Berlin has canceled contracts with a company that runs nine homes for asylum seekers after leaked e-mails showed managers joking about executing young refugees.
Berlin Social Affairs Senator Mario Czaja on Sunday severed ties with Pewobe, whose hostels shelter about 3,000 people in the German capital, after newspaper Bild printed a series of e-mails apparently exchanged between three of the firm’s managers.
In one e-mail, Pewobe’s general manager appeared to suggest investing a 5,000 euro (US$5,632) donation from BMW in “a small guillotine for children.”
In ensuing messages, company employees sent each other pictures of guillotines, beheadings and a photoshopped image showing a playground slide ending in an oversized cheese grater.
They also joked that disposing of the bodies would require a “large-volume crematorium.”
“The advantage is that we would get our environmental certificate back, because the waste heat could be recycled constructively,” one employee wrote in an e-mail.
Czaja, a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said the “inexcusable” e-mail exchange “makes it clear that any further work with Pewobe is impossible.”
The company’s lawyer said the leaked e-mails had been taken out of context, and that the term Kinderguillotine, or “guillotine for children,” had been created by an autocorrect function.
The firm on Monday said that it would appeal against the “politically motivated” dismissal, which comes almost a month ahead of local elections in Berlin.
The company has been under heavy criticism for some time.
Last month, a newspaper investigation revealed that its manager had in the past been a member of the German People’s Union, a far-right nationalist party.
Berlin volunteer organizations have complained about “catastrophic conditions” in one of Pewobe’s hostels, with reports of leftover food attracting vermin and staff hindering volunteers from accessing its premises.
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