A radical left group claimed responsibility for the destruction of power lines that left 50,000 homes and many businesses without electricity in Berlin for two and a half days, with repairs expected to take until 2026.
A manifesto confession posted on a notorious hard left message board called electricity the primary means of support for the political system, and depriving thousands of people of power for days justifiable collateral damage.
50,000 homes in south-east Berlin and thousands of businesses woke up to a power cut on Tuesday this week so severe it took 60 hours for the energy company to get all residents back onto a stable temporary supply. This is now working well, the city says, but the work to make permanent repairs will be so great they will take months and may not be completed until 2026.
The power cut is the longest experienced in Berlin since the Second World War. While many of the systems that help deliver the modern world have built-in backups, the outage lasted so long they were exhausted, meaning even basics like the emergency telephone numbers to call the police, fire brigade, and ambulances ceased to function.
German broadsheet newspaper Die Welt said the city felt like a scene from a “apocalyptic Hollywood movie”.
The Red Cross and Civil Defence agency was deployed to Berlin, with “lighthouse” pop-up tents through the city with diesel generators to give citizens a place they could go to charge their cell phones, get a hot drink, or talk to government advisors.
Across south-east Berlin trams had stopped dead in the street and in many cases were blocking roads and junctions. Conventional diesel-powered vehicles were deployed to drag them away and police officers were on traffic duty at busy junctions where traffic lights had similarly failed.
09 September 2025, Berlin: The partially damaged electricity pylon in Königsheideweg is inspected. (Photo by Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty Images)
09 September 2025, Berlin: A streetcar is towed away at Adlershof S-Bahn station. (Photo by Patrick Neumann/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The outage is believed to have been caused by arson attacks against two major power pylons on the high voltage electricity backbone system carrying energy into south-east Berlin in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Berlin City said in a statement on Friday, after power had been restored: “The fire destroyed several thick power lines at the foot of two electricity pylons in Berlin-Johannisthal in the district of Treptow-Köpenick. It took the fire brigade an hour just to extinguish the fire”. Berlin said the pylons themselves were not damaged and could be re-used.
Broadcaster Radioeins states the attack was by “left-wing extremist attack with insider knowledge” on where exactly to set fires to cause maximum disruption.
City Mayor Kai Wegner said of the sabotage: “Those affected, including many elderly people and families with children, had to go without the bare necessities – simply because some left-wing extremists believe their ideology is more important than human life…. I also find it appalling that there is a political front that is shrugging off this attack and refusing to acknowledge how dangerous these perpetrators are. We must have this debate now”.
The sabotage was claimed in a confession letter signed by “Some Anarchists”. The document is being treated as genuine by police investigators, it is stated.
In the document, the alleged perpetrators revealed the intended target of the power outage is WISTA, Europe’s largest science and technology park, the home to hundreds of research and manufacturing businesses and known in the country as “Germany’s Silicon Valley”. This, they said, was because of “fascist technocracy”.
They stated: “No, today is not a normal day. Hundreds of CEOs of various companies and research institutes from the fields of IT, robotics, bio- and nanotech, aerospace, AI, security, and defense industries have received the bitter news that their technology park in Adlershof has ceased to function. At least for a short period of time, but that was enough to massively disrupt their sensitive super-machines and processes.”
Indeed, it is reported this week that the park was hit “particularly hard” and that “Sensitive machines and laboratory equipment were damaged, and some devices are no longer usable” after the power failed.
The “Some Anarchists” acknowledged that the impacts of the cut would go much further than the science park, but also that they didn’t care. They wrote: “We ask for the leniency of the residents whose private homes were affected; this was by no means our intention. Nevertheless, we consider this collateral damage to be justifiable, in contrast to the de facto destruction of nature and the often fatal subjugation of people for which many of the companies based here are responsible day in and day out.”
The businesses at the park, which include many defence contractors, tech companies, and advanced science firms have to be brought down they said because they “support the [political] system” and “guarantee the continued existence of the capitalist death machine”.
