German asylum seeker hostels lose contracts after managers joke about executing children

Berlin authorities have cancelled contracts with a company that runs nine homes for asylum seekers after leaked emails showed the managers joking about executing young refugees.

The social affairs senator Mario Czaja severed ties on Sunday with Pewobe, whose hostels shelter about 3,000 people in the German capital, after Bild newspaper printed a series of emails apparently exchanged between three of the firm’s managers.

In one of the emails, Pewobe’s general manager appeared to suggest investing a €5,000 euro (US$5,630) donation from BMW in “a small guillotine for children”.

In the ensuing messages, the company’s 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 of them wrote.

Czaja, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, said the “inexcusable” email exchange “makes it clear that any further work with Pewobe is impossible”.