More than 5,000 Berlin households were evacuated three weeks ago when an unexploded aerial bomb from World War II was discovered at the bottom of the Neukölln shipping canal. That might be big news in a lot of places, but here this happens regularly enough that it was barely a blip in local headlines.
Our first year here, a construction crew working on a new apartment building near the school my son attended unearthed one while digging out the foundation.
Like that bomb, this recent one was retreived and safely disposed of by the police bomb squad at their secure facility in Grunewald.
Public broadcaster RBB published a video of the process here.
Then, a few days later, another Neukölln resident found an old, unexploded grenade in their garden and helpfully decided to just bring it to the police station on Zwickauer Damm himself.
This prompted the Berlin police to issue a statement asking the public to please never do this. Call them and they will send the bomb squad to come get it. They don’t mind—it’s their job.
And even as Berliners continue to face reminders of the last time the city was a war zone, they are coming to realize that they are under attack again. Not with bombs this time - but drones, small-scale sabotage, and social media disinformation campaigns.
What is hybrid warfare?
On September 2, the German government accused Russia of responsibility for the failed August 4 drone attack on a cargo plane at the Leipzig airport.
“We are not at war,” German interior minister Alexander Dobrint stated at a press conference announcing the government’s decision. “But we are the daily target of hybrid warfare.”
Since at least 2022, Russia is suspected in several acts of sabotage on German infrastructure, as well as targeted acts of terror and large-scale disinformation campaigns, designed to destabilize the government and reduce its ability to provide support to Ukraine.
“Hybrid warfare was defined by Frank Hoffman in 2007 as the emerging simultaneous use of multiple types of warfare … [including] political warfare and blend conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyberwarfare[2][3] with other influencing methods, such as fake news,[4] diplomacy, lawfare, regime change, and foreign electoral intervention.”
-Source: Wikipedia.
Recently, such attacks have become both more frequent and bold.
In just the previous month:
a cyberattack on the Berlin state computer network resulted in the theft of a large amount of personal data, including the names, addresses, and birth certificates of thousands of state employees;
police found several homemade explosive devices placed around a power plant in Jänschwalde in southern Brandenburg;
a Russian influence operation, Operation Overload, is thought to be behind a series of deepfake videos promoting lies related to candidates for state political offices
Terminal 1 at Berlin Brandenburg International Airport was evacuated and air traffic shutdown for several hours last Thursday after a woman approached a security checkpoint and told officers there that she had a toxic substance in her purse. (So far, this airport incident is not alleged to have been sponsored by any hostile action. The woman was only briefly held for questioning. But it has contributed to the overall unease.)
Some also believe the Russian government to be behind the arson attack on a power substation last January that left 65,000 residents in southwest Berlin without power. The largest power outage in the city since the second world war.
Although a statement, allegedly from a leftwing environmental activist group calling itself the Vulkangruppe, claimed responsibility for the arson, there has never been any confirmation that such a group exists or that any one group is behind attacks carried out in their name.
That’s the key benefit of hybrid warfare. The attacker can deny they did it—posing as anonymous “left-wing extremists” or “environmental extremists” to take the blame.
Until now, the German government has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the extent of Russia’s attacks, worried that doing so would escalate the conflict into open war.
But as Russia has stepped up actions both here and in other NATO countries, it has forced the issue out into the open.
Populist parties undermining national defense
Ironically, Russia’s most successful hybrid campaign so far seems to be its support for populist political parties that undermine social cohesiion as well as public support for increased defense spending.
In Germany, both the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and the (allegedly) far-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) are both openly pro-Russia, supporting the lifting of the embargo on oil purchases and halting German arms support for Ukraine.
As I mentioned last week, the series of social media videos promoting a fake campaign to re-divide Germany has been traced to a Russian disinformation network. The same network also produced several videos spreading lies and false claims about individual political candidates in Saxony-Anhalt.
The AfD recently scored a major victory in elections for the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, the first time that a far-right party has come in first in a state-wide election since the end of the second world war. It is also polling among the top three parties in upcoming state elections in Berlin and Mecklenberg-Vorpommern.
