the equipment he would need on the mountain, but he passed the money along to his wife instead. The down jacket he is now wearing for the climb has been borrowed from acquaintances, along with the insulated pants, crampons and harness.

Hassan stands to earn a $500 to $800 "carry bonus” for lugging the coils of rope up the mountain. He can hardly believe his luck. To earn the bonus, he has to carry the rope to an altitude of around 8,100 meters, but he apparently decides to take advantage of the opportunity and climb all the way to the top. He wants to demonstrate that he has what it takes to summit the mountain. His assignment to the rope-fixing team is his opportunity to prove himself as a mountaineer.

Muhammad Hassan tells his relative Hassan Shigri, who has also been assigned to the rope-fixing team, of his plan. Shigri is worried about his impetuous cousin, who has no clue what conditions are like high up in the death zone – about the extreme cold and the thin air, in which you slowly lose control of your senses as your organism begins shutting down and, ultimately, failing completely if you don’t get off the mountain quickly enough.

Shigri warns Hassan against trying for the summit, but he won’t be dissuaded. During their trips to the high camps, Hassan insists, he was faster than the Nepalese Sherpas.

To reconstruct what happened during the ascent to the top, DER SPIEGEL spoke with mountaineers who were on K2 that day in addition to consulting eyewitness accounts from those who experienced those dramatic hours in the Bottleneck. Kristin Harila, the Norwegian extreme climber, answered a long list of questions in writing and also made herself available for an extensive video call.

On the afternoon of July 25, the rope-fixing team starts out for Camp 3. The expedition teams begin their climbs about eight hours later – almost all of them at the same time.

A view of the K2 summit and the giant serac hanging over the traverse.

Mountaineers heading toward the summit of K2 in the dark.

A German climber is also part of the caravan. Cameraman Philip Flämig from Wiesbaden is filming a documentary for the Austrian broadcaster Servus TV. Flämig records the stages of the ascent. The climb begins after midnight, heading up through a frozen labyrinth, past towers of ice and deep crevasses.

There is a lot of freshly fallen snow on the steep flanks of the mountain, which is why the guides decide to skip Camp 1 and head directly up the ridge to Camp 2 at 6,760 meters, which is better protected from avalanches.

Step for step, the men and women fight their way up the mountain, gasping and coughing. Flämig, an experienced alpinist, calls out advice to those with less climbing experience. "Get your body close to the rock and hold on tight. There are plenty of good holds,” he tells them.

Just before Camp 2, they all have to climb up through a 30-meter gap known as "House’s Chimney.” The passage has been made easier with a fixed rope ladder, but a traffic jam develops nonetheless.

"I mean, this is a ton of fun,” says Flämig, grinning into the camera as if he was on a day hike in the Alps. Other climbers seem anxious, happy to be additionally secured with a rope by their Sherpas.

Teams in commercial expeditions are usually completely random groups of people. Bankers and blue-collar workers, experienced mountaineers and total beginners, braggarts and stoics. For a few weeks, they put their fates in each other’s hands, hope for decent weather and place their trust in the expertise of the guides, who do their best to calm the fears of their guests as they skirt yet another deadly drop-off.

As the customers get closer to the top, summit fever begins to kick in. Fear and doubt are replaced by an overwhelming desire to get to the top at all costs. Some lose all common sense. Every year, tragedies occur because climbers who are completely exhausted simply refuse to descend. And time and again, summit fever has led mountaineers to leave weakened comrades behind.

At Camp 2, the Sherpas have to free the tents from the snow that has fallen. The clients enjoy the view of the Godwin Austen Glacier far below. Harila has also arrived. They enjoy a dinner of granola bars and dehydrated astronaut food.

After a rest, the teams head out in the middle of the night for Camp 3. Snow is falling, the wind has grown stronger, and the sound of avalanches can repeatedly be heard.

Flämig, the cameraman from Wiesbaden, films the column of climbers. "They all want to get to the summit. All of them. And they are all clipped into a single rope. It’s crazy,” he says into the microphone. He zooms in, showing a wobbly anchor that has been pounded into the rock and is holding the fixed rope.

