The Ulm 5: Denied Their Basic Rights By A State That Will Never Escape Its Authoritarianism

On 8 September 2025, five young activists – Crow, Daniel, Leandra, Vi and Zo – broke into the Ulm offices of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private arms manufacturer. They smashed computers and laboratory equipment, sprayed slogans including “Shut Elbit Down” and “Baby Killers” on the walls, and set off smoke bombs. Then they called the police, filmed themselves, and waited to be arrested.

Now known as the “Ulm 5”, their trial began on 27 April 2026 at the Stuttgart Regional Court in Stammheim, the same high-security courtroom where the Red Army Faction was tried in the 1970s. The venue is not coincidental. It is a deliberate framing. It’s framing in the eyes of the diligently voting, elderly, German liberal that the Ulm 5 like the Red Army Faction before them are “dangerous communistic terrorists coming for our democracy” in 2023 there was a Bundestag resolution that equated BDS boycotts with antisemitism and created the subsequent crackdown on Palestine solidarity, which created the political soil in which this prosecution grew.

Why They Acted

The five, aged between 25 and 40, from Ireland, Britain, Germany and Spain, all resident in Berlin,  had spent years campaigning legally for Palestinian rights. But as Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified, they felt compelled to move beyond protest.

Elbit Systems supplies approximately 85 percent of the Israeli military’s land-based equipment and 85 percent of its drone systems. Its software programmes, including the disgustingly named  “Where’s Daddy?”, have been used to track and kill targets in their homes – with up to 100 civilian deaths deemed acceptable for one high-ranking Hamas militant. 

Elbit Systems Deutschland in Ulm specialises in electronic warfare, radar, and components for the Hermes 900 drone. The same model is heavily used in Gaza for both surveillance and strikes. The computers and lab equipment they destroyed were directly tied to the production and testing of drone sub-systems that enable targeted killings. This makes the action far more than symbolic vandalism. It makes it a precise, deliberate act of intervention in a specific supply chain. One that they were justified to make under international law to stop a genocide. 

In his statement from prison, Daniel Tatlow-Devally (32, Irish) explained: “My actions at the Elbit facility in Ulm were motivated exclusively by urgent humanitarian considerations”. Multiple international bodies, including an independent UN commission, had concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the criteria for genocide. “To look the other way when genocide takes place is reprehensible; to provide the equipment with which it is carried out is worse,” he said.

Germany, far from looking away, dramatically increased its arms exports to Israel during the war. In August 2025, Chancellor Merz announced a partial arms freeze, but by November it was lifted, with €167 million in military exports approved shortly afterwards. This is the context in which the Ulm 5 acted: to disrupt, even briefly, the material supply chain of a genocide. It is not reported in the English speaking media, but there are reports that the massive job losses and offshoring of production inside Volkswagen are to make space for Volkswagen to produce arms both for German remilitarisation & possibly for to supply Israel. It was reported on the 14th of July that the VW plant at Osnabrück 2,000 jobs are at risk because the Qatari government have slowed down their arms orders as they object to the now permanent cooperation between Volkswagen and the Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Production of components for the Iron Dome is also planned.Volkswagen and Rafael have already signed the paperwork as of April. The Qatar Investment Authority is the third largest individual shareholder at Volkswagen. However with tensions between Qatar and Israel, Rafael systems may pull out & according to Bild India is also being assessed for production capacity. However major questions remain. This is what is going on in a majority state owned company. What is going on there that we do not know in companies like Elbit? Whats publicly known is bad enough. 

Criminalising Conscience

The prosecution charges them with trespassing, criminal damage (estimated at around €1 million), and most significantly: membership of a criminal organisation under Section 129 of the German Criminal Code.

This is the crux of the matter. Trespass and property damage carry a maximum sentence of just two years. But Section 129  a law designed to combat organised crime and terrorism elevates this case to one of national security. The prosecution alleges the five belong to “Palestine Action Germany”, a supposed offshoot of the British activist network. Yet whether this group even exists as a formal organisation remains entirely legally unproven.

Amnesty International’s Yasmin Khuder has called this “highly problematic”: “This case creates a risk that measures actually intended to combat organised crime are now being used against political protest”. The activists’ defence lawyers argue the charges are disproportionate and that their clients’ fair trial rights are being violated.

A Show Trial in Stammheim

From the very first day, the trial has resembled a stage play more than a court of law and crucially not one where the defendants are even allowed to speak.

The five are held behind thick security glass, separated from their own lawyers. The defence team argued this makes communication impossible and violates the European Convention on Human Rights. When the lawyers protested, the presiding judge, Kathrin Lauchstädt, gave them five minutes to take their seats or face removal. They refused. She adjourned the hearing. The defence has since filed a bias complaint against her.

