by Paul Grussendorf
On June 4, 1980, in a remote region of Lower Saxony, West Germany thirty-five hundred riot police forcibly cleared a population of one thousand anti-nuclear protestors out of a make-shift village which the activists had established on top of a nuclear bore site. The overwhelming police response to peaceful protestors was oddly similar to the recent eviction of a group of environmental protestors from a village sitting on top of a coal mine in Lutzerath, Germany on January 11, 2023. In 1980, I was there in the middle of the action with my camera crew.
I was working in Germany as a freelancer in documentary and news film, joining news teams to cover in-depth stories and local news. I usually worked as a camera assistant or soundman (Tonmeister), for the networks, and occasionally as a producer with Deutsche Welle. During those years I covered a dozen anti-nuclear demonstrations.
The federal government had an aggressive nuclear energy program, and the nascent Green Party was active in opposing it at every opportunity. Demonstrations at nuclear stations and proposed sites for nuclear waste storage were common events which often turned violent. Pro-violence anarchist elements liked to attach themselves to such demonstrations for the love of breaking things and for publicity. Such violent extremists received the appellation Schlagertypen, roughly translated as “the guys who beat you.”
The government of the state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) had committed itself to providing a permanent site for the storage of nuclear waste from Germany’s nuclear fission plants. The most dramatic demonstration of resistance in West Germany occurred when a group of environmentalists occupied a drilling test site in the eastern part of the State, right at the border with East Germany, where bore samples were being taken for a proposed storage site. In early May 1980 approximately five thousand activists took over the bore site, on a patch of cleared forestland near the town of Gorleben, in the Wendland region. Gorleben Muss Leben, Gorleben Must Live, became a rallying cry. The activists declared the remote wooded site the “Free Republic of Wendland,” Republik Freies Wendland. The Minister of the Interior of Lower Saxony, Egbert Moeklinghoff, publicly declared that such a move constituted high treason.
Unlike on past occasions, when the government had always reacted expeditiously to such provocations by sending in the riot police to clear the area, this time Gerd Albrecht, governor of the State, decided to act with dispassionate reserve, perhaps hoping the fervor of the occupiers would gradually dissipate. The tactic backfired. It gave the demonstrators a month to build a primitive village of some one hundred huts from wood and clay on the bore site and to agitate and garner popular support through the sympathetic press. A community house, bath house, infirmary, and greenhouse added to the village feel. Rock concerts, films, and community discussions were hosted. International activists, German celebrities, liberal politicians and artists such as folksinger Wolf Biermann visited the site to show their support and elevate the conflict in the media. Finally, after procrastination, word came that German Chancelor Helumt Schmidt had ordered the site should be cleared in a few days’ time.
My film team was deployed on the eve of the big event by Norddeutscher Rundfunk, or NDR (North German Radio), one of Germany’s three public TV networks.
The three of us had worked together going on three years. Cameraman Lothar Gerber, a defector from East Germany, had been one of the leading feature-film cinematographers in East Berlin before coming to the West. Camera assistant Mischa Haertel, who dressed like a bohemian in silk scarves and colorful clothes, had been a long-time fixture in Munich’s feature film industry. I was designated soundman, looking forward to what promised to be a dynamically cinematic experience.
On the afternoon that we made the two hour drive out from Hamburg, we understood the police action would take place the next day. We spent the night in a neighboring village, arriving at the encampment at five o’clock in the morning, ready for the action – but it was a false alarm. Instead, the next several days we roamed the encampment, which resembled a preindustrial agrarian settlement populated by German hippies. We shot footage of the village and its inhabitants. We chatted with barefoot families cooking breakfast in front of their thatched shelters, the kids running gleefully around the camp. We were issued complementary passports (Wendenpas) as citizens of the Free Republic of Wendland which were valid “for the whole universe” and for “as long as the bearer can still laugh.” We interviewed the ringleaders of the occupation, who revealed to us their true goal. Prevention of the establishment of a nuclear waste site was a pretext providing them with a good catalyst for rallying sympathizers. Their real aim, so they said, was to replace the German republic with a preindustrial model of governance. They were proponents of a return of society to an agglomeration of small tribal units living on the barter system.
A press photo by renowned photographer Guenter Zint shows my cameraman and myself, holding a shotgun mic, interviewing Gerhard Schroeder (lefty politician in the Social Democratic Party and later Chancellor of Germany), in the middle of the village a day before the real action went down. (I came across this photo forty years later while researching this article).