View of the Godwin Austen Glacier.

"They don’t understand just how crazy this is,” says Flämig.

At Camp 3, at an altitude of 7,350 meters, the climbers collapse into the tents that have already been prepared for them. They are now breathing supplemental oxygen from bottles. Sleep is out of the question. The wind is whipping the sides of the tents.

Kristin Harila begins her ascent to the summit at around 8 p.m. Muhammad Hassan, meanwhile, is higher up on the mountain with the rope-fixing team, heading towards the Bottleneck.

The Sherpas have hardly taken any breaks at all during the ascent and Hassan is feeling the altitude. He is exhausted. One Sherpa tells him that he should turn back if he can’t continue. But Hassan decides to keep going anyway.

Once they get to the Bottleneck, the Sherpas install the fixed rope using ice screws. Hassan waits a bit lower down, sitting in the cold for over an hour until the work has been completed. He then starts climbing up after them.

Hassan is eager to rejoin his group. At the end of the crossing beneath the serac, he steps on a small cornice, a snowdrift that has formed above the abyss. And it collapses under his weight. He has no chance to react.

The fixed rope he has clipped into breaks his fall, but two anchors pull out of the ice, so that he is now hanging on the wall five to six meters below the traverse.

Hassan tries to climb back up to the traverse, but he slips down again. He gets tangled up with his crampons and is now hanging upside down in the rope.

Harila arrives at the traverse at around 2 a.m. She and her team have left the other expeditions behind. Her cameraman, Gabriel Tarso of Brazil, is filming the summit push with a camera attached to his helmet. The grand finale.

Climbers in the Bottleneck high up on K2.

The site of Muhammad Hassan's accident. More than 70 mountain climbers walked past him on their way up the mountain.

At 2:15 a.m., Harila reaches the site of the accident. She can see Muhammad Hassan hanging there in the light of her headlamp. One of her team members tries to climb down to him – and almost falls himself.

Harila and her guide, Tenjen Lama, stand there staring downward for several minutes. They can see that the man’s clothing shifted in the fall and that his bare stomach is now exposed to the cold. The fixed rope has wrapped around his leg. He is no longer able to free himself.

Harila says to her guide: "We have to help him.”

2:30 a.m.: Tenjen Lama tries to pull Hassan up, but he is unable to. More and more climbers have begun stacking up behind them in the traverse. "What’s wrong?” they call out. "Why have you stopped?”

A couple of climbers try to push past Harila, but Tenjen Lama screams at them: "Go back!” If someone else falls into the fixed rope now, additional ice screws could fail and a group fall could be the result.

2:45 a.m.: Hassan Shigri, the cousin of the fall victim, has left the rope-fixing team and climbed back down to the site of the accident to help his relative. He watches as Harila’s cameraman, Gabriel Tarso, descends to the victim. The Brazilian manages to turn Muhammad Hassan around so that he is no longer hanging upside down.

Hassan seems listless and he is babbling. He has to get off the mountain. Otherwise, he has no chance of surviving.

Using a pulley, Tarso sets up a block and tackle. As 3:30 a.m. approaches, he and Shigri are able to heave Muhammad Hassan back up to the traverse. He gives him hot tea and puts his mask on Hassan, giving him oxygen.

To now bring Hassan down the mountain, the teams would have to stop their ascents. All of the climbers would have to descend and the Sherpas would face the challenge of rescuing Hassan from the traverse, with ropes, ice screws and blankets. There would have been plenty of oxygen on the mountain for such a rescue. The expedition teams always have extra bottles along for their customers.

Hassan would likely suffer significant frostbite. But he would at least have a chance at survival.

But none of the teams waiting at the traverse take the initiative. Nobody makes any move to start a rescue operation.

And by this point, Kristin Harila and her Sherpa have left the site of the accident. They have continued on their way to the top.

Harila has made her choice. For the summit. One last slope and she will have done it.

What Harila doesn’t realize is that the story of her record and the fate of Muhammad Hassan became inextricably intertwined at the Bottleneck. Both wanted to reach the peak of K2. Hassan was eager to prove that he could keep up with the Sherpas from Nepal. Harila needed the mountain for her record. Hassan helped set up the fixed rope for Harila to clip into. When he ran into trouble, she kept going.

