Berlin blackout: Volcano Group's environmentalist agenda behind power cut

Sebastian Brandt, chief technician of the Immanuel hospital in the leafy, affluent Wannsee district of Berlin, guessed something was wrong as soon as he opened the window of his home and smelled diesel. It was 3 January, a freezing Saturday morning, and luckily the hospital opposite had relatively few patients on this post-holiday weekend. As he looked out, the diesel fumes told him that the emergency generator – a huge, deafening, decades-old machine in the basement – had kicked in. That meant the hospital was no longer getting power from the grid. And that meant Brandt was not going to have a quiet weekend.

Although an emergency generator keeps a hospital running, it has its limitations. Surgical procedures have to be cancelled, and though generators are tested regularly, no one can be certain what will happen when they are kept running for days on end. The generator tank in the Immanuel hospital contained about 3,000 litres of diesel, and Brandt had calculated it would burn about 550 litres a day; when the grid operator informed the hospital that the outage might last until the end of the following week, Brandt was quickly dispatched to fetch more diesel from the nearest petrol station that was still on the grid. Meanwhile, he’d heard that a neighbouring hospice was going to move its patients to the hospital, too.

What Brandt didn’t know – and what would have soured his mood even more – was that his hospital was cut off because a couple of hours earlier, at about 6am, approximately 12km away, someone had set fire to five high-voltage cables fixed to the underside of a bridge over the Teltow canal, a long waterway that cuts through the southern part of the German capital.

Virtually all of Berlin’s 22,400 miles of electricity cables are buried underground, but there are vulnerable points, especially crossing water; these five cables, each 10cm thick, led from a natural gas power station and supplied about 45,000 homes, 2,200 businesses and four hospitals. A picture released later that day by Stromnetz Berlin, the city’s state-owned grid operator, showed them burning brightly as they dangled above a pile of burning debris.

Four districts of the city were affected – some of Berlin’s wealthier suburbs, though far from exclusively so – and despite power being restored to 10,000 homes by the next day, the other 35,000 went without electricity for five more days. Whoever had done this had caused the longest power cut Berlin had seen since the second world war.

A few kilometres from Immanuel, the attack had caused Michael Schmidt, director of the Hubertus hospital, his own problems. This was a much larger hospital, and several operations had been planned for that morning. “It was good that it happened before 8am, so no one was actually lying on the table,” he tells me, sitting in his office a few weeks later.

Within hours, Schmidt found himself making plans to evacuate the 150 patients he had in the building, because although the generator had kicked in, the heating system had failed. It turned out the pumps that supplied it with gas were outside the hospital grounds and not connected to the generator. “The outside temperature that morning was around -1C. If the temperature dropped too far, we would have had a problem,” says Schmidt.

In the end, the hospital’s technicians found a way to reroute power to the gas pumps, and the city’s grid operator managed to use emergency power lines to restore electricity to all four hospitals by the next morning. And Brandt didn’t have to spend his week fetching cans of diesel. The surrounding residential homes, however, remained dark for another five days. Some older residents had to be moved to emergency accommodation, and local TV news was filled with people angry at the lack of information and the way the authorities had handled the situation. “It was a bit of a dystopian atmosphere around here,” says Schmidt, as he recalls travelling to and from work by the glow of the last few Christmas lights still out on people’s balconies. A blackout that lasts a few days has a way of both making people feel less safe – extra security personnel were briefly hired to guard the hospital – but also galvanising a sense of community: local people began to appear at the hospital door, hoping to charge various appliances, and the canteen became a provisional meeting point.

Within a day or so, Schmidt learned that the blackout had been triggered deliberately, apparently for political reasons. He pauses when I ask him how he feels about this. “I think the people or the organisation that did this maybe didn’t completely anticipate what would happen in this supposedly rich district – not everyone who lives here is rich,” he says thoughtfully. “There are old people who need help here, in the hospitals but also at home. This didn’t hit the system, it hit normal individuals, and we’re lucky that we got away with a black eye.”

