Police in Berlin Rout Squatters, Arresting 300

BERLIN —  Amid an escalating climate of youth violence in eastern Germany, 1,500 to 2,000 German police backed by bulldozers and water cannon fought an intense, two-hour battle Wednesday before clearing militant youths from a squatters’ ghetto in the eastern section of Berlin.

Police officials said 70 officers and 15 youths were injured and more than 300 people were arrested in connection with the action.

With a vehemence rarely experienced in a city known for urban disturbances, youths standing on the rooftops of derelict six-story apartment buildings they had occupied in recent months attacked police using flares, cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

“They wanted to kill us,” Wolfgang Hoffmann, one of the police involved in the operation, said.

The crumbling, 70-year-old apartments had been scheduled for renovation when they were first occupied by the squatters. City Interior Minister Erich Paetzold said it required 1 1/2 hours for police to break through the heavily fortified barriers and get into the houses, in the working-class district of Friedrichshain, which borders the old Berlin Wall. There were reports of hand-to-hand combat between police and squatters.

The 10 apartment buildings in question were eventually cleared, and by early evening, police had fenced off some entrances. They said they would remain until the buildings’ doors and windows were bricked in.

“It (the battle) had an intensity I haven’t seen before,” a Berlin police press spokesman, Hans-Eberhard Schultz, told reporters at the scene a few hours after the fighting had ended. “I’ve been a police spokesman for 10 years and followed most of these kinds of actions. The opposition was so strong that the police had to move back and regroup.”

Late Wednesday, a group broke away from a mainly peaceful demonstration against the police action, smashed several store windows and pelted police with rocks.

Social scientists believe the growing violence in the former East German Communist state stems from a collapse of state authority; a largely discredited police force hard-pressed to enforce the law without its traditional instrument of fear, and angry hard-core groups of disaffected youth, upset about a chronic housing shortage and rising unemployment.

Many of the police units used Wednesday were imported from North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, previously part of West Germany.

“The housing shortage, unemployment and decay are a social time bomb that can explode anywhere,” Berlin Mayor Walter Momper said. “Berlin reflects the social conflicts of the whole of Germany and the social problems of unification.”

Momper denounced the squatters as violence-prone criminals and expressed concern about the level of violence and what he called “the preparedness to kill.”

“It’s plain murder lust,” he declared.

The arrest of leading members of a partner in Momper’s coalition, the Greens/Alternative List--including the party’s press spokesman--both embarrassed the Social Democratic mayor and threatened the coalition with collapse barely three weeks before the general election.

Opposition Christian Democrats blamed the city government’s earlier permissive stance toward squatters, a charge Momper rejected as election rhetoric.

Because of the severity of Berlin’s housing shortage, Momper’s government has in many cases tried to formalize the basis upon which many squatters have occupied buildings in the city.

The squatters in Friedrichshain--predominantly young people whose core appeared to be mainly from the western part of the previously divided city--had dug trenches up to five feet deep in the street, then constructed barricades of scaffolding, barbed wire and even a sea-freight container.

After the battle, police on one rooftop found what they called a “super-Molotov cocktail”--an oversized glass vessel filled with gallons of gasoline and oil.

“Thank God it wasn’t used. . . . It would have had the impact of a bomb and set the entire street on fire,” said the Police Department’s president, Georg Scherz.

Wednesday morning’s violence was the latest in an escalating series of clashes in eastern Germany between police and young people. Heavy fighting in the same location Monday left more than 130 police officers and an undetermined number of squatters injured.

In separate recent incidents outside Berlin, young soccer hooligans last Saturday used tear gas against police in the northern city of Rostock, while police in the industrial city of Magdeburg deployed water cannon and dogs and resorted to tear gas to break up a crowd of hooligans who had damaged shops in the city center.

On Tuesday, German soccer officials were forced to cancel the last match between the West and East German national teams scheduled for next week in Leipzig because police said they were unable to guarantee the security required. One youth died Nov. 3 in Leipzig in soccer-related violence.