Mayor comment

Berlin mayor Kai Wegner told reporters: “It is unacceptable that left-wing extremists are once again openly attacking our electricity grid and thereby endangering human lives.” 

He later added: “This is not just arson or sabotage – this is terrorism.”

Berlin’s energy and economy senator, Franziska Giffey, called the attack a “serious blow to critical infrastructure”, and said the perpetrators had likely used publicly available data to select their location.

“You can find a lot of information on the internet,” she said, adding that policymakers would need to prioritise security over transparency going forward. The group claimed in its statement, however, that the sabotaged cables were “not publicly documented”.

On 6 January, German federal prosecutors confirmed they had launched a terrorism investigation into the arson attack by Volcano Group, which is considered “a left-wing extremist organisation” by the German government.

Active since 2011 – when it sabotaged railway infrastructure in Berlin on the basis that it helped the German state project military force and transport nuclear technology – members of the Volcano Group have claimed responsibility for a number of acts of technological sabotage since then.

This includes attacks on high-voltage power lines, transformers, radio stations and the power supplies of Tesla production sites.

A 2024 annual security report by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency highlighted that the group is a major concern for the German state due to the “enormous impact and high amounts of damage” caused by their attacks, which participants view as “a potentially promising way of influencing” the country’s climate policy.

To date, German police have failed to identify or arrest specific individuals that have participated in the Volcano Group or any of its attacks. While the group’s membership and organisational structure remain largely opaque, German authorities believe it operates in a decentralised manner.

Volcano Group motivations

In the statement published online in the wake of its attack, the Volcano Group apologised to “less affluent and vulnerable” Berlin residents impacted by the power cuts, claiming they were not the “intended targets” of the action.

“Our sympathy for the owners of the many villas, the real estate companies, the embassies and other elite wealthy individuals in the area is limited. The rich and their self-centred, antisocial lifestyle are currently destroying the planet,” they said, claiming the attack deliberately targeted the wealthier districts of the city.

In a follow-up statement published on 8 January, the group expressed regret at the impact on ordinary Berliners, adding that knowing the full consequences now, they would have planned the attack for a warmer time of the year.

In its initial statement published online, however, the Volcano Group said its targets were “the fossil fuel economy” and “energy-guzzling” digital technologies.

Noting that ordinary people “have no say in the direction of energy policy decisions or the city’s development”, the Volcano Group members argued that the “modernisation” of Berlin’s digital infrastructure is about increasing control and making it an attractive investment location, rather than improving the lives of all of its residents.

“These economically liberal destroyers of a liveable future think of the city in terms of numbers, sums of money, growth rates and competition with other cities. People don’t count, or only as categories of low-income or high-income earners,” they said, noting that while the latter will receive a “smart and beautiful” city, the former will face increasingly repressive measures that curtail their movement and opportunities.

“The ‘energy transition’ is a smokescreen that obscures the fact that it’s about energy without any transition, without ifs, ands or buts,” they added. “The main thing is energy, sustainable or not.”

Highlighting how the digital technologies being produced by resource-intensive production processes are contributing to people’s social dislocation while bolstering the military and surveillance capacities of states around the globe, Volcano Group members claimed that its “public-spirited action is socially beneficial.”

They added that although the attack will not prevent Volcano Group members’ own complicity “in an imperial lifestyle” built at the expense of billions in the Global South, it will send a signal.

“We are trying to interrupt the exploitation of the Earth, prevent CO2-related deaths, and halt the diseases linked to the climate catastrophe,” they said. “We are also trying to put an end to species extinction and make the world a more liveable place for everyone. Those who call us ‘eco-terrorists’ are themselves the real eco-terrorists, using this term to serve their own selfish interests and power calculations.”

Everyday digitisation

Volcano Group members also criticised the increasing digitisation of everyday life, claiming that algorithmically mediated communication via smartphones and social media means people are “operating their own surveillance”, while also feeding their “loneliness and alienation”.

At the same time, they argued that digitisation also means people are “increasingly excluded” from society if they do not use certain technologies.

“We are prisoners in a digital system that increasingly deprives us of our right to exist if we don’t submit to its rules and relocate our lives to social media, chat rooms and artificial realities,” they said.

“We receive no money, can’t book or buy anything with cash. Without access to the digital world, we are increasingly excluded, losing touch with what seems normal. We are afraid of what will happen to us and bury ourselves even deeper in our screens instead of switching off our devices and taking away the power over us of those who track, monitor, observe and manipulate us.”

Highlighting how rich countries and billionaires are doubling down in the face of looming environmental catastrophe – using growing resource scarcity to promote authoritarian political solutions while continuing their destabilising resource extraction at pace – the Volcano Group members called for “an international movement that rejects progress based solely on destruction, murder and plunder.”

“Desperate, angry and determined, we call out, joining the calls of others: Sabotage the fossil fuel infrastructure, the power grids, the exploitation of the Earth, the datacentres, the chip industry and its suppliers; destroy the foundations of the automotive and arms industries, of air travel, villas, yachts, spaceships and golf courses,” they said.

“Destroy the police headquarters that guarantee patriarchal property relations, for the Earth belongs to itself and to all living beings, not to humans, or rather, to men alone, and not to the richest among them.”

Contending views

Since the sabotage, a third statement has appeared online from people who claim to be members of the original 2011 Volcano Group that attacked the cable duct at Ostkreuz train station.

Distancing themselves from the action at Lichterfelde power station, the members said it contradicts what the group originally stood for and why they acted.

“Our point of reference was clear and limited,” they said. “Our targets were Bundeswehr deployments, German participation in wars, and arms exports.

“Infrastructure was not an end in itself or a playing field for us, but rather a symbol and vehicle for external military force. Our interventions were directed against war policies, not against basic social services, not against people in their everyday lives.”

Noting that “our past actions are being used to legitimise, explain or politically justify current attacks”, the group added that they have now distanced themselves from this and other recent Volcano Group attacks because they do not “want to be part of a dynamic in which criticism of militarism coincides with the actual weakening of societies”.

However, just as the identities of those who made the initial statements after the Lichterfelde attack cannot be definitively identified, there is no way of concretely verifying the identities of the third letter’s authors.