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Police in Herrenwald: There may be months of clashes ahead
Photo: Matthias Bartsch / DER SPIEGEL
Around 6 a.m., several hundred police officers had already left a Bundeswehr barracks in Stadtallendorf in Central Hesse.
They parked their emergency vehicles on the northeastern edge of the city, secured a piece of forest with red and white tape and surrounded three improvised tree houses on which around ten environmental activists were waiting at the time.
They then accompanied workers with heavy equipment onto the site.
The first trees fell about three hours after the start of the mission.
Strong police forces from Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria as well as federal police officers are to secure the expansion of the A 49 motorway near Gießen and Marburg on a large scale.
According to a police spokeswoman, they are preparing for weeks or months of clashes with forest occupiers and demonstrators.
The environmental activists want to hold the position on platforms in the treetops, some of which are more than 20 meters high, until the end of March, after which the tree-felling work would have to be interrupted until autumn 2021 for nature conservation reasons.
For the start of the clearing, the police and construction company have chosen a place that expected relatively little resistance: They did not begin in the Dannenröder forest, where more than 150 activists are currently believed to be living.
Instead, the trees are first felled in a forest further north, the Herrenwald near Stadtallendorf.
The "altitude intervention team" in the treehouse
"Danni stays, forest instead of asphalt," echoes from the three tree houses in the forest.
"People in the tree houses, you are great," a young woman calls back from the barricade.
Meanwhile, a police "high-altitude intervention team" is preparing for its mission on a meadow in front of the forest.
In the late afternoon the tree houses will be cleared.
About a hundred meters away from the tree houses, around 30 men and women block a forest path at noon, on which a police clearing vehicle wants to drive to its next location.
The officers first separate a few demonstrators from the group, then they carry the others one after the other into a clearing on the edge of the path.
People are shouting and protesting, but the operation remains peaceful.
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"Danni stays, forest instead of asphalt," echoes from the three tree houses in the forest
Photo: Boris Roessler / dpa
You don't want to endanger people, says an activist who calls herself Lola.
She speaks for an alliance called "Auto Correction" that supports the forest occupiers.
She hoped that this would also apply to the police.
But you have to expect that the disputes will get tougher if the clearing soon also begins in the Dannenröder forest, says Lola.
This forest is about 1000 hectares in size.
27 hectares of which are to be cleared for the motorway.
It is an intact, species-rich mixed forest with over 250-year-old oaks and beeches, criticize protest camp residents, citizens' initiatives and environmental associations such as BUND.
In addition, the concrete runway endangers the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people.
The region around the Herrenwald and Dannenröder Forest is one of the most important drinking water reservoirs in Hesse.
This is another reason why the construction of the A 49 has been controversial for decades.
The opponents of expansion call the slope a "planning dinosaur", which is neither contemporary nor approvable in view of climate change.
The first drafts come from the 1960s.
Since then, routes have been repeatedly rejected, shifted and, in some cases, re-planned.
Supporters also demonstrated
In the meantime, more than half of the route, which should better connect the north Hessian Kassel with the middle and the south of the federal state, has been completed or is currently under construction.
The aisles through the Herrenwald and Dannenröder Forest are part of the last two construction phases, which are around 31 kilometers long.
The southernmost part of the route through the Dannenröder Forest to the A 5 motorway was approved by the traffic authorities in 2012 and then confirmed by several courts up to the Federal Administrative Court.
Construction should be completed by the middle of this decade.
There are also numerous supporters of the motorway among the residents in the region.
Many residents, companies and municipalities hope that the new route will relieve the heavy traffic on the federal highways and provide a faster connection to Giessen or the greater Frankfurt area.
At a rally with a few hundred participants last weekend, the autobahn proponents in Stadtallendorf described themselves as a "silent majority".
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Police in the forest near Stadtallendorf
Photo: Boris Roessler / dpa
The opponents of the slopes, on the other hand, have supporters from many parts of the republic.
Among them are tried and tested forest squatters who had already cobbled together barricades and tree houses in the Hambach Forest.
Or high school graduates like Lou, that's what she calls herself, who has lived in the forest since May.
In mid-September, with a camouflage-colored cloth in front of her mouth, she led the left-wing Hessian parliamentary group through the branching resistance settlements with names like "Oben" or "Unterwex" and raved about life in the Dannenhöfer forest.
When she wakes up in the morning and hears birds chirping and the wind rustling in the leaves, then she knows that she is in the right place, Lou reported, the forest is her "home".
The left-wing politicians expressed their solidarity and donated containers for water treatment to supply the protest camp residents.
Carola Rackete wonders about the greens
The human rights activist Carola Rackete, known as the captain of the rescue ship Sea Watch 3, has also taken up quarters in a tree house in the "Oben" part of the village and called on Twitter to come into the forest when the eviction begins.
It is absurd that such a beautiful old forest should fall for a highway, says Rackete.
She is surprised that the state government in Hesse is involved, although the Greens co-governed the state and even provided the transport minister.
For the Greens in Hesse, the dispute over the "Danni" has actually turned into a credibility problem.
The Green Minister of Transport Tarek Al-Wazir is currently using every opportunity to explain that he has always been against the motorway and still rejects it.
Only: he could no longer prevent the building.
Before his term in office, the motorway had been decided by other political majorities, the building rights had been granted and approved by the courts up to the last instance.
After all, even a minister must obey the law.
Not all Greens see it that way.
The Homburg city councilor Barbara Schlemmer, who maintains close contact with the forest occupiers, is "deeply disappointed" by her party friend.
"Tarek Al-Wazir should stand here in the forest with us," she says, and actually also the federal chairmen Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock.
Instead, the left is the only party from the state parliament on the side of those who fought in the "Danni" against the destruction of nature, climate change and an outdated transport policy.
"It's a scandal for me," says Schlemmer.
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