Civil War Watch: Left Extremists Burn Amazon, Telecom Company Vans in Berlin

Specialist police are investigating after an ultra-left group claimed responsibility for the burning of dozens of Amazon and Deutsche Telekom trucks in Berlin this week.

100 firemen were deployed by the Berlin fire brigade to blazes in the Lichtenberg and Britz neighborhoods in early hours of Tuesday morning to tackle blazes apparently set amid large numbers of commercial vehicles, reports city newspaper BZ.

At both locations the fires, which started simultaneously several miles apart, were too well established by the time they were noticed and reported to be put out and the vehicles were totally destroyed. In all 19 Amazon delivery vans in a private Amazon compound and 17 Deutsche Telekom vans in a car park were burnt out.

Five further vehicles were damaged by flames leaping from the burning Amazon trucks at the compound location, Tageschaureports. The fires came as Amazon celebrated the opening of its new corporate headquarters in Berlin, the city’s tallest office tower where 3,000 Amazon staff are due to work.

The state security services are investigating the blazes because of the presumed political motivation for the arson. Indeed, the fires follow other such attacks in Berlin in recent days.

Last week in the early hours of Tuesday morning 23 Amazon delivery vans were burnt out in Brandenburg, Germany. Weeks before on May 1st, another 16 Amazon vans were burnt in the Wittenau neighborhood of Berlin.

Hours after Tuesday’s fire, a letter published to a prominent, infamous left-extremist scene bulletin board ‘Indymedia‘ claimed responsibility for the blazes, stating both Amazon and the state-owned Deutsche Telekom are legitimate targets because of their involvement with Israel and Germany’s police, intelligence services, and border controls.

In the statement, seen by Breitbart London, the anonymous ‘Antimilitarist’ author claimed “Both companies profit immensely from global militarization and the escalating wars” and that “Amazon’s servers and cloud services are used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to store the vast amounts of data obtained from mass surveillance of the Palestinian population.”

As for excusing the arson of vans belonging to Germany’s national telephone operator, they stated: “For the state and global military system to function, a highly complex technological infrastructure is needed. In Germany, this is operated and expanded by the state-owned Telekom… [which is a] supplier to border authorities, police, and intelligence services”.

They also decried Telekom for working with “pure fascist” Elon Musk’s Starlink, saying:  “Starlink not only supports Ukraine and Israel with data in their military attacks – Musk also has the power to prevent those same attacks by not providing Starlink data.”

The group called on others who opposed war, “fascism”, and imperialism to launch their own attacks against the infrastructure which they say underpins those issues.

Although little remarked upon, the recent spate of arson attacks against Amazon and Deutsche Telekom are the latest manifestation of a years-long campaign by the radical left to sabotage the systems that underpin modern urban life across Europe. As expressed by Professor David Betz on where this rising tide of sabotage leads:

… these are now very small-scale, but what they represent is a tactic… system disruption. It’s a very well known idea in the literature on this issue that works on the logic that by attacking infrastructure, by disruption the system, you produce political effect… this is a tactic which can be used in order to disrupt the system, to cause the cities to ultimately implode.

… [thinking hypothetically about where this leads] it’s not just happening once in a while, once in ten years or 20 years, but is happening once every two weeks. The power is going out, or the gas doesn’t operate because someone’s attacked the network… it’s the second or third time that’s happened in a winter… and every time something settles down, something else breaks because someone breaks it.

This is the essence of a strategic approach where you conduct an action with a view to creating a certain effect… you’re not mobilising 30,000 people to go out onto the street, you’re turning off the electricity, you’re turning off the support systems to the urban environment which keep those people on a normal basis from not losing it. And that can be done with quite low numbers of people.

As reported in 2024 when hard-left activists sabotaged the railways leading in and out of Paris:

As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 there was a strikingly similar attack in Germany, where “Backhaul communications cables concerned with the Germany Railway (Deutsche Bahn, DB) radio system, safety-critical equipment without which modern, tightly timetabled and high speed trains cannot safely operate, were “willfully and intentionally severed”.”

The perpetrators were said to have “very precise knowledge of the railway’s radio system” and two cables were cut simultaneously 340 miles apart. As expressed by a German Army General at the time of that attack, the purpose of such attacks are “not about an enemy army with soldiers and tanks attacking our country [but] pinpricks in the population that are intended to stir up uncertainty and shake confidence in our state” and “every substation, every power plant, every pipeline can be attacked”.

These “pinprick attacks” undermining public confidence in the everyday systems of Western life frequently target railways. Cables supplying power to high-speed trains were sabotaged in in 2019 in Italy. As stated at the time, this attack appeared to coincide with a court ruling on a left-wing group said to have bombed a book shop.

In 2019, a radio transmitter was burnt in France. In 2020, 50,000 people lost internet access in greater Paris when cables were cut. This was said to be the culmination of a weeks-long campaign against information infrastructure.

In 2021, a series of attacks against telephone and internet services in France saw data company vehicles burnt, fibre optic cables cut, and a radio tower destroyed. Left-wingers took credit, saying: “it is not to protest against 5G in particular but in a broader context, fighting against the techno-world… We want to salute all the arsonists who are acting in the shadows at the moment and repeatedly beating this technological hell.”

In early 2022, the far-left was suspected over the sabotage of a power station and nine power lines over two nights. This left thousands of homes and a semiconductor factory without power. Days later, several French cities were left totally without internet after data cables in several locations were cut in the same night. The sabotage was done effectively enough, it was said the attackers would have to have “known the network”.