The two were determined to chain themselves as soon as an attempt was made to get them out, said a spokeswoman for the “Lützerath Lives” initiative on Friday morning. The Technical Relief Agency tried to get the activists out that night, but ended the operation later. It is not known when a new attempt will be made. According to “Lützerath Leben” the people are a good four meters deep. There is a “ventilation system”.
The tunnel under Lützerath is a “special structure intended to prolong the clearance,” the activists tweeted: “Undermining the destructive system is manual work.” Despite heavy rain and wind, activists are still holding out on the surface. In the night on Friday, the evacuation initially continued in the dark. “Objects that have been addressed are still being processed,” said a police spokesman. Activists who had cemented themselves in or chained themselves were also freed despite the darkness.
Police need support from special forces
The situation is dangerous for Aachen police chief Dirk Weinspach: “We don’t know how stable these underground soil structures are and how the air supply is there.” There are two tunnels, the police confirmed, and there are people in one.
The activists had drawn the attention of the emergency services to the underground trenches and warned them not to drive up with heavy equipment. According to the police, special forces from the energy company RWE and THW would now have to take care of “how the rescue can be carried out in a suitable manner”.
The police want to get in touch with the activists in the tunnel. According to activists from the night, several objects and resistance structures were still occupied. “It’s far from over,” the squatters said.
Taken from a height of up to ten meters
On Thursday, numerous wooden huts and barricades belonging to the activists were razed to the ground by excavators. During the evacuation, the squatters usually allowed themselves to be carried away without much resistance. The squatters were brought down from the tree houses, which were erected at a height of up to ten meters.
Police officers then cut the tethers, causing the tree houses to fall with a crash, breaking into many pieces. Two symbolic houses of the former residents of Lützerath were also cleared.
More than 300 people left Lützerath by Thursday evening. Criminal charges were filed against six people for resisting law enforcement officers and damaging property. There have been violent protests since the start of the eviction on Wednesday. According to the police, one person was slightly injured among the occupiers, and eleven police officers were injured without external influence.
coal instead of gas
There were also protests in front of the headquarters of the energy company RWE on Friday morning, according to activists, several of them chained themselves to the entrance gate. RWE wants to mine the lignite that lies beneath the village, which has long since been abandoned by the residents. The coal is needed to save gas for power generation in Germany during the energy crisis, the group argues.
The activists deny that. In exchange for the fact that politicians paved the way for the mining of lignite under Lützerath, the coal phase-out in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) was brought forward by eight years to 2030.
“Lützerath the wrong symbol”
The Green German climate protection minister Robert Habeck has little understanding for the violent protests against the demolition: “There are many good reasons to demonstrate for more climate protection, for my sake also against the Greens. But Lützerath is simply the wrong symbol,” Habeck told the “Spiegel”. The village is not the symbol for a continuation of the Garzweiler lignite mine in the Rhineland, but “it is the final line”.
Habeck defended a corresponding contract between the federal government, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the energy company RWE. That means: “We save five villages and farms with around 450 residents. The Hambach Forest has been secured. The agreement has halved the permitted amount of open pit coal.”
NRW Minister of Justice Benjamin Limbach said that he could understand the resistance well, since the way to coal was a “wrong way”. Nevertheless, the legal situation that RWE has the right to claim this location must be respected.