Mountaineer Kristin Harila: "We all knew there was nothing more we could do for him."

She saw no possibility that the porter could still be saved.

During her video call with DER SPIEGEL, Kristin Harila showed footage that her cameraman had taken in the Bottleneck. Muhammad Hassan can clearly be seen in the video, hanging from the fixed rope. Radio messages can be heard. You get an impression of just how steep the terrain is.

The situation was dangerous, says Harila. Challenging and chaotic. At around 3 a.m., she says, she heard about an avalanche over the radio. Out of concern for the rope-fixing team higher up, she says, she and Tenjen Lama decided to check on the men. "We had also done what we could in the Bottleneck.”

But the rope-fixing team wasn’t in trouble. So why didn’t she return to the accident site to help out? Why did she continue onward to the summit?

"The return route had been blocked by the queue of other climbers. It would have been more dangerous to descend and turn back in the traverse where subsequent teams were still ascending than to continue to the summit. Each expedition team uses different radios, so it is not possible to communicate with the other teams. This is also why it was impossible to communicate to the teams ahead that there had been an accident," Harila wrote to DER SPIEGEL.

The decision "to make it to the summit was based on the dangerous conditions that day and on reports of problems with the rope-fixing team higher up, not on a desire to set the record.”

3:45 a.m.: A chain reaction begins in the traverse. Even as Gabriel Tarso, the Brazilian cameraman, is kneeling down next to Hassan, the other mountaineers begin trudging past. One after the other, they make their way past the injured porter. None of them offer assistance. Shigri, Hassan’s cousin, will later say that one of the climbers stepped on his leg with his crampons. Another demanded that he get out of the way.

At one point, Muhammad Hassan grabs the leg of a man stepping over him. But the climber pays no attention and continues on his way.

Tarso is stunned. Nobody seems to care about the dying porter. He looks at Shigri and says: "Brother, it’s just me and you. There’s nothing more we can do here.”

Following dramatic events up on the mountain, controversy frequently erupts about what exactly happened. The thin air makes it difficult to think clearly and witnesses often provide contrasting accounts. When accidents happen, there are almost never pictures or video footage.

This time, though, is different. Philip Flämig, the German cameraman, is about 200 meters below the traverse at 4 a.m. on the day of the accident. He sees that some climbers are turning back because of the traffic jam in the traverse and he has also decided to go no further. The rumbling of an avalanche that narrowly missed him a short time before is still echoing in his ears.

Before heading down, though, Flämig wants to take a few more shots of the summit. He sends up a drone that he has been carrying in his backpack, a Mavic 3, which can fly at altitudes of up to 9,000 meters.

Shortly before sunrise, he steers the drone towards the mountainside and films the climbers at the traverse. On the tiny monitor of his controller, Flämig can’t see exactly what is going on at the Bottleneck. But like a flying eye, the drone’s camera records the scene.

By 5:30 a.m., Flämig has used up the last of his batteries and he descends to Camp 3. After a brief rest, he continues all the way down to base camp. There, he has a look at the drone footage on his laptop – and realizes what he has filmed.

Muhammad Hassan is clearly visible lying in the traverse. In the snow next to him is Hassan Shigri, who is massaging his cousin’s shoulders. You can see climbers moving past them on their way up. You can see that Hassan is moving his legs. The timestamp on the recording reads 5:31 a.m. By that time, Muhammad Hassan has been exposed to the cold for three-and-a-half hours.

Flämig’s drone also films Kristin Harila still ascending further up the mountain. At 10:45 a.m., she reaches the summit, and with that, she has reached the tops of all 14 8,000-meter peaks in just 92 days. A world record.

She makes a video for her fans following along on Instagram. "We have reached summit number 14,” she says, smiling into the camera. Crystals of ice are flying in front of her face. She thanks her Sherpas, her supporters and her sponsors.

