Germany

Siemens AG, the German industrial conglomerate, paid more than $1.4 billion in bribes across 60+ countries between the mid-1990s and 2007, including contracts in Argentina (national-ID), Bangladesh (telecom), Iraq (Oil-for-Food), Nigeria (telecom), and Venezuela (rail). German prosecutors raided Siemens's Munich offices in November 2006. On 15 December 2008, a joint SEC, DOJ, and Munich prosecutor settlement imposed $800 million in US penalties and €395 million in Germany — totalling over $1.6 billion, the largest FCPA settlement at the time. CEO Heinrich von Pierer had resigned in 2007. Siemens subsequently established one of the most extensive corporate compliance programmes in history.

On 31 August 1939, SS Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks led a staged false-flag attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland). Concentration camp prisoners and local Silesian activist Franciszek Honiok were dressed in Polish uniforms and killed at the scene — the so-called "Konserve" (canned goods) operation. Combined with simultaneous attacks on Hochlinden customs post and the Pitschen forest service station, it formed the pretext for Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Naujocks's 1945 affidavit to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (PS-2751) is the sole surviving direct testimony. Verdict: confirmed.

In February 2009, Baxter Biosciences' facility in Orth-an-der-Donau, Austria shipped seasonal H3N2 influenza vaccine contaminated with live H5N1 avian influenza to distributors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Germany, and Austria. The contamination was discovered when the Czech distributor Biotest found that 4 of 4 ferrets died after receiving the material. WHO, EMA, and national health agencies investigated. Conspiracy claims that the contamination was a deliberate attempt to seed a pandemic are assessed as not supported; regulators and industry accept accidental contamination of a seed stock as the most plausible explanation.

The East German Sports Medical Service (SMD) systematically doped approximately 10,000 athletes — including roughly 1,500 minors — with anabolic steroids, principally Oral-Turinabol and Mestanolone, under the codename State Plan 14.25. The program ran from 1968 to 1989. SMD head Manfred Höppner and swim-team physician Lothar Kipke were later prosecuted. Shot-put gold medalist Heidi Krieger underwent gender transition she attributed to forced hormone administration. The Stasi Operation Fairy archive was sealed in December 1989 as the regime collapsed. Germany passed compensation legislation in 2002 and 2016 for victims.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny collapsed on a Tomsk-to-Moscow flight on 20 August 2020 and was evacuated to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where doctors confirmed poisoning by a novichok-class cholinesterase inhibitor. OPCW laboratories and independent German, French, and Swedish labs confirmed the finding. Bellingcat and the Insider published an investigation identifying an FSB team that had surveilled Navalny for years; a phone-call recording in which FSB officer Konstantin Kudryavtsev described the underwear contamination route went viral. Russia denied all involvement and refused to open a criminal investigation.

Adolf Hitler died by suicide in his Führerbunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945. Soviet forces recovered remains; dental records matching Dr. Hugo Blaschke's records for Hitler were confirmed; the Soviet skull cap with a bullet hole was displayed as evidence. A persistent claim holds that Hitler escaped via ratlines to South America — Argentina is most frequently named. FBI files released under FOIA in 2014 reference wartime informant reports of Hitler sightings in Argentina; these are raw intelligence reports, not confirmed findings. The ratlines were real and transported genuine Nazi war criminals including Eichmann and Mengele. Hitler's death in the bunker is confirmed by multiple independent forensic and archival analyses.

Adolf Eichmann, the SS-Obersturmbannführer who administered the logistics of the Holocaust, was captured by a Mossad team led by Isser Harel in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960. He was transported to Israel, tried publicly, convicted, and executed in 1962. CIA and BND (West German intelligence) files declassified from 2006 onward revealed that both agencies had located Eichmann in Argentina years before the Mossad operation — and chose not to act, in part to protect West German officials with wartime connections. The cover-up claim is substantially true based on the declassified record.

Wirecard AG, a German payments company listed in the DAX, collapsed in June 2020 after its management board said there was a "prevailing likelihood" that €1.9 billion in reported bank balances did not exist. Its former CEO Markus Braun and two co-defendants have been on trial in Munich since December 2022; no verdict has been delivered. Former COO Jan Marsalek is a fugitive.

Chemie Grünenthal sold thalidomide in West Germany from 1957 as a sedative that needed no prescription, and the drug was soon available in dozens of countries, including Britain through Distillers; Richardson-Merrell applied to sell it in the US. Reports of nerve damage from 1959 were not acted on in time, and from late 1961 the drug was tied to limb and organ malformations in children, put at about 10,000 by the German Federal Constitutional Court and press accounts and at over 24,000 in a UK National Archives estimate. The record documents slow warnings, a sales ban that Der Spiegel reported it resisted, official reluctance to warn the public in Britain and Ireland, and decades of fights over compensation, but no criminal conviction of any defendant.

Secret "stay-behind" networks, set up with US and British intelligence services and kept from their own parliaments, existed in Cold War Western Europe; the Italian branch, Gladio, was disclosed by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1990. That the networks themselves directed the "strategy of tension" bombings is not established and is not what the verdict confirms; the courts attribute the major bombings to neo-fascist groups and convicted officials who obstructed the inquiries.

Volkswagen installed "defeat device" software in its diesel cars that detected emissions testing and ran full pollution controls only during tests. On the road the cars emitted nitrogen oxides at up to 40 times the US standard, according to EPA. Volkswagen said in 2015 that around eleven million vehicles worldwide with EA 189 engines were affected; the US cases concern about 590,000 vehicles. A May 2014 West Virginia University study commissioned by the ICCT exposed the discrepancy, and Volkswagen disclosed the device to US regulators on 3 September 2015.