‘Left Wing Terrorism is Back’: Germany Offers $1.2 Million Reward After Berlin Plunged Into Darkness

German police are still no closer to identifying a suspect over the left-wing terror attack that plunged much of Berlin into darkness for days during freezing weather, and have posted a bounty to encourage the public to turn in those responsible.

The German security services are offering an unprecedented €1 million ($1.2 million, £870,000) reward for information leading to the identification of those responsible for a sabotage attack against a critical power line in the city earlier this month. Believed to be the work of a left-wing terror cell, the attack struck a precisely chosen point on the city’s power grid that left “approximately 45,000 households and 2,200 commercial customers in the Berlin districts of Nikolassee, Wannsee, Zehlendorf, and Lichterfelde”.

The city’s rail network and five hospitals were also impacted. Some areas in Berlin’s south west were without power for five days, meaning the attack took the record for the longest power cut since the Second World War, taking the title from another near-identical left-wing attack in Berlin less than six months before.

Germany has a major state security apparatus including a political police force that spies on groups it believes pose a threat to the post-war constitutional order. Yet three weeks after the latest attack the German government has admitted it is still “largely in the dark” about who the actual perpetrators are, reports Die Welt.

Part of the problem appears to be that in Germany, as is the case in many Western nations, the de facto government position is that left wing terrorism either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. Far from having developed intelligence networks in the left-wing scene, Berlin appears to be attempting to investigate a violent extremist group that reportedly used sophisticated techniques to cover its tracks from a standing start.

But the magnitude of the Berlin attack has made the problem too big to ignore, and now Germany says it is going to start looking into the problem.

“Left-wing terrorism is back”, said Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt this week, in a clear reference to the deadly left-wing terror groups like the Red Army Faction that stalked the old Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. Making implicit that the German state simply hadn’t been paying attention to the hard left until now, Dobrindt added: “There is a need to catch up in the fight against left-wing extremism”.

To aid this, Germany’s internal spy agency is to receive greater resources to examine left-wing groups.

Berlin is also launching a large-scale public information campaign to advertise the one-million-Euro reward for information. Posters appealing for information are to appear at subway and bus stations and the public are to be leafletted.

The Federal Criminal Police Office are to ask “On January 3, 2026, unknown perpetrators damaged high-voltage power cables leading to a Berlin power plant by arson… Can you provide any information about the crime or the perpetrators? Did you observe any suspicious persons and/or possible acts of crime or preparation in the area of ​​Bremer Straße?” and will appeal for any photographs or videos the public may hold.

The appeal by authorities to the public to help in the investigation comes as German politicians vote on a new law to mandate utility and infrastructure companies harden their equipment to make it less easy to sabotage. As reported, the law will impact 1,700 essential service providers, passing the cost of counter-terrorism to either taxpayers or those businesses — and in turn, their customers — as a corrective after state failure to anticipate, surveil, and interdict against ultra-left terrorist cells, thereby preventing attacks.

Despite the serious and ongoing nature of the left-wing terrorist threat in Germany and wider Europe, whether this new decision to investigate the problem presages a change in the mindset of the intelligence community and the government ministers that direct them, or if it will quickly be forgotten will only be proven in time. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the domestic intelligence agency MI5 hailed the establishment of a new unit targeting “left-wing, anarchist, and single-issue terrorism, or LASIT” in 2020, which was then never spoken of again.

Breitbart News has long tracked the phenomenon of left-wing terrorism in Europe, which is just as much characterised by official indifference as it is by the actual acts by attackers, with actual convictions astonishingly rare. Summarising this history and paraphrasing previous reports:

50,000 Berlin homes were left without power in September 2025 after a hard-left group said it had burnt out a key power line, overwhelming backup systems as the cut lasted so long battery packs and generators became exhausted. Trams were left stranded on the roads, blocking major junctions and even basic systems like the emergency telephone numbers for the police and other emergency services ceased to function.

Local media said the attack was by “left-wing extremist attack with insider knowledge” on where exactly to set fires to cause maximum disruption.

Left-wing group “Some Anarchists” said ending the use of electricity altogether was their ultimate aim and that without it life would be full of “freedom without domination and exploitation. They stated: “Electricity is the primary source of energy that powers every machine and the ‘progress’ necessary to reproduce this current system”. The group was thought to be behind “dozens” of other such attacks.

The month before that , German railways experienced days of “massive” disruption as a ultra-anarchist set fire to cables rending a major line carrying intercity and international trains unusable.

As the first set of cable damage was repaired, a second fire was discovered nearby, again knocking the line out. Regional interior minister Herbert Reul said at a press conference: “Based on our authorities’ current assessment and understanding of this act of sabotage, it was left-wing extremists who are trying to bomb us back to pre-industrial times”.

A group calling themselves ‘Kommando’ claimed responsibility for the sabotage, and wrote in their manifesto:

The society we live in is in the process of devouring the entire planet. The mass conversion of natural ecosystems into dead products… [is] a core mechanism of the system… None of the proposed pseudo-solutions is capable of changing this problem. Not so-called renewable energies, nor communism, nor so-called green consumerism, nor any spiritual ‘transformations.’

The only solution is the complete dismantling of the technological-industrial system. We consider attacks on transportation, communications, and energy infrastructure, along with other forms of resistance, to be essential in this fight.

As reported by Breitbart News in 2022 there was another strikingly similar attack 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. Railway traffic was paralysed across France on the opening day of the Paris 2024 Olympics when suspected “ultra-left” activists who were said to have been “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted”.

The following day, France was hit with a double-whammy when internet backbone cable networks were sabotaged in six locations nationwide simultaneously.

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”.