How this act of sabotage had been committed was relatively clear, but the who is still a mystery and the why a matter of some controversy. About 24 hours after the lights went out, a confession was sent to media outlets and posted on leftwing platforms such as Indymedia.org, which allow anonymous, untraceable texts to be uploaded and published. The meandering statement, pushing 4,500 words, was titled “Shutting down fossil fuel power stations is handiwork. Take courage. Militant new year’s greetings”. The author was named as “Volcano Group: Turn off the juice of the rulers”.

This byline put the blackout into the context of a series of intermittent attacks on Berlin’s critical infrastructure carried out over the past 15 years. There have been at least seven “Volcano Group” attacks in and around Berlin since 2011, the first of which was apparently inspired by the disruption caused by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010, which knocked out air traffic for several days across much of central and northern Europe. The Volcano Group has caused much less damage and inconvenience, and no injuries or directly attributable deaths. The first spate of attacks, between 2011 and 2013, targeted railway power lines and cable boxes, and each of the early confessions namechecked a different Icelandic volcano – there was the “The Roar of Eyjafjallajökull”, followed by “The Hekla Reception Committee – Initiative for More Social Eruptions” and “Anonymous/Volcano Katla”. The actual name “Vulkangruppe”, or Volcano Group, only appears to have been adopted in 2018, in confessions to later attacks – and even then the names vary: “Volcano Group against continuing destruction” or “Volcano Group: Tear up net authority”.

After an apparent hiatus between 2013 and 2018, there were further Volcano Group attacks in Berlin, as well as two, in 2021 and 2024, on the power lines supplying the Tesla Gigafactory just outside the city. The latter sabotage was claimed by “Volcano Group shut down Tesla” and knocked out the factory’s power supply for several days, causing Elon Musk’s auto company financial losses “in the high nine-figure range”, according to a Tesla official at the time.

The investigations into all these acts of sabotage have been taken over by Germany’s federal state prosecutor’s office, which means they are being treated as crimes endangering the functioning of the German state – in other words, terrorism. Police and state prosecutors in Germany never give interviews or statements about ongoing investigations, but according to responses given to Green party MPs in February, there are four separate federal Volcano Group investigations still in progress, the oldest dating back to the initial attacks in 2011.

From what little they are willing to divulge, the authorities seem to be stumped as to who the Volcano Group actually are. Not a single arrest has been made in connection with any of the attacks. There have been other suspicious cases: in 2023, two people active in the leftwing scene were arrested with flammable materials near railway lines in the Adlershof district of Berlin, but the ensuing trial ended when a judge concluded the state had no hard evidence against them. Otherwise, the authorities’ responses have appeared broad and speculative: on 24 March, about 500 police officers raided 14 properties associated with Berlin’s far-left scene in connection with an arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 that knocked out power to a technology park – again, in the Adlershof district – where several IT security companies are based. But although the confession statement, published a few days afterwards, resembled the others in style and ideology, it was not written by anyone calling themselves a “Volcano Group”. In any case, no arrest warrants were issued.

There are good reasons for that, according to Hendrik Hansen, professor of political extremism at Germany’s Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences. “There are simply no physical clues as to who the perpetrators are,” he says, though that in itself is telling: “It’s not that easy to carry out a crime without leaving DNA traces at the scene.”

Felix Neumann, extremism and terrorism prevention researcher at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a thinktank affiliated with the conservative Christian Democratic Union, also thinks the perpetrators of the Berlin blackout were highly skilled. “They knew from the start what they were doing, and that’s the big difference to, for example, far-right extremists or Islamists, where we often have perpetrators who do things for the first time and don’t inform themselves enough about how to do them,” he says.

