Police raids bring climate roadblocks to a halt in Berlin

A POLICE crackdown has stopped Berlin’s climate protesters in their tracks, with no street blockades affecting the German capital since nationwide raids targeted the Letzte Generation group last month.

Since late April, the group, using similar tactics to Just Stop Oil in the UK, had blockaded major streets in Berlin and pledged to continue until the government met their demands.

Data shared by Berlin police with Sunday Telegraph showed officers had to deal with more than 50 separate blockades in the week before the raids. On May 19 alone, officers were called out to 17 incidents in which activists had either glued themselves to the tarmac or had locked their arms to car wheels.

Activists filmed the reactions of furious drivers, some of whom attempted to drag them from the street, and posted the footage to social media.

But since May 24, when police raided 15 properties across the country and froze the group’s bank account, not a single illegal blockade has taken place on the capital’s streets.

“What we have seen is ‘slow walks’, legally registered protests where demonstrators slowly cross the street,” a police spokesman said, warning that it was “too early” to say if the blockades had disappeared for good.

The raids were ordered by prosecutors in Munich who suspect Letzte Generation is a criminal organisation.

As part of the crackdown, prosecutors froze three bank accounts that are believed to have held at least €100,000 in donations. They also took down the group’s website.

The donations are critical to the protests as they are used to pay travel fees, help activists cover police fines, and even pay small monthly stipends.

Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister, said the raids showed “the state isn’t prepared to be made a fool of ”. “Police registered more than 1,600 crimes by Letzte Generation last year alone, most of which were street blockades,” she said, adding that the group had “crossed a red line”.

Rights groups say they are worried about the consequences for a protest form that has been largely peaceful. “The persecution of the Letzte Generation has reached a new level of escalation,” Amnesty International wrote on Twitter.

The group added that the investigation would have “a chilling effect on other climate activists who may now be too scared to exercise their right to freedom of assembly”.

Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general, also got involved, saying climate activists “need to be protected and we need them now more than ever”.

The Letzte Generation leadership, many of whom are young students, have clearly been affected by the police action. Carla Hinrichs, a group spokesman and one of those whose homes were raided, described being woken up by a police officer pointing a gun at her.

“They took everything that I use in my daily life, it was scary, they tried to scare me,” she recounted in a video posted to Twitter. Berlin police are now investigating her claim. Mr Hinrichs, who was sentenced to three years on probation this week in a trial in Frankfurt, turned down a request for an interview.

But activists remain defiant, asserting that the timing of the police raids has nothing to do with the fact that they have stopped blockading the streets.

“It was always our intention to take a break at the end of May,” Arne Springorum, one of the group’s most engaged activists, said.

Far from being a defeat, he insisted, the raids came “at the perfect time... just as we were running out of energy. They’ve given us a huge boost”.

The number of volunteers has shot up since the raids, he claimed, while the group has already started gathering donations in a new bank account

“In September we will be back in Berlin with five times as many people, and because it worked so well, of course we will use street blockades again,” he said.

‘What we see instead is slow walks, registered protests, where they walk across the road slowly’