It was finally confirmed that the next day a special contingent of Federal Border Guards, the Bundesgrenzschutz, from Bavaria would arrive, shock troops who notoriously didn’t mind dishing out violence on the job. Everyone in the encampment was on edge. We spent the night in the makeshift village to be sure we wouldn’t miss anything. The inhabitants indulged in a final bacchanalia of bonfires, drinking, smoking and carousing. We shared joints with the revelers. I wondered what kind of destruction we would witness the next morning, and whether we, the intrepid camera team, would be able to avoid harm. We were all afraid
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We awaken to a beautiful dawn with crimson-tinged sky. At around 7 a.m. the sound of approaching helicopters drives home the reality: this is it. The sky is filled with the cinematic image of fifty transport helicopters circling the village several times before setting down on the perimeter. The percussive whirl of so many rotary blades seems designed to strike fear. Out march the black-clad Bavarian shock troops in their Darth Vader riot helmets.
Tension mounts for an hour as over three thousand troops deploy in a complete circle around the encampment.. The villagers situate themselves around the Peoples’ House in the center. Next to it stands a wooden tower in which a radio transmitter for Radio Free Wendland and a loudspeaker are located, so the village spokesperson can broadcast to the world on a pirate frequency while also transmitting orders and admonitions over the loudspeaker to the defenders of this modern-day Alamo.
Finally a police captain approaches the huddled masses of unarmed villagers. Through a bullhorn he pronounces that whoever wants to get out, now is the time to get out. In one hour the party will begin. He makes a special plea for women and children to take this opportunity to leave standing up. A number of teary-eyed demonstrators gather their children, share hugs with fellow resistors who are remaining, take their personal parcels and leave.
At H-hour the village loudspeaker begins broadcasting folk resistance songs. The Bavarian shock troops are given the order to advance. They move forward, tightening the circular vise. They begin grabbing people one at a time, selecting their victims from a thousand interlocked demonstrators. Progress is tedious, working from the outside of a defensive circle. The villagers, practicing passive resistance, have to be pried loose from their comrades’ clinging arms and carried away one-at-a-time. Each resister goes limp when torn from their comrades.
The air soon fills with dust, intermingled with smoke from smoldering campfires. A tremendous din deafens us, the loud music from the village radio broadcast and admonishments to the villagers over their loudspeakers coupled with constant bullhorn orders from the police.
We deliberately put ourselves between the two warring factions, where the dynamic footage will be captured – the intense interpersonal struggle between the black-armored knights of oppression and the feudal villagers clinging to a fading dream. We’re on our feet all day, no time for food or water. Lothar Gerber carries a heavy Arriflex BL 16mm camera on his shoulder. It’s impractical to use a tripod because we have to be able to react quickly. Dust invades our hair, covers our faces and equipment. We are a nuisance to the police who at times try to plow over us to get at the seated villagers. I’m knocked to the ground, landing on my side to protect the Nagra recorder I’m clutching to my belly. Lothar is pushed, stumbling with his heavy camera, but saved by Misha from a frontal plunge into the dust. We constantly balance our safety with our responsibility to capture the visceral images. Only we can show the outside world and TV audience the trauma being intentionally inflicted on the passive resisters.
The villagers vocalize their anguish in a constant caterwaul of cries and moans, both for their own sake and for the picture show that will be reaching the homes of millions of TV viewers that night. Dust turns the afternoon sun into a red sphere.
By the end of the day the village square is littered with the detritus of a vanquished people, abandoned clothing and other personal items lying inert in the dust. Here is a limp rag doll, over there an elementary school primer. A police Manshaft, a group of a half-dozen men is sent up the ladder to the tower to detain the radio operators and disassemble the last bastion of resistance. The radio voice of the Republic Freies Wendland goes silent.
Black-clad shock troops remove their helmets, revealing blond sweaty-haired young men who sip water and smoke cigarettes. Perhaps they’re thinking of their own families back home, perhaps of the overtime and hardship pay they’ve earned.
We are among the last people in the village, remaining to film the bulldozers efficiently destroying huts and tents, grinding tarps and wooden planks into the ground. Finally only a depressing silence remains, with some ravens picking through the rubble, where hours before a thriving community existed. A driver picks up our cans of film to rush them back to Hamburg for the evening news.
For some time afterwards I would wake in the middle of the night, reliving the melee with my team.
*
The memory of the Free Republic of Wendland is still celebrated in Germany and internationally by anti-nuclear activists. On the 30th anniversary of the occupation in 2010, and again in 2020 on the 40th anniversary, theater students in Hanover built a replica of the village in the town square, holding commemorative presentations and music concerts. The flag with the coat-of-arms of Wendland remains a symbol of the anti-nuclear movement.
Paul Grussendorf is a former immigration judge, an attorney representing refugees, and a consultant to the UN Refugee Agency. His legal memoir is My Trials: Inside America’s Deportation Factories.
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