Much of this “professional” knowhow is available on the internet. Even without dipping into the dark web, you can find manuals that explain not only how to build rudimentary incendiary devices with cheap parts available in electronics and hardware stores, but how to avoid being caught on CCTV, how to buy and pass on tools and materials without being noticed, how to time attacks, and even how to remove plastic gloves without leaving your DNA on them. These manuals also provide pointers about how to recruit people with the right psychological profile, and how to organise cells of just two or three people into structures that offer a high degree of autonomy with a minimum of hierarchy.

Considering how public all this information is, Hansen says it’s impossible to tell whether the members of such groups even know each other personally: “It could just be that they took the label and decided: we’ll do something similar.” In other words, the Volcano Group is a kind of franchise – an open-source label that anyone can adopt if they have a can of flammable liquid and the determination to find a vulnerable spot on the power grid.

So much for the who. As for the why, the claim of responsibility for the blackout that was posted online on 4 January was less a manifesto than a rambling blog post, full of spleen and non sequiturs. It threw up as many questions as it answered, but it did have one clear point to make: “We can no longer afford the rich,” it began. “We can trigger the end of the imperial lifestyle. We can stop the plunder of the Earth.” It went on to declare: “The attack on the gas power station is an act of self-defence and international solidarity with all those who defend the Earth and life itself.” Unlike those who carried out the original attacks in 2011, whose beef was largely Germany’s participation in overseas wars, this Volcano Group clearly had an environmentalist bent.

January’s statement catalogued the many acts of ecological violence being inflicted on the planet by the capitalist system (“Those that call us eco-terrorists are themselves the true eco-terrorists”) while digressing into almost poetic observations about the damage digital technology has inflicted on our lives: “We serve our own surveillance and it is total … We feed on the colourful pictures that machines filter and put in front of us and stare at our screens in loneliness and alienation.”

What the statement lacked was any attempt to formulate a set of principles. But defining an ideology wasn’t really the point of the text; its purpose was a call to arms. If enough people join in, they were saying, we can bring down the whole show, or as they put it: “Sabotage the fossil fuel infrastructure, the power grids, the plundering of the Earth, the server centres, the chip industry and its supply operations, destroy the preconditions of the automobile industry and the arms industry, of airline travel, the villas, the yachts, the spaceships and the golf courses. Destroy the police headquarters, which are the guarantors of patriarchal property relations, because the Earth belongs to itself and all its creatures, and not the people, or rather the men alone, and not the richest among them.”

The Berlin police described the statement as “authentic” and both the federal and Berlin governments were eager to show how vigorously they were pursuing leftwing extremism. Federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt posted a reward of €1m for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators of the Berlin blackout. This was 10 times larger than the reward posted to catch the Islamist who killed 13 people in Berlin’s Christmas market attack of 2016, and about 40 times larger than the reward paid out for the arrestof one of the last remaining Baader-Meinhof group members, Daniela Klette, who was apprehended in Berlin in 2024 after more than three decades on the run.

Despite having disbanded in the late 1990s, the group, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), still casts a heavy shadow over the German psyche. An armed communist militia that was at one stage supported and trained by the East German Stasi, the RAF carried out more than 30 killings and kidnappings. It has been invoked in the climate debate before: in 2022, Dobrindt, then in opposition, demanded tougher punishments for climate protesters who blocked roads, telling the Bild am Sonntag newspaper: “The emergence of a climate RAF must be prevented.”

Such comparisons to climate activists are far-fetched, according to Hansen. “Just ideologically, the RAF was Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, and so stood for an idea that the revolution would bring a dictatorship of the proletariat,” he says. “That’s a completely different ideological current. Second, the RAF carried out targeted murders with guns and bomb attacks. We haven’t had that in recent attacks.”

And yet, in the aftermath of the Berlin blackout, the government was certain that leftwing eco-terrorists were indeed at large. But internet sleuths were not so sure. Linguists went to work on the Volcano Group’s statement and concluded that some of the German sounded off. They pointed to incorrect spellings of well-known names (JD Vance, for example, was written as “Vans”). Reddit threads appeared where people reverse-engineered the text through AI translation programmes and declared it had originally been written in Russian.