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Berlin police were guarding the Reichstag on Saturday night after a mob tried to storm the parliament building at the end of a day of protest against Covid-19 restrictions.
At around 8 p.m., a group of people broke through the protective barriers and raced up the main steps in front of the building. Police in riot gear stopped them just before they reached the glass entrance doors and pepper sprayed them.
“To push them back we had to use force,” police said in a statement, adding that the spontaneous demonstration before the building was dismantled around 9 at night.
It was the dramatic end to a long day in Berlin when an estimated 38,000 people staged a largely peaceful protest against the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, dubbed a “crisis of convenience” by a nephew of John F. Kennedy.
Demonstrators march during a protest against coronavirus pandemic regulations in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Saturday. Photograph: EPA
Hours after a court overturned the ban on the gathering, the march through the city center came to a halt shortly after it began as protesters refused to wear masks or distance themselves.
A separate meeting was held near the Victory Column in Tiergarten park. From a stage there, Robert F. Kennedy, a skeptic of America’s vaccines, praised the cheering crowd for rejecting what he called efforts to spread fear in the pandemic and impose a new surveillance state.
Half a century after his uncle visited Berlin, then a frontier of the cold war against totalitarianism, Kennedy delighted the crowd by repeating his uncle’s most famous catchphrase, but in a very different context.
“Today Berlin is once again a front against totalitarianism,” he said to great applause. “And so I am proud to say, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’
The administrative court and the high court in Berlin allowed the demonstration to take place under certain conditions. Photograph: EPA
The gathering in the park drew far more people than the 20,000 expected by its organizer, the Querdenken 711 group, and a 2 km stretch from the Brandenburg Gate to the Victory Column was packed with people.
Querdenken founder Michael Ballweg, a businessman from Stuttgart, urged the crowd, some huddled together, others spaced out in the park and none wearing masks, to be on the lookout for extremists attempting violence.
“We demand the lifting of all restrictive measures introduced and the resignation of the entire federal government,” he said, prompting a 40-second wave of applause from the crowd.
“We are Democrats. Left and right extremism and fascist thinking have no place in this movement. We ignore all attempts to pigeonhole us as left or right. “
German riot police detain a protester as coronavirus skeptics and right-wing extremists march in Berlin in protest against coronavirus-related restrictions. Photograph: Getty
People of all ages made the trip to Berlin, from retirees in Munich to engineers in Frankfurt. Between the rainbow peace flags and the Israeli flags were hundreds of homemade banners with messages ranging from “Health, not pharmaceutical benefit” and “Crown is a declaration of war by the elite against the majority.”
Some signs referenced the online conspiracy theory “QAnon,” others accused Microsoft founder and public health philanthropist Bill Gates of stealthily planning a mass Covid-19 vaccination program.
Notable numbers of neo-Nazis, outfitted with historic Reich flags and other extremist accessories, mingled with the crowd.
Most of the protesters approached by The Irish Times expressed various concerns about the future of civil liberties in the pandemic. “We are really concerned that people are allowing themselves to be scared and manipulated and that our basic rights are being eroded,” said Svenja, a 22-year-old student from Nuremberg.
Some 3,000 policemen were deployed to manage the event, prohibited by the Berlin state government, but allowed after judicial intervention.
Late Saturday afternoon, a police spokesman said the event had been largely peaceful, although there had been isolated fights. “We had to intervene in front of the Russian embassy where a bottle and stones flew towards two officers,” said spokesman Thilo Cablitz.
“Two people were arrested and, in the midst of fights, they had to use pepper spray.” Further down the boulevard Unter den Linden, a counter-demonstration to the Querdenken march attracted a few hundred participants.
As the main demonstration was ending, a small group of extremists waving historic Reich flags held an unofficial meeting at the Reichstag.
One of the speakers at the meeting was Attila Hildmann, a vegan cookbook author who has become one of the leading conspiracy theorists in the pandemic. He was later arrested by the police in the skirmish in front of the Russian embassy.
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