The Anti-Nuclear "Free Republic of Wendland" (May 30, 1980)

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So what next? Nightmare or reality?

Whatever happens, experience says that the evictors and the armed men will get their way. They’ve already seen to it in advance.

“What the squatters are doing is itself violence – we are only reacting to it … unfortunately,” said the press spokesman of the police precinct of Lüchow, which is responsible for the “nuclear police.” And all the media – Tagesspiegel, Die Welt, television, etc. – needs to do is mention a “fighting village” or insert a clause that somehow associates the squatters with “the so-called chaotic professional demonstrators and K-Groups . . . that staged the bloody riot against the army in Bremen” – not even Meyer* claims to know about a connection between Bremen and “1004” – and that’s enough for the whole Left to be right back where they want it, and for the police presence that has swelled up over the last few years to find justification.

If the quails start squawking in Gorleben, it’s not because they’re breeding, but because they’re frightened by the special border-police squad cars that thunder past the floodplains and the dykes of the Elbe on their way to the relief point at deep-drilling sites 1002 and 1003. And if the birch stands between the lonely farmsteads and the radial villages seem particularly green, it’s not because spring is coming, but because behind them the border police convoys are driving by in camouflaged vehicles adapted to the surroundings.

[ . . . ]

At the start of the police action four years ago, the border police was still content to write down the license plate numbers of cars parked in front of the church with bumper stickers reading “Nuclear Power – No Thanks” while the drivers were inside at the service. Soon the police could get away with, for example, using a welding torch to cut down the lighting pole of a methane gas installation of the farmer Horst Wiese – after all, it might be used for a crime. Charges filed against the policeman who did it were dismissed on the grounds that he could not have known it was against the law.


* Rolf Meyer, press speaker for the Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Bau und Betrieb von Endlagern (DBE), the company contracted by the German government in 1979 to construct and operate the German final repositories for radioactive waste – trans.