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.
All this might sound unlikely but, a month later, the federal government admitted investigators had not ruled anything out. “The federal security forces generally pursue all evidence … including that pointing to potential other groups of perpetrators as well the possible Russian authorship of the letter of confession,” the interior ministry said, in response to questions submitted by Green party MPs.
“We think it’s outrageous that in 15 years they haven’t got one step further in identifying these people,” the Green MP Irene Mihalic tells me. “The investigative authorities should have enough powers to throw some light on to it. It’s interesting that they know so little.”
Public opinion has been largely hostile to the Volcano Group, not least because, in the days after the January blackout, local TV news was full of images of pensioners forced to camp out in emergency shelters. Unsurprisingly, Berlin’s leftist scene, a kaleidoscope of different political currents, was virtually united in disowning the group. “Historically, you never see an underground leftwing group without some kind of above-ground periphery. But here, absolutely no one on the left is defending them. That’s unusual,” as Nathaniel Flakin, a Berlin journalist and historian, puts it to me.
Inspired by the Russian rumours, some concluded that those behind the Volcano Group weren’t even leftists. Two months before the Berlin blackout, German media had reported that the far-right Alternative for Germany, often accused of being sympathetic to Russia, had submitted a suspicious number of questions to the government about Germany’s critical infrastructure. Could this have been a false flag attack carried out by Russian agents with the help of Germany’s biggest far-right political party? The notion is “ridiculous”, says Frank-Christian Hansel, an AfD representative in the Berlin state parliament. It was Hansel’s questions in the parliament in 2024 about the safety of Berlin’s power grid that triggered a small flurry of conspiracy theories online in the aftermath of the blackout. “It was my duty as a parliamentarian to ask about resilience. It’s absurd to blame us, who want [Berlin] to be resilient, to suggest that we want to give information about how to attack.”
The Volcano Group appeared to be offended by the idea they might be Russians or their far-right agents in Germany. On 8 January, a second statement appeared on Indymedia, saying such speculation would in the past have been treated as “irrelevant rubbish”, but now “fake news, AI-generated reports and hybrid attacks have caused uncertainty”.
By this stage, the situation had started to get really confusing. On 7 January, a statement claiming to be from another Volcano Group had popped up on Indymedia. This text, entitled “Against appropriation and false continuities”, claimed to be from the group that carried out the original 2011 attacks, and distanced itself from this year’s blackout. Their quarrel, back in the day, had been with Germany’s involvement in foreign conflicts and the country’s arms industry, they said. They would never have tried to cause a blackout: “We wanted interruption, not escalation. Disruption of normality, not its destruction.”
The 3 January Volcano Group was annoyed by this, and sniped back in response that the above statement was obviously a fake, possibly planted by “intelligence agencies and/or fascists”. “This is about disorientation, sowing confusion and division,” it said.
Nevertheless, there was an odd tone of remorse in the latter statement, too. The 3 January Volcano Group appeared to regret causing such a major disruption to people’s lives. The target had been the fossil fuel economy, they claimed, not the people of Berlin, and their intention had simply been to cut a fossil fuel-burning plant from the grid. “The scope of the effect on around 40,000 private homes was neither intended nor factored in,” they said. “With today’s knowledge about the consequences for sections of the population, we would have moved the action to a warmer season,” they wrote, somewhat sheepishly. In other words, it seemed, this whole thing had been a major cock-up.
Well, of course, thought Tadzio Müller, a veteran of Berlin’s leftist climate movement. “This act was indefensible,” he tells me. He learned about the blackout the day after it happened, while on a train back to Berlin. “I heard ‘power cut’, I heard ‘arson attack’, and I was thinking, ‘Please no, please no’ – and then I hear ‘Volcano Group’. And I was like: ‘Fuck.’”
Meeting him in his book-lined flat over a herbal tea, I can see why Müller has become a prominent figure – he is an intense, garrulous presence, a fit-looking 49-year-old with a hyperactive energy. His conversation is a roiling stream of war stories from three decades of struggle, punctuated with allusions from a century of leftist and anarchist thinkers. And he has the scars to show for it: Müller has been beaten up by cops in Prague, and sobbed with helpless rage at the fence of a British military airfield as planes took off to join the bombing of Iraq in the early 2000s.
In 2015, Müller co-founded the environmentalist action group Ende Gelände, the most militant of Germany’s “above-ground” climate protest organisations. In 2024, Müller published a book about his journey through climate grief to renewed action, entitled Between Peaceful Sabotage and Collapse: How I Learned to Love the Future Again.
When he read the Volcano Group’s initial confession, Müller also felt something was off about the language, but he doesn’t think this necessarily means the blackout was orchestrated by Russian agents. “I think it was a leftist action, and I think it went horribly wrong,” he says.
Müller is adamant the Volcano Group is not just made up of frustrated climate activists – people who used to be in groups such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil or the Last Generation and then decided to go militant; the kind of people imagined, for example, by Swedish academic Andreas Malm in his much-discussed 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Instead, Müller locates the Volcano Group within a particular strand of radical leftism called anarcho-primitivism, which has long advocated destabilising the economy through physical sabotage, and which in the past few years has taken on a more eco-activist tone. Hansen seems to agree: they may be disgruntled climate activists, he tells me on the phone, “but I think it’s more likely that they’re people from the militant leftwing extremist scene”.
Müller has never considered going underground, but he does think there’s a fruitful gap to explore between what is legal and what is legitimate. “I’ve said for years that we need to think about the possibility of some type of publicly legitimisable sabotage,” he says. “Like shutting down some tracks to block a train with nuclear waste. Sure, it’s illegal, but the country to some extent accepts that it is a legitimate protest.”
The legal grey zone of civil disobedience is very much the space occupied by Ende Gelände, whose name approximates to “end of the road”, and which marries environmentalism with anti-capitalism. Since 2024, the group has been designated as engaging in “suspected” leftwing extremism (rather than actual leftwing extremism like the Volcano Group) by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Ende Gelände staged several mass interventions in the late 2010s, where thousands of people occupied Germany’s coalmines. Unlike the Volcano Groups, Ende Gelände’s actions are public and sometimes involve thousands of demonstrators, as they are able to draw many of their activists from the climate movement at large.
Despite also targeting fossil fuel power stations, Ende Gelände conspicuously refrained from expressing support for the Volcano Group. But I do find one Ende Gelände activist willing to offer at least some sympathy with the cause – if not endorsement of the method. Scully, who does not want to give her full name, and who has taken part in several Ende Gelände actions, is ambivalent on the subject of sabotage. “I wouldn’t say I was happy,” she tells me over the phone, when I ask what she made of the blackout. “But I am a proponent of talking about whether we want to carry out sabotage and how we carry out sabotage.”
Scully thinks the chaos of 3 January wouldn’t have happened if the “above-ground” climate movement offered space to debate such tactics within its ranks, so that bad ideas could be shot down before people carried them out. She is convinced the threat of direct militant action has a place in the fight for climate justice. Like the anarchist group Kommando Angry Birds, thought to be responsible for at least seven attacks on the German train system since 2023, and which cited the inspiration of Nelson Mandela’s speech on acts of sabotage on critical infrastructure, Scully draws a comparison with the anti-racism movement. “It’s the typical argument: Martin Luther King wouldn’t have been so successful without Malcolm X.”
