Germany: Over 5,000 Dead from Heat as Merz Cuts Climate Funds

Germany has now recorded an estimated 5,120 heat-related deaths so far in 2026, most concentrated in late June when the heatwave sweeping Western Europe triggered all health alarms. The figure comes from a weekly report by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s public health authority, which also noted that 4,270 of those deaths were among people aged 75 or older, and that more women than men died, mainly because they represent a larger proportion of the very elderly population.

The RKI report confirms what healthcare workers and relatives had already denounced: in numerous nursing homes without air conditioning or fans, room temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius for several consecutive nights. This is the profile that concentrates mortality: elderly people with pre-existing cardiovascular, pulmonary, and renal conditions, for whom extreme heat does not kill «directly» but rather acts as the final trigger for a body already battered by lack of care and adequate public infrastructure.

The most brutal case occurred in Cologne, where over the weekend of June 27 and 28, 120 people died—four times the usual number for the city. The figure was made public by Katharina Droege, leader of the Greens in the Bundestag, during a parliamentary debate in which she also accused Chancellor Friedrich Merz of not speaking out about the heatwave despite the sustained rise in the death toll and the overwhelming of emergency services.

While the country buried thousands of elderly people, the coalition government led by Merz moved forward with a budget proposal for 2027 that cuts funds earmarked for climate protection. The executive aims to divert billions from the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) to plug budget holes, although the specific cuts have not yet been publicly quantified. It is the same logic we already saw in France weeks ago: governments that empty hospitals and nursing homes, that do not invest in air conditioning for spaces where the most vulnerable people live, and then present each heatwave as a meteorological fatality unrelated to their own policies.

This is not the first time the RKI has measured such a spike in mortality: the highest figures of the last decade were recorded in 2018 and 2019, with 8,400 and 6,900 deaths respectively, while between 2022 and 2025 the annual average ranged from 2,600 to 4,900 deaths. Every summer, the climate crisis hits with particular ferocity those whom capitalism already leaves behind, especially the elderly, who lack resources to cool their homes or rooms in nursing homes and depend on a systematically underfunded public health system.

The German figure adds to a grim continental picture. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that Western Europe experienced its hottest June on record, with an average temperature of 20.74 degrees Celsius. Between June 20 and 28 alone, national authorities in France, Belgium, Spain, and the Netherlands reported more than 4,700 excess deaths, now added to the more than 5,000 in Germany. As we already noted in our coverage of the crisis in France, the «extraordinary disaster» of climate change repeatedly collides with the «ordinary disaster» of a capitalism that empties public services, precarizes the lives of the working class, and turns access to air conditioning into a class privilege.

That thousands of elderly people die in rooms without fans while the German government discusses cutting the climate fund is a stark expression of the logic of a system that subordinates social needs to militarism and to swelling the profits of big capitalists. The response cannot be left in the hands of those who manage the catastrophe. Faced with each new heatwave, the demand for massive investment in healthcare, nursing homes, and dignified housing, as well as workers’ control over protection protocols against extreme heat, becomes ever more urgent.

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