Railways in Germany have experienced days of “massive” disruption after a track bottleneck on the national network was found to have been sabotaged two days in a row, with a post-left ultra-anarchist group taking responsibility for what they called a strike against the global industrial economy.
Thousands of international, intercity, and regional trains were disrupted, and many tens of thousands of passengers and freight consignments were hampered after a fire was set in the cabling trough that runs beside the mainline on Thursday, rendering the signalling and safety system inoperative and trains totally unable to run. National rail company Deutsche Bahn said damage was significant and repairs of a 60-meter (65-yard) stretch of cables would last until the following day. Yet a second fire was subsequently discovered on another stretch of cabling on the same railway on Friday, pushing repairs into the weekend.
The fires took place on the “Ruhr Axis” high-speed line connecting Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf International Airport, and Duisburg in western Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). As well as local trains, high-speed intercity lines connecting Berlin, Frankfurt, north and south Germany, and the Netherlands were all impacted with “massive” disruption, reports WDR.
Police say they are investigating deliberate sabotage, and NRW 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”.
While police haven’t yet said they are sure it is genuine, a letter claiming responsibility for the fires was published in the usual way on the infamous left-extremist scene bulletin board ‘Indymedia‘ by the creatively named ‘Kommando Angry Birds’. Stating they want to “switch off the system of destruction”, the Kommando said in their note: “The Rhine-Alpine Corridor connects some of Europe’s most important economic centres: Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Duisburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Basel, Zurich, Milan, and Genoa. The Duisburg-Düsseldorf-Cologne region is one of its many bottlenecks.”
The disruption caused has a direct impact on the economy by delaying and diverting freight and passenger trains, they said.
The Indymedia network hosts several messages professing to be by the Kommando group, which admit to years of repeated railway sabotages and, by dribs and drabs, expressing a world view radically against economic growth, factory production, and resource extraction. Past “confession letters” by the Kommando mock the radical-left former Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, who oversaw the final disassembly of Germany’s nuclear power plants, as insufficiently ideologically pure and explain why modern “industrial society” needs to be utterly destroyed.
The regular political left is corrupt because it wishes to harness the new technologies created by the capitalists, while in their view, technology should be eliminated altogether, freeing man from being a “cog in the machine”, as asserted in a screed attached to the claimed burning of a series of radio masts near Düsseldorf. The group clearly perceives itself as post-left and apparently as anarcho-primitivists.
In another missive, they explained:
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.
Dismissing criticism of their attacks on railways as ill-founded because rail travel is more sustainable than other means of transportation, the group reflected that it still requires steel, plastic, aluminium, diesel, and electricity, and in any case takes up land, has employees, disturbs wildlife, is used for wartime logistics, and above all helps sustain modern industrial society. It is not the only target, they say, noting “Power lines, telecommunications cables, logistics companies, pipelines, and factories are equally legitimate” in their campaign to pour “sand” in the “cogs” of modern life.
This week’s sabotage, and the other arson attacks by the group and many others just like it across Europe, are part of a constantly ongoing and barely perceived — and certainly rarely reported on by the legacy media — phenomenon of system disruption by extremists that has been going on for years. Meant to undermine the myriad of discrete systems that underpin modern life, they take advantage of the openness of Western societies and how unprotected almost all critical infrastructure is.
Breitbart News has been reporting on such attacks for many years. As reported in a digest of such attacks at the time of identical railway sabotage in France on the first day of the Paris Olympics in 2024:
…in 2022 there was a strikingly similar attack in Germany, 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. 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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