The party’s success can spell trouble not only for domestic policies, but also as Germany and its allies try to collectively respond to Russian aggression.
“Europe is stagnating at a time when the external threats were assuming a dimension which is really very serious.” Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference, said at a recent forum in Rome. “These are really huge and existential challenges requiring greater integration in defence.”
But the German public may be waking up to the real threat posed by Russia. A recent national poll by the public broadcaster, ARD, has found that over half of respondents see the country as a threat.
“Some 56% of the eligible voters polled now see Germany's security as threatened by Russia, according to the latest Deutschlandtrend, for which the polling firm infratest-dimap conducted a representative survey of 1,319 German voters for public broadcaster ARD between August 31 and September 2.”
In response to the Leipzig attack, Germany announced it would close the Russian consulate in Bonn and the Russia House in Berlin. Officials in Brandenburg and North Rhine - Westphalia are sharing information about the similar acts of sabotage attempted on power substations in their areas and exploring strategies for protecting critical infrastructure.
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DW.com: Berlin: BER Airport Terminal 1 reopened after security scare
Reuters: Berlin launches crisis response after hackers publish stolen data
DW.com: Germany news: Explosive devices found near power plant
The Guardian: Europe calls out Russia’s ‘hybrid war’ in public. But how can it make Putin pay?
📕📺🎧Read, watch, listen
Here what I have been reading (Berlin- and Germany-related) this week. Yes, more politics—but also racism and, of course, real estate.
Zeitgeist: Is today a historic day in Germany?
Historian Katja Hoyer puts the AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt in context of the development of democracy in postwar Germany.
When West Germany was founded in 1949, it was acutely aware of the fact that it had inherited a population that had been deeply nazified, affecting younger people especially, who had known nothing but Hitler’s ideas. With that in mind, the watchful eyes of the Western Allies on all their doings and the experience of the collapse of Weimar democracy in vivid living memory, it set out to tolerate only political parties that were within the moderate spectrum.
The first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, applied a whole range of methods to achieve this. He banned a Nazi successor party and the Communist Party in the 1950s. He integrated former Nazis into his own government, as well as the civil service and society more widely. And he built a domestic security service to monitor and potentially ban other political organisations if they were deemed to sit outside the constitutional boundaries.
Effectively, this meant that Adenauer’s own conservatives (CDU/CSU) were as right-wing as Germans were supposed to go and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) covered the other side of the political spectrum.
Read her article here.
Paul Sullivan: A Warning Sign—and a Glimmer of Hope
I regularly read (and link to) the website, Slow Travel Berlin. Now its founder, Paul Sullivan, has a Substack covering climate change and German politics. I appreciated his take on the recent AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt.
BUT—the AfD does not have a majority. Sachsen-Anhalt’s parliament has 83 seats, meaning 42 are needed for an outright majority. Current projections give the AfD 39 seats, with the BSW on five. If the BSW ultimately falls below the 5% threshold and loses its seats, the AfD could rise to 41; still one short of a majority.
More here.
HEIST: Goodbye to Berlin: Why I’m Leaving This City After 15 Years
Berlin’s worker-owned online news magazine featured this essay from Zara Rahman, a German citizen of British-Bangladeshi ancestry, on why she can no longer call this country home.
It’s not the AfD, nor the rise of the far-right. No. It’s because of the dishonesty within the left and ‘progressive’ part of German society.
Read the rest here.
The Berliner: Berlin’s Empty Office Problem is Building
A question I always ask myself whenever the tram I’m riding on passes empty commercial buildings is, “Why isn’t the city building more housing when it still has abandoned buildings?” Here, writer Salome von Stolzmann also asks this question.
“Berlin has an abundance of empty buildings. To be exact, there are over two million square metres available, room enough for tens of thousands of people to live. The problem is that it’s currently in the form of not-in-use offices. So why in the name of a widely agreed-upon housing crisis aren’t we turning them into places to live?”
Read more here.
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Is Russia using these tactics only on Germany, but on other European countries too?