Deutsche Bahn removed Pommes from its bistro menus in June. The reason is the EU's F-gas regulation — Verordnung 2024/573 — which phases out the fluorinated refrigerants used in the freezer units that stored them. The regulation entered German law in April. The freezers are out. No suitable replacement has been installed. Currywurst remains on the menu. The Pommes do not.
This is a small administrative matter. It has a very long paper trail.
The same week, Germany opened the GAZ Hybrid centre.
The name is worth a moment.
In bureaucratic German, GAZ is an acronym: Gemeinsames Abwehrzentrum Hybrid. A joint defence coordinating body. Five working groups. Interior Minister Dobrindt at the opening. BfV president Selen with a warning: "real attacks on our society, on our free democratic order and the security of Germany."
In Russian, газ means gas.
In current EU energy policy, a gas hybrid refers to the blending of hydrogen into existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure. Green gas in grey pipes. Like a car hybrid — petrol and electric together, sharing one engine. Germany is planning this transition. The Druzhba pipeline corridor, The Prompt noted in June, has already been examined for a second application: fibre optic cable. The pipes are in the ground. The question is what runs through them.
The GAZ Hybrid centre opened on 16 June. Its mandate covers cyberattack, disinformation, economic interference, and sabotage of national infrastructure, including energy systems.
Eight days later, the trains stopped.
On 24 June, the GSM-R digital radio system failed across the entire German rail network. GSM-R provides continuous communication between train drivers, signal operators, and dispatchers. When it fails, trains cannot transmit emergency signals. They cannot move. The network was halted for more than two hours. Passengers were advised to seek alternative transport. Long queues formed at station information desks; some journeys stretched through the night. Deutsche Bahn offered taxi and hotel vouchers. Services were described as running "largely seamlessly" by Wednesday morning. Delays remained.
Deutsche Bahn attributed the outage to a software update.
Frieder Kümmerer, Deutsche Bahn analyst for SWR, offered an assessment: "We see management failure on many levels at Deutsche Bahn."
Deutsche Bahn's handling of the F-gas regulation transition is, by contrast, regarded as a success. The freezers were decommissioned on schedule. The Pommes were removed. The Currywurst was retained. Regulatory compliance was achieved without incident.
The software update was also handled by management.
"They are very good at knowing what to remove," one source familiar with the rail network said. "They are less reliable on what to keep running."
Deutsche Bahn has taken steps to address this. On 25 June — the day after the outage — the railway announced the appointment of Michael Obrowski as its new Finanzvorstand, effective September. Obrowski joins from Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge, where he has led the Finance and IT division since 2021. Volkswagen is currently planning to remove up to 100,000 positions worldwide, according to reporting cited by NDR. The DB supervisory board noted that Obrowski brings "all the experience" needed for the role.
His brief at Deutsche Bahn covers Finance and IT.
Within hours of the outage, security authorities issued a statement. The outage was not a cyberattack. It was not sabotage. They were asked. They said so promptly.
This was notable. In recent months, German authorities had been considerably more willing to name Russia when things broke. The Bundestagswahl bauschaum attacks on cars were attributed to Russian orchestration. The Güterverkehr sabotage attempts in Stuttgart. The fire in the Leipzig freight container. Each time: Russia named, or strongly implied, within days.
This time, the denial came faster than the investigation.
Sources familiar with the coordination process suggest that the proximity to the GAZ Hybrid opening — eight days — made a Russian attribution politically inconvenient. The centre had just announced itself as Germany's answer to hybrid threats. A hybrid attack on the rail network, nine days later, would have been a difficult association to manage. A software update, by contrast, is no one's fault in particular.
The Bundesanwaltschaft has not commented.
The colour question has also arisen.
GAZ Hybrid is not affiliated with the Greens. But the word Hybrid carries associations in a country that recently governed itself through a traffic-light coalition. One observer, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted the naming problem.
Green was unavailable. Blue is occupied. Red is inadvisable.
"Orange was proposed," the observer said. "There was a historical problem."
The historical problem: the United States military deployed a herbicide in Vietnam under the classification Agent Orange. The name derived from the orange band on its storage containers, not from any description of the product's nature or effects. The name concealed what was inside.
The observer declined to draw a parallel. The centre is called GAZ Hybrid. Neutral grey. Suitably bureaucratic. No colour at all.
BMW, whose strategy of maintaining combustion engines, plug-in hybrids, and electric vehicles in parallel produced stronger first-quarter results than VW or Mercedes, calls this approach Antriebsflexibilität. The hybrid model is working for someone.
The EU's long-term energy policy calls for the phase-out of natural gas and its replacement with green hydrogen, blended initially into existing infrastructure. This is sometimes called green gas. Sometimes gas hybrid. The pipes do not change. The contents do.
Germany has been planning this transition for some time. The GAZ Hybrid centre is not part of that policy. The name is a coincidence.
On 16 June, the centre opened. On 24 June, the trains stopped. The Pommes were already gone.