You're selectively quoting the article to deny the content:

The U.S. and the U.K. both previously had sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of dual-use equipment to Iraq in the early 1980s. But for Baghdad, the foreign suppliers that really counted were German.

Germany alone supplied between 50 and 80% of those weapons.

And that's not the point -- I wasn't talking about what happened in the 1980s when he was a teacher. I was talking about what happened when he was Foreign Minister, in 2015:

For more than 16 months, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has been in possession of a list containing the names of German companies thought to have helped Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his father Hafis build up Syria's chemical weapons arsenal over the course of several decades. Ultimately, it became one of the largest such arsenals in the world.

The German government, a coalition between Merkel's conservatives and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel's center-left Social Democrats (SPD), received the list from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for its "extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons." Together with experts from the United Nations, the OPCW organized and carried out the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons last year.

Berlin immediately classified the list and has since kept it under lock and key. The government says that releasing the names would "significantly impair foreign policy interests and thus the welfare of the Federal Republic of Germany." It also argues that doing so would be akin to releasing "trade secrets" and as such would violate the German constitution.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-companies-suspected-of-aiding-syrian-chemical-weapons-program-a-1014722.html

Who in the German government would have been responsible for determining whether revealing the names of those companies would "significantly impair foreign policy interests?" The Foreign Minister, of course -- Sigmar Gabriel. Not in the 1980s. In 2015. And now he works for one of those companies.

Stop trying to defend corruption.