Berlin in the dark: a power outage shakes Germany
Arson that left parts of German capital without electricity for days highlights poor energy infrastructure
An arson attack that left parts of Berlin without power for days in freezing temperatures has shaken residents and sparked a debate about the resilience of Germany’s energy infrastructure.
Last Saturday, 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses in affluent south-western districts of the German capital — as well as several hospitals and nursing homes — woke up without electricity, heating or mobile phone service.
Investigators are still working to establish who was responsible for the deliberate fire, which damaged several high-voltage cables running over a canal near a power plant.
Activists purporting to be from a leftwing anti capitalist organisation called Volcano group initially claimed responsibility. But subsequently others who said they were the authentic Volcano group denied involvement.
Germans have grown accustomed to increased sabotage in recent years — which Chancellor Friedrich Merz has mostly attributed to Russian hybrid warfare — but Saturday’s incident caused unprecedented disruption.
As night fell, plunging homes and snow-blanketed streets into darkness, authorities said it would take six days to fully restore power, confronting Germany with its longest outage since the second world war — and a sudden sense of fragility.
By Wednesday, power was finally restored. The country’s ageing energy infrastructure is set to be upgraded after two decades of under-investment, but the blackout has exposed the country’s lack of readiness for such an attack.
“If a group of German anarchists can be that disruptive, imagine what foreign secret services can do,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a Berlin-based research fellow at US think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was among those affected.
It has also highlighted a degree of bureaucratic inertia and unpreparedness. Berlin’s Christian Democrat Union mayor Kai Wegner, who leads a coalition with the Social Democrats, only visited the affected areas 24 hours after the attack. Wegner, who hails from Merz’s party, later admitted he played tennis on the first day of the outage.
The city waited until Sunday to declare a state of emergency, while some residents in unaffected areas received an “extreme danger” alert on their phone on Wednesday.
The electricity network operator said on Saturday that it was searching for specialist staff to carry out “a complex operation”.
Manuel Atug, an expert in cyber security and critical infrastructure, said the handling of the crisis was “catastrophic”, adding that politicians were seeking to divert attention by focusing on the perpetrators.
“Obviously not all German municipalities take emergency management, crisis management and civil protection seriously and don’t learn from previous incidents,” he added.
Berlin’s grid lacks backup lines to reroute power, a well-known weakness that authorities failed to address, he said. Some cables laid out three or four decades ago need modernising and spare parts for them are no longer available, he added.
Berlin’s interior minister, Iris Spranger, defended the city’s management, saying that it acted quickly and that it had addressed some of the network’s shortcomings.
The Volcano group has allegedly targeted Germany’s grid, radio masts and railway lines since 2011. In 2024, the group was linked to an arson on a pylon near Tesla’s plant outside Berlin, forcing the US carmaker to suspend production for several days.
Anonymous people claiming to be the authentic Volcano group on Wednesday denied involvement in the latest arson attack, saying the organisation had halted such actions after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
German intelligence services are still investigating whether the group was behind the arson and have not ruled out a foreign power’s involvement, according to a government insider.
Merz’s interior minister Alexander Dobrindt was quick to declare that “leftwing terrorism is back in Germany with increasing intensity”.
Peter Neumann, a security professor at King's College London, said that the ideology of groups like Volcano is rooted in “various crisis narratives — climate crisis, capitalism critique, technology scepticism and rejection of the state”.
This means they see sabotage ‘‘as a politically legitimate means to accelerate the supposed decline of the existing system”, he added.
In affected areas, the outage exposed social divides as the better off living in villas near some of the prettiest lakes surrounding the capital decamped to hotels and temporary apartments.
Well-known figures in Berlin society were hit, including former ambassador to the US Wolfgang Ischinger. Now chair of the Munich Security Conference, Ischinger complained on X that “instead of planting trees”, the city and federal government should use state infrastructure funds to prevent “one sabotage team” from “shutting down the entire capital’’.
A senior executive at a US company told the Financial Times he dusted off an old radio to keep up with the news. He admitted he was glad he still owned a diesel car: his electric vehicle was trapped in the garage behind an electrically operated door. On Wednesday, he was relieved to see his heat pump restarted without issue.
Others struggled more. Prokopenko found friends willing to host her, and on Tuesday took her cats with her as temperatures descended below 11 degrees in her flat. Contacted by phone, she laughed about the alerts she received on her phone the first day, which included links to websites that were impossible to access without the internet. “But nothing on my mailbox,” she noted.
At Zehlendorf town hall, which was turned into an emergency shelter with makeshift beds, hot meals and charging points for phones, residents of the borough with nowhere else to go were in disbelief.
Joachim Schönleiter, a 98-year-old pensioner who lives alone, recalled being captured by Soviet troops during the second world war. “There are extremists everywhere,” he said on Monday.
Sabine, a 65-year-old office worker on sick leave and walking on crutches, said she suspected Russia might be responsible. “I was afraid even to drink tap water,” she said. “I am not the only one thinking this.”
Natalia Stepanenko, a 55-year old Ukrainian accountant working from home with her son, said the outage brought back memories of her war-stricken hometown of Dnipro.
Meanwhile Emilia von Fumetti, 23, and Trille Schünke, 37 — both volunteers and members of the leftwing Die Linke party — said the attackers gave their ideology a bad name.
This type of attack “affects vulnerable groups the most”, von Fumetti said. “The wealthy this is supposed to target are well provided for. They have cars, they can stay in hotels, they can buy supplies. It’s hitting the wrong people — full stop.”