Ending electricity for good is the goal, they said, stating it would be replaced “with a life of freedom without domination and exploitation” and an end to the wars of the “military-industrial complex”. “Electricity is the primary source of energy that powers every machine and the “progress” necessary to reproduce this current system”, they said.
Welt reports police are trying to match the language of the letter to other previous radical left acts of sabotage. Certainly, the technique of cable burning to bring the delicate systems that underpin the modern world crashing down is now well rehearsed and practically a daily occurrence in Europe now.
Per the report, police are considering a link to a known cell of extremists in Bavaria thought responsible for “Dozens of arson attacks on radio masts, railway lines, and energy facilities”. Also being investigated are any relationship to years of power supply sabotage attacks using the same simple techniques on the Tesla Gigafactory outside Berlin.
While such attacks happen across Europe with astonishing frequency, the amount of police time dedicated to finding the culprits appears to be small and in most cases the cable-cutters do their work free of personal consequences and, except in a handful of spectacular instances, without anything beyond local media coverage or public discussion.
Nevertheless, Breitbart News has long been reporting on the phenomenon.
Summarising this history and paraphrasing previous reports:
Just last month, German railways experienced days of “massive” disruption as a ultra-anarchist set fire to cables rending a major line carrying intercity and international trains unusable.
As the first set of cable damage was repaired, a second fire was discovered nearby, again knocking the line out. Regional interior minister Herbert Reul said at a press conference: “Based on our authorities’ current assessment and understanding of this act of sabotage, it was left-wing extremists who are trying to bomb us back to pre-industrial times”.
A group calling themselves ‘Kommando’ claimed responsibility for the sabotage, and wrote in their manifesto:
The society we live in is in the process of devouring the entire planet. The mass conversion of natural ecosystems into dead products… [is] a core mechanism of the system… None of the proposed pseudo-solutions is capable of changing this problem. Not so-called renewable energies, nor communism, nor so-called green consumerism, nor any spiritual ‘transformations.’
The only solution is the complete dismantling of the technological-industrial system. We consider attacks on transportation, communications, and energy infrastructure, along with other forms of resistance, to be essential in this fight.
As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 there was another strikingly similar attack where “Backhaul communications cables concerned with the Germany Railway (Deutsche Bahn, DB) radio system, safety-critical equipment without which modern, tightly timetabled and high speed trains cannot safely operate, were “willfully and intentionally severed”.”
The perpetrators were said to have “very precise knowledge of the railway’s radio system” and two cables were cut simultaneously 340 miles apart. As expressed by a German Army General at the time of that attack, the purpose of such attacks are “not about an enemy army with soldiers and tanks attacking our country [but] pinpricks in the population that are intended to stir up uncertainty and shake confidence in our state” and “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked”.
These “pinprick attacks” undermining public confidence in the everyday systems of Western life frequently target railways. Railway traffic was paralysed across France on the opening day of the Paris 2024 Olympics when suspected “ultra-left” activists who were said to have been “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted”.
The following day, France was hit with a double-whammy when internet backbone cable networks were sabotaged in six locations nationwide simultaneously.
Cables supplying power to high-speed trains were sabotaged in in 2019 in Italy. As stated at the time, this attack appeared to coincide with a court ruling on a left-wing group said to have bombed a book shop.
In 2019, a radio transmitter was burnt in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in greater Paris when cables were cut. This was said to be the culmination of a weeks-long campaign against information infrastructure.
In 2021, a series of attacks against telephone and internet services in France saw data company vehicles burnt, fibre optic cables cut, and a radio tower destroyed. Left-wingers took credit, saying: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”
In early 2022, the far-left was suspected over the sabotage of a power station and nine power lines over two nights. This left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after data cables in several locations were cut in the same night. The sabotage was done effectively enough, it was said the attackers would have to have “known the network”.
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