Her cameraman Gabriel Tarso arrives at the summit about 40 minutes after Harila. He could no longer stay with Hassan because he was running out of oxygen, and he would have put himself in danger as well. Tarso will later say that he climbed without oxygen for part of the ascent until he reached a Sherpa who had an extra bottle for him.

In total, around 70 climbers reach the summit of K2 on this morning. That, too, is a record. Selfies are taken. High fives exchanged.

During the descent, they all pass the site of the accident again in the afternoon. By then, Muhammad Hassan is dead.

Mountains are not lawless spaces. There, too, an obligation exists to help those in need to the degree possible. In commercial expeditions, though, the willingness to exhibit solidarity vanishes quickly. Such tours aren’t cheap, after all.

On the other hand, mountaineers in the past have repeatedly surpassed themselves in extreme situations. Just two weeks before the accident on K2, a Mexican group on Broad Peak left behind a Pakistani porter who was suffering from altitude sickness just below the summit. The man would almost certainly have frozen to death if the Austrian mountaineer Lukas Wörle had not found him lying in the snow. Wörle broke off his ascent and dragged the porter out of the death zone, thus saving his life.

K2 victim Muhammad Hassan didn't have a guardian angel that day on K2.

The family of Muhammad Hassan, the high-altitude porter who died on K2. The youngest son never had a chance to meet his father.

Muhammad Hassan had no guardian angel, nobody to take pity on him. He was useful for as long as he could carry equipment for the mountain climbers. Once he fell, though, he became an impediment. A burden.

The mountain tourists didn’t feel responsible for the high-altitude porter who had run into trouble. They had booked a trip up K2. And the Sherpas were focused on doing their job and getting their clients to the top of the mountain. Because they only get a bonus for summits.

Ultimately, Hassan was just a bit of collateral damage on an otherwise immensely successful summit day.

When Kristin Harila returned to base camp late in the evening of July 27, there was a brief fireworks display for the queen of the mountain, a standard ritual following successful summits.

About two weeks after the drama on K2, the first stories about the events at the Bottleneck began appearing in newspapers. Then, Flämig’s drone footage went viral. The image triggered an outcry. Media outlets across the world expressed outrage at the "Shame on K2.”

Mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner lamented that the behavior of the climbers marked a low point in the unscrupulous business of high-altitude mountaineering. On the 8,000-ers, ego had triumphed over empathy, Messner said.

Harila felt the full brunt of the events on K2. Critics accused her of prioritizing her record over the life of the porter and she was bombarded with hateful comments on social media.

During her video call with DER SPIEGEL, Harila spoke calmly and matter-of-factly about what happened. And she defended her actions. Saving people in the death zone is always extremely difficult, she pointed out. The critics, she said, have no idea how dramatic the situation was for everybody. Hassan hadn’t received enough mountaineering training and wasn’t adequately equipped to be climbing on K2, she said, adding that she and her team did everything they could to help the porter. But "no one could have survived the situation Hassan was in,” she wrote in a response to DER SPIEGEL.

The climbers who were in the traverse at the time cannot be blamed, she insisted. "We all knew there was nothing more we could do for him.”

Pakistani officials investigated the accident. In their report, they wrote that Muhammad Hassan did not have the necessary know-how to be on K2 and his equipment was inadequate. Still, they noted, the climbers at the Bottleneck had perhaps prioritized their ambition over Hassan’s life. "All the alpinists were purely focused on their long-awaited summit push and all members had tunnel vision,” the investigators wrote.

The Brazilian Gabriel Tarso became the tragic hero on K2. He tried to save Hassan. But he was unable to do so without help.

K2 has brought Kristin Harila no happiness. Her record is overshadowed by ongoing debates in the mountaineering world about whether she did everything in her power to save Muhammad Hassan.

Because in late July 2024, his body was recovered. Eight high-altitude porters from Pakistan demonstrated that it was possible to bring a person down from the dangerous Bottleneck. The men climbed up to the traverse, chopped Hassan’s body out of the ice, lowered it down with ropes and then carried it down the mountain.

Hassan’s wife, who was widowed by the accident, now must raise their children by herself. Three of her sons are now in school. The fourth never met his father.

He was born six months after the accident on K2.