German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg told the Bundestag, the German parliament, on 26 November that General Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the Generalinspekteur der Bundeswehr, the chief of staff, and Peter Wichert, state secretary in the ministry of defense, had resigned over the Bundeswehr's failure to provide all the facts about a 4 September air strike in which as many as 142 Afghans were killed, including an estimated 40 civilians. The website of the mass circulation tabloid Bild posted a video of imagery from one of the two F-15E Strike Eagles which conducted the air strike, which the narrator said was being transmitted to the German provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Kunduz whose commander ordered the strike.

People can clearly be seen in the video walking around two tanker trucks hijacked by the Taliban, prompting the F-15E pilot to ask a German NCO with the codename Red Baron 20 watching the scene on a monitor in the PRT whether he should fly low over the site to scare people off. Ten minutes later, the pilot asks if the people on the ground pose "an immediate threat", which Red Baron 20 confirms, after which the F-15s drop two 227-kilogram GPS-guided bombs.

The Bundeswehr withheld information on the air strike from the public prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe, which is investigating the incident, and Jung knew about civilian casualties earlier than he let on, according to Bild. This might also explain why the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Gen. Stanley McCrystal, appeared to be so critical of the Germans after the air strike, which took place only two months after he issued a revised directive seeking to reduce civilian casualties.

Guttenberg had only seen the ISAF report on the incident until he was given the Bundeswehr's own report on 25 November. He promised the Bundestag that he would examine this report and others he had not seen dating from the previous government and hand them over to the Bundestag and the state prosecutor.

Meanwhile, the opposition Social Democratic, Green and Left parties are calling on Jung, who is now labor minister, to resign. They failed in a vote yesterday to force Jung to make a statement to the Bundestag but he later did so voluntarily, claiming he had informed them of the facts he was aware of after the incident.

A special session of the Bundetag defense committee is meeting today to discuss the affair, which has developed into a crisis for the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.