The far-left anarchists who have been camping outside of the Tesla factory near Berlin, Germany attempted to storm the facility on Friday. Police officials who described the situation as “dynamic” hurt the protestors with batons and pepper spray as they jumped fences. Some 21 police officers were injured along with many protestors.
The Anti-Tesla activists brake through the police lines and reach the fence of #Gigafactory. Police seems disoriented.#DisruptTesla #Grünheide pic.twitter.com/ir64DfY8qL
— the brake (@TheBrakeNet) May 10, 2024
The officers had secured railway tracks, power and water lines, and power station in the proximity of the factory, but the protestors broke through. Authorities from Berlin and Brandenburg along with federal officers were ultimately able to repel their advances.
Photos from Getty Images are provided below:
As reported in March, anarchists affiliated with the left-wing extremist Vulkangruppe, or “Volcano Group,” claimed responsibility for an arson attack on a Tesla factory near Berlin, Germany. The so-called “gigafactory,” the only Tesla factory in Europe, had one of its pylon power line towers set ablaze, shutting off electricity at the factory and causing an outage that is expected to last for at least a week and cost several hundred million euros to fix.
The Volcano Group posted a 2,700-word manifesto to its website kontrapolis.info—which translates to “against the city”—explaining that they did it to stop the “technofascists like Elend Musk” (“Elend” being German for “miserable,” “nasty”) and to liberate humanity from “patriarchy” (in the left-wing theory of ecofeminism, “patriarchy” is associated with the exploitation of the environment, while the abolition of “patriarchy” will, they claim, save the planet from climate disaster). Responsibility for the attack was also proudly claimed in a letter signed “Agua De Pau,” which is the name of a volcano in the Azores.
The protestors at the time wrote:
We sabotaged Tesla today. Because Tesla in Grünau eats up earth, resources, people, labor and spits out 6,000 SUVs, killing machines and monster trucks per week. Our gift for March 8th is to shut down Tesla. … The Gigafactory has become known for its extreme conditions of exploitation. The factory contaminates the groundwater and uses huge amounts of the already scarce drinking water resource for its products. Without any scruples, the state of Brandenburg-Berlin is being cut off for Tesla. The critics in the waterworks, the residents, the eco-activists are silenced. Numbers are embellished. Laws bent. deceived people. A large part of the population around Grünheide rejects the Gigafactory because of water theft and gentrification.
A parking lot of Tesla cars was also lit ablaze near Frankfurt, Germany in September 2023, destroying Tesla Model Y EVs. An anonymous letter, titled “Teslas flambé,” surfaced at the time claiming responsibility for the attack, naming Tesla as one of their “most prominent enemies.”