At later hearings, the judge further restricted the defence, citing “provocative behaviour” and even “silent applause” hand-waving from supporters in the public gallery. “The defence’s rights are not a ‘favour’ from the court,” one lawyer responded.

On the third day, the five were carried into the courtroom against their will, Vi in an office chair, the others physically brought in by police officers. The public rose in a standing ovation. But the message was clear: the state will control how these defendants appear, even if it means dragging them.

Prison: 23 Hours a Day

Since their arrest in September 2025, all five have been held in pre-trial detention – often in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, with just one hour of exercise in a concrete yard. Visits are limited to one or two hours per month.

Daniel Tatlow-Devally described his cell as “approximately two by five metres”. “I have only seen the sky for an hour a day – if at all,” he said.

Irish politicians from across the political spectrum have visited and expressed alarm. People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett called it a “show trial… where the defendants are not being given a fair chance to present their defence and are being treated in a brutal, inhumane and totally unacceptable way”. Eighteen Members of the European Parliament have also published an open letter expressing concern over trial fairness.

International human rights law is very clear on this: the UN Mandela Rules state that prolonged solitary confinement (more than 15 consecutive days) can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Note that the five have now been in such conditions for months, before any conviction. Pre-trial detention is supposed to be the exception in rare cases where individuals pose a risk to the public, not a punishment doled out without due process. The Ulm 5 voluntarily waited for arrest, have ties to the community, and present no flight risk. These facts remove any legal justification for such harsh treatment. There is no “security” argument, the German government are being vindictive. 

The Politics of Solidarity

Greta Thunberg attended the trial, calling the five “brave souls… ready to make personal sacrifices”. “Either you support a brutal normality that leads to genocide – or you resist,” she said.

The mothers of the accused have become prominent voices. Nicky Robertson, mother of Zo Hailu, told der Freitag: “The prison sentences in Germany are only a fraction of what the people in Palestine have to suffer”. She and other family members attend every hearing, sitting behind the glass separating them from their children.

Supporters are urged to attend hearings, write letters to prisoners, and donate to the crowdfunding campaign.

A Precedent for Repression

The Ulm 5 trial is not an isolated case. In the UK, Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 – though the High Court later ruled the designation unlawful. Germany has increasingly used Section 129 against protest movements, including climate activists from Last Generation.

What is at stake here goes beyond five individuals. As the defence lawyer Benjamin Düsberg put it: “In this trial, what is ultimately being negotiated is German Staatsräson itself” – the state’s foundational commitment to Israel. By equating solidarity with Palestine with criminality, by trying activists in a courtroom built for terrorists, by holding them in isolation for months on end, the German state is sending a message: dissent will not be tolerated.

A Leopard With Unchanging Spots

Germany, in the lifetime of of anyone on the planet still living has been authoritarian and has, with classic German ruthless efficiency always defended it's vested interests in ways only the US can compete with. I will go further into this in an article on why Germany is the greatest threat to the European left and Ireland specifically but in this specific instance there is little difference between what is happening here and now, and what has happened in Germany’s history. Germany was on the train of the inevitable turning of “Liberal Western Democracy” into frank authoritarianism before anyone else had bought their ticket. It is through this lense that we should view all actions in this case, and all European attempts at overstepping people’s privacy & civil rights. I would first like to demonstrate to you why modern Germany’s progressive, cuddly, democracy loving image has always been a lie: 

