Germany news: Population shrinks for first time since 2020

The Dortmund-based home improvement and garden center chain Hellweg said it has filed for insolvency under self-administration. 

Hellweg had been known to be struggling for some time now, most recently announcing a series of store closures last month. 

According to the company, a court in Essen had approved the petition. 

Hellweg said in a statement that all locations and its online store would remain open. 

It said that employees would receive insolvency benefits via the Federal Employemnt Agency over the next three months. 

The company said the court had appointed Stefan Denkhaus as a provisional administrator to oversee creditors' interests. 

The Dortmund-based chain operates 68 stores across Germany and employs roughly 2,900 people. It's most active in the western Rhine-Ruhr region and in Berlin. 

Prosecutors have told German media, including the dpa news agency, that the 17-year-old daughter of Herdecke Mayor Iris Stalzer faces charges in connection with her stabbing last year. 

Stalzer was found in her home with serious wounds on October 7, soon after her mayoral election victory and around a month before she would ultimately take up the role. 

Brief speculation of a political motive was rife, but police soon said their investigations did not point to this. 

The day after Stalzer was found, she regained consciousness and was able to tell police that it was her adoptive daughter who had attacked her. Police have said that the family had a difficult history prior to the stabbing.

Prosecutor Bernd Haldorn told dpa that the teenage girl was facing charges akin to aggravated bodily harm.

Haldorn said, echoing comments from last October, that evidence such as Stalzer's children calling the emergency services spoke against pushing for the most serious possible charges like attempted murder.

The girl's younger brother was also investigated but prosecutors ultimately dropped that case, deeming he was not involved in the attack.

Stalzer recovered from her wounds relatively quickly and was sworn in a month later. 

Police in the western German town of Erkrath said officers shot and severely wounded a man who threatened them with a knife on Tuesday. 

Investigators said the man was a 59-year-old Ukrainian national. 

"At around 9:55 a.m. an observant witness raised the alarm with police, after she saw a man with a knife on Sandheider Street not far from two childcare facilities," police wrote of the incident. 

It said that officers soon arrived on the scene and were threatened by the man. He was "severely wounded" when they subsequently opened fire. Officers then provided first aid and brought the man to a hospital ward. 

"No third parties or officers were wounded," police said. "Based on current findings, the two childcare facilities or Sandheider Street are not related to the events." 

Erkrath is a town of around 45,000 people east of Düsseldorf in western Germany. For the purposes of neutrality and to avoid a conflict of interest, Düsseldorf police took over investigation of the incident, Erkrath police said.

A large police presence remained in service at the scene in the subsequent hours. This included a sniffer dog and its handler, seeking the bullet that struck the man. 

A new nationwide opinion poll published by YouGov on Tuesday gives the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) its largest lead over Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats on record. 

The survey puts the AfD on 29% public support, with the CDU/CSU alliance next in line on 20%. 

Merz's junior coalition partners the Social Democrats dip to 12% support, while the ecologist Greens climb slightly to 14%. 

On the other flank the socialist Left Party also gained 1 point on the previous month's tally, climbing to 12% support. 

The other far-left party, the BSW Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, was just below the cusp of qualifying for proportional representation, at 4%. 

Another major polling institute, Infratest dimap, published figures earlier in June that gave the AfD a much more slim lead over the Christian Democrats, at 27% versus 23%. 

The AfD became the second-largest party nationwide for the first time in its history in last year's federal elections.

Even if rising to the top spot is very unlikely to enable the party to also take power, given that no other parties are willing to ally with it and that it has the support of less than a third of voters, it would nevertheless be a major blow for more traditional German political parties. 

Seven Castor containers of radioactive waste have arrived in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, as their ship from back from processing in the UK docked on Tuesday. 

A police spokesman said many officers were on site at the Elbehafen port, but that there had been no protests as of late morning.

A police convoy started to transport the material from the port towards the disused Brokdorf nuclear power plant.

It will be stored there on a temporary basis until and unless Germany finally establishes a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste — something it has been trying and failing to do for many years. 

The waste hails from spent fuel rods from German nuclear plants, all of which are now offline, that were sent to the Sellafield facility in Cumbria for processing. Germany is obliged to take such waste back under international treaties.

The last such delivery from France returned to the country in 2024. Germany's last three nuclear power plants definitively went offline in April 2023, part of a shutdown process that took years.

The delivery is likely to be met with protests from opponents of nuclear power like the "Stop Castor" alliance.

Stop Castor's Kerstin Rudek said demonstrators would at least wait outside the Brokdorf power plant, even if they could not locate the convoy's path.

"When it comes to keeping [the route] secret, those responsible have done their homework when compared to the last comparable delivery in 2025," Rudek said. "We will interpret this as a concession that these transports are dangerous and that they are a potential terrorist target." 

She said her group anticipated that the truck would arrive overnight.

Prices for motorists buying diesel or petroleum at filling stations are approaching the levels from March 1, at the start of the US-Israel attacks on Iran, amid the news of a preliminary peace deal. 

According to the ADAC motoring club, which monitors daily prices, the nationwide averages for Monday stood at €1.816 for a liter of diesel, and €1.868 for a liter of petrol or gasoline. 

