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Police officers at the crime scene in Grünheide
Photo: Filip Singer / EPA
After the suspected arson attack on its factory in Grünheide, the US car manufacturer Tesla expects a production outage to last several days.
The left-wing extremist “Vulcan Group” claims responsibility for this.
The investigating authorities classify the left-wing extremists' letter of confession as authentic, as a spokeswoman for the Brandenburg state police announced this morning.
What is known about the »volcanic group«?
What happened in Grünheide?
Unknown perpetrators set fire to a power pole in a field in Gosen-Neu Zittau near the Tesla factory in Grünheide on Tuesday morning.
There was a blackout in Tesla's only European car factory, the site was evacuated and production stopped.
According to Brandenburg's Economics Minister Jörg Steinbach, a total of six communities with "several tens of thousands of people" were affected by the power outage.
Also hospitals and retirement homes where people may need to be ventilated.
In the alleged attack, the perpetrators "accepted that people would be injured as a result."
The Brandenburg police are currently not talking about an attack, but rather about “intentional arson.”
Who is behind the “volcano group”?
Little is known about them.
The group is said to have been founded in 2011 and is assigned to the anarchist spectrum by the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Since its founding, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has held it responsible for a series of arson attacks in Berlin and Brandenburg
.
In the confession letter from Tuesday, the group calls itself the “Volcano Group Shut Down Tesla!”, but it has also appeared under the names “Vulkan Group Against the Progress of Destruction” or “Vulkan Group Shut Down The Power”.
The number of members and the exact organizational structure are not known.
However, it can be seen from the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 2019 that the intelligence service is based on a consolidated structure.
What did the letter of confession say?
“We sabotaged Tesla today”: This is how the letter that the group published on Tuesday afternoon on the left-wing extremist Internet platform Indymedia begins.
The “complete destruction” of the factory was the goal, as was “the removal of techno-fascists like Elend Musk.”
This is a step towards liberation from patriarchy.
In addition to some publicly discussed criticisms of the work, the group also cites the rejection of “green capitalism” as the motivation for the attack.
The authors claim: "We have ruled out any danger to our lives and the lives of other people." The pamphlet also describes in detail how they claim to have proceeded with the attack.
What were previous actions?
The attacks attributed to the group since 2011 have mostly targeted cable shafts on railway lines.
In some cases, the left-wing extremists also attacked radio masts or data lines, and sometimes also company vehicles.
According to the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2019, the “volcano group” is said to be “revealing the vulnerability of the urban mobility and communication infrastructure, disrupting public order and causing significant property damage” through acts of sabotage.
In at least eight cases in recent years, according to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the texts of the letters of confession are said to be so similar in structure, style and content that the authority assumes a “(partially) identical group of authors”.
A strategy paper from 2015 also points to a fixed structure.
It is also not the first time that left-wing extremists are suspected of having carried out an arson attack on Tesla's power supply.
They are said to have carried out an attack on the power supply at the Tesla construction site as early as 2021.
At that time, power cables were burning in a forest about 500 meters from the car manufacturer's factory.
In March 2018, the group carried out an arson attack on power lines in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
Around 6,500 homes and 400 companies were without power for hours.
The property damage ran into the millions.
And Tesla?
Tesla boss Elon Musk already commented on Tuesday.
"These are either the stupidest eco-terrorists in the world or they are puppets of those who don't have good environmental goals," Musk wrote in English on the X portal. He did not say who he suspected was the possible mastermind.
“Stopping the production of electric vehicles instead of fossil fuel vehicles is extremely stupid,” Musk continued.
He wrote the words “extremely stupid” in German.
The Grünheide plant manager reacted with dismay.
»For us, this is really an attack on this industrial settlement here in Brandenburg.
We have over 12,000 employees that we cannot continue to employ at the moment," said André Thierig.
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