Enlarge image
Climate activists at the airport in Leipzig
Photo: Tim Wagner / dpa
At around 2 a.m., the activists were taken into custody by the police at Leipzig Airport.
The protesters had held out for several hours and blocked a driveway for DHL trucks.
The logistics company later complained that several of its planes could have taken off too late and that the international flight schedule had been mixed up.
The action was the latest volte from climate activists from the Leipzig area, and it provoked violent reactions.
The police spoke of a "million dollar damage" that night, and DHL filed a complaint.
For Saxony's CDU Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, the action "crossed borders": "I think the majority of people in Saxony would say: It would be right if the blockers paid the millions in damage." Saxony's Minister of Economic Affairs and SPD country chief Martin Dulig also condemned him Protest as "unacceptable".
But what actually happened at the airport on Saturday night?
The most important questions and answers:
Why is Halle-Leipzig Airport being expanded?
The airport is now the second largest German cargo airport in Germany after Frankfurt am Main and is set to expand even further.
DHL wants to expand its large logistics hub from 60 to up to 100 parking spaces.
This is expected to cost 300 million euros, and the number of take-offs and landings will increase from 80,000 a year to up to 130,000.
The planning approval process is currently still in progress.
The expansion of the airport, which largely belongs to the federal states of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, is also supported by the federal government.
In the coalition agreement of the grand coalition of 2018, for example, the plan was to "extend cargo landing rights" for Leipzig-Halle Airport.
Why are the demonstrators against it?
Citizens' initiatives, climate activists and at least one member of the state parliament have teamed up to stop the project.
The motives for this are different.
Local residents warn of further noise and environmental pollution, especially in the north of Leipzig.
Most of the flights at the DHL hub take place at night.
It is also criticized that, of all things, an airport should be expanded during the climate crisis, instead of relying more on rail traffic.
For left-wing activists, there are also working conditions at DHL, which they criticize as inadequate for the employees.
What actually happened that night?
About 80 people, most of them in their early twenties, blocked an entrance to the DHL hub at the airport on Friday evening at around 10.30 p.m. The action was initially not registered with the police, who then moved in after a while and surrounded the group, as the demonstrators describe. One of the co-organizers, Marco Böhme, member of the Left Parliament, apparently sees no problem in the missing registration: "One of four access roads was occupied, so there can be no question of a complete blockade."
Around midnight, Böhme had officially requested a meeting with the police.
SPIEGEL has a corresponding document.
That should be decisive for the legal situation.
"If the demonstrators had the impression that they had complied with the reporting requirement, they can hardly be prosecuted," said administrative lawyer Christian Pestalozza of the "Mitteldeutsche Zeitung".
Therefore, even the police might ultimately be liable for the damage.
However, it is questionable whether the authorities would have allowed the blockade itself or a meeting on the driveway to the airport.
Around two in the morning, when the demonstrators were apparently already on their way, the police are said to have evacuated the gathering.
Some of the participants refused to provide information about their identity and were held until the next day.
What damage has occurred?
The police had written in their report that night that "the vehicles that were stopped were also trucks loaded with vaccines."
And "according to a person responsible at DHL", "damage in the millions was incurred".
That is why it was necessary to establish the identities of the activists by order of the Leipzig public prosecutor's office "to safeguard civil law claims".
However, a spokesman for DHL said on Monday that vaccines were not affected at all.
Rather, the closure only "led to delays in operations with locally manageable effects."
At the DHL hub in Leipzig, »time-critical freight is often handled, including important spare parts for industry as well as chilled or frozen goods or urgently needed and often vital medical goods«.
Vaccines were not included.
The damage that has occurred cannot yet be identified at this point in time.
But there was no longer any question of a "million dollar damage".
How does federal politics react?
"Investments in infrastructure such as Leipzig Airport are of enormous importance for our mobility and for thousands of jobs of hard-working people," said transport politician and CDU member of the Bundestag, Christoph Ploß, to SPIEGEL. »Peaceful demonstrations are legitimate, but committing crimes in the process is not possible in a constitutional state. These so-called “activists” should be liable for any damage, ”he demands.
This is seen differently in the so-called Climate Union, a group of CDU politicians who want to promote climate policy in their party. The group calls for all air traffic subsidies to be abolished piece by piece - this also applies to Leipzig Airport. "In view of the global warming that is leading to heat waves and forest fires in Canada and the USA, for example, and the Paris climate target of stopping global warming at the 1.5 degree limit, more talk about air traffic," says the Chairman of the Climate Union, Heinrich Strossenreuther, SPIEGEL "It would be better if there were no registered demonstrations by deeply worried citizens, but politicians were responsible for conducting this discussion themselves."
Left chairwoman Janine Wissler, who recently met with representatives of the initiatives, shares their concerns about the expansion. “I find the reaction of the police and the Prime Minister to a peaceful demonstration with a few dozen participants wrong and incomprehensible. Especially after the lateral thinker demos in recent times, "Wissler told SPIEGEL, with a view to a meeting between Kretschmer and organizers of the lateral thinker movement, which was partially observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
The climate policy spokesman for the left parliamentary group Lorenz Gösta Beutin said: “The protest in Leipzig is a loud wake-up call in the summer slump, fully legitimate and urgently needed.
The accusation of the state government, public prosecutor and police leadership that the blockade had impeded vaccine deliveries borders on deliberate deception of the public. "With the" unbroken billions of claims from airports and airlines ", the federal government is operating" climate destruction at taxpayer costs. "
Luisa Neubauer from Fridays for Future, who visited some of the arrested activists at the police station on Saturday, criticized the state government: “The climate crisis is escalating.
Instead of stepping up climate protection, climate activism is increasingly criminalized. "