That equates to $7.98 per US gallon for diesel or $8.21 for unleaded.

These levels were just a few cents per liter shy of the March 1 prices.

However, amid the war, the government introduced a temporary rebate on fuel taxes to ease the pressure of prices at the pumps. So taking this into account the costs are still more than 10% higher. 

Berlin also made another hasty new law trying to control the prices, limiting filling stations to just one price increase each day, at noon local time. 

That, however, has done very little to reduce prices. It has only led to a phenomenon where it is highly advisable not to fill up your car between noon and about 2 or 3 p.m., when prices are now markedly higher than the daily averages. 

Elon Musk has said he's launching legal action against German public broadcaster ZDF for what he termed "outrageous lies" in their reporting on his involvement in anti-migrant unrest and riots in Belfast in Northern Ireland last week. 

The broadcaster has already apologized for what it acknowledged was "imprecise" phrasing from its anchor amid a 30-minute current affairs show.

For all the details, read our full story here. 

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt was in Berlin on Tuesday morning for the opening of the new collective hybrid threat defense center known in German as GAZ Hybrid. 

The center is charged with combating espionage, sabotage, disinformation, proliferation, transnational repression, state terrorism and other forms of hybrid threats, according to the Interior Ministry. 

"Hybrid threats have long since become daily threats," Dobrindt said, adding that GAZ Hybrid would be a place for federal and state security services of all kinds to pool their capabilities. "We are protecting our country against hostile actors and strengthening the security of our infrastructure, our economy and our democracy. We're investing in prevention." 

Dobrindt said that daily situation reports, exchanges of information and coordinated reactions would increase the country's defensive capabilities. 

GAZ Hybrid is the latest in a string of new components to the German security architecture, including the NCAZ national cybersecurity defense center, the GDAZ collective drone defense center and the GETZ collective terrorism defense center.

Germany's federal prosecutor general Jens Rommel was even critical of the opening of so many different defensive facilities.

He noted that it did make some sense to divide up the many tasks of the GTAZ, the collective terrorism defense center established in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

"But having many different centers could be counterproductive because they could be likely to lead to inefficiencies," Rommel warned.

Germany's federalized and compartmentalized domestic security apparatus has long faced criticism from some quarters for potential inefficiencies and overlaps.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz took a special German national team jersey to the G7 summit in France as a gift for US President Donald Trump. 

The jersey bore Trump's name and the number 47 — a reference to his current stint as the 47th president. It was presented following his 80th birthday and amid the US co-hosting the World Cup. 

Merz had also sent Trump a handwritten note, delivered in the US on Sunday.

The prospect of a peace deal with Iran — with the war a source of friction between Merz and Trump in recent months — and Russia's invasion of Ukraine are among the dominant issues at the G7 summit in France on Tuesday. 

For all the latest, check out our live G7 updates. 

Germany's population shrank by roughly 110,000 people in 2025, the first calendar-year reduction since 2020, the government's statistics office Destatis said on Tuesday. 

At the end of 2025, 83.5 million people resided in the country. The reduction equates to a little more than 0.13%. 

Reduced net migration — with 235,000 more people moving to the country than leaving it — was not enough to cancel out the fact that 352,000 more people died than were born in Germany in 2025. 

The last time the German population shrank in a year was in 2020, as the height of the travel restrictions amid the COVID pandemic led to a sharp one-off dip in migration. 

Germany's birth rate hit the lowest level on record last year and Chancellor Friedrich Merz had promised a tougher line on migration in the 2025 election campaign, so the news did not come as a surprise. 

The only states where the population grew were the wholly urban city states of Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg. 

The rate of population decline was considerably faster in the former East German states, at 0.5% (57,000 people in total), compared to 0.1% (or 68,000 people) across the states that made up former West Germany. Eastern states are home to fewer people with migrant backgrounds, who also tend to have more children. 

The population continued aging as a result. The 60-79 age bracket continued to swell, with 358,000 people joining its ranks as more and more so-called "Babyboomers" approached retirement age.

The primary tax-paying age bracket, from 20 to 59, shrank disproportionately to the national average, falling by 1.0% or 409,000 people. 

Hallöle, welcome to our updates on all things German on this fine Tuesday. 

Chancellor Friedrich Merz is across the border in France for the G7 summit, along with various world leaders including US President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and French President and host Emmanuel Macron.

Closer to home, the statistics agency reports that the national population dipped for the first time since 2020 last year, as a result of reduced net migration and the perennially low birth rates. 

Motorists are enjoying some relief at the pumps, as fuel prices near the levels prior to the US-Israeli attacks on Iran on news of a framework for a peace deal. However, that's also largely thanks to temporary fuel tax cuts introduced when prices were markedly higher.

The last transport of German radioactive waste sent for processing in Sellafield in the UK has docked in the north of the country. Its passage to a storage site is sure to be accompanied by protests, as is customary for such deliveries.

And a new hybrid threat defense center, known in German as GAZ Hybrid, has been inaugurated by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt in Berlin. 

Do please stick around for updates on all this and more throughout the day, not to mention reading and viewing tips from our analyses and background coverage.