1. Banning of the Communist Party (KPD) – 1956: The Federal Constitutional Court declared the KPD unconstitutional, dissolving the party and confiscating its assets. Thousands of members were prosecuted or lost their jobs. This was the first major post-war use of judicial power to eliminate a legal leftist party, setting a precedent for treating political dissent as a threat to the constitutional order.
2. The “Radikalenerlass” (Anti-Radical Decree) – 1972: A joint administrative decree by federal and state governments barred anyone considered to hold “anti-constitutional” views from public service employment (teachers, railway workers, postal staff, etc.). Candidates and employees were screened by domestic intelligence. The vast majority of the roughly 3.5 million people vetted, and the 11,000 rejected or disciplined, were leftists—including future elected politicians from Die Linke. It was an administrative clampdown, not a trial, but it professionalised the surveillance and delegitimisation of left-wing dissent for decades.
3. The Stammheim RAF trials and the isolation regime – 1975–1977: The trial of Red Army Faction leaders Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe was held in the same high-security courtroom now used for the Ulm 5. Key features included:
   1.  Purpose-built, maximum-security confinement (“dead wing” in Stammheim prison)
   2. Months of white-cell isolation for some defendants, with artificial light and sound deprivation
   3.  A new law (Section 129a StGB, introduced 1976) that retroactively created the offence of “membership of a terrorist organisation”
   4. Exclusion of defence lawyers suspected of sympathies, and bugging of attorney-client conversations
   5.  The state made clear that an entire left-wing movement was on trial. Several prisoners died in highly disputed circumstances in Stammheim in 1977. The architectural and procedural legacy is directly visible in the Ulm 5 trial.
4. The Celle Hole (“Celler Loch”) false-flag operation – 1978: Lower Saxony’s domestic intelligence agency blew a hole in the outer wall of Celle prison to fabricate the existence of a planned RAF breakout. They planted evidence to justify an already-planned expansion of surveillance and a large-scale crackdown on the left-wing milieu, including search operations against leftist lawyers’ offices. The incident was exposed, but it showed the state willing to commit crimes itself to manufacture a threat and justify repression.
5. The persecution of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) – 1970–1971: The SPK, a group that fused anti-psychiatric therapy with revolutionary politics, was treated as a criminal organisation. A massive police raid in 1971 led to arrests and a long trial under the old Section 129. The state argued that a self-organised group of mentally ill people was effectively a terrorist cell—an early example of stretching criminal association laws to dismantle a radical-left collective.
6. The “Antifa-Ost” / “Dresden Leftist Criminal Organisation” trial – 2019–2023: From 2019, several left-wing activists in Saxony and Berlin were charged under Section 129 with forming a criminal organisation, for allegedly carrying out coordinated attacks on neo-Nazis. The Federal Court of Justice upheld the charge at one point, but large parts of the case eventually collapsed. Defendants endured long pre-trial detention, and the trial dragged on for years. The use of Section 129 against anti-fascists—when neo-Nazi groups often received lighter treatment—was widely criticised as a politicised double standard.
7. The Letzte Generation (Last Generation) criminal-organization investigation – 2023–2024: In May 2023, police raided homes and premises of climate activists from Letzte Generation nationwide, under a Section 129 investigation for forming or supporting a criminal organisation. The public prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin froze bank accounts and seized equipment. In 2024, the Munich Regional Court ruled that the group did not meet the legal threshold for a criminal organisation, sharply rebuking the investigation. Nevertheless, the state had already used the powers of a serious anti-terror law to hamstring a civil-disobedience movement.
8. Ban and deportation orders against pro-Palestinian leftist groups – 2023–2024: The Interior Ministry banned the international solidarity network Samidoun in November 2023, using the law on associations (Vereinsgesetz). The ban criminalised any continuation of the group’s work and allowed asset seizures. The Palestinian community group Palästina Forum Darmstadt was also banned. In parallel, a slew of restrictions on speech, demonstrations, and fundraising for Palestinian causes were imposed, and foreign activists faced deportation orders. While these were executive rather than judicial actions, they used state power to directly suppress a left-wing solidarity movement by framing it as a threat to public order and state security.
9. Surveillance of Die Linke and its elected members: The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has for years listed parts of the democratic socialist party Die Linke (and its predecessor PDS) as “extremist” entities under observation. This includes Bodo Ramelow, the only Minister-President from Die Linke, who was under surveillance even while serving as head of a state government. The practice stigmatises a whole parliamentary left as semi-criminal and provides a standing justification for intelligence-gathering and professional discrimination.

This is a short list of examples. I could fill a book with expanded examples. It is funny that a state that likes to paint itself as a paragon of institutionalised antifascism should have this history but it isn’t funny at all to those of us who know the background and mechanics behind this history. West German denazification was a failure and this is the result of it. By 1951, the Allies had handed denazification over to German authorities, who promptly passed amnesty laws that reinstated thousands of former Nazi judges, prosecutors, and civil servants into the very institutions now prosecuting the Ulm 5. The same attitudes and at times, same people just found another more friendly looking cause. 

I would now like to lay out the glaring problems with the whole case as well as why anyone who supports human rights should be watching this case very carefully. 

1. Misuse of Section 129: The “justifying necessity” defence: Under German law, Section 34 of the Criminal Code provides a defence of justifying necessity (rechtfertigender Notstand) when an act is committed to avert an imminent danger to life, limb or other fundamental legal interests. The defence team is almost certainly building part of its case on this: that damaging property to disrupt the supply of weapons used in what multiple UN bodies have called plausible genocide is proportionate.
2. The stretching of section 129: Kriminelle Vereinigung requires a structured group with a common criminal purpose, not an informal network of like-minded people sharing information. The UK High Court’s ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful severely weakens the claim that a “Germany” branch exists as a coherent criminal entity. If the UK cannot lawfully label it a terrorist organisation, how can a German court treat participation in the same loose network as membership of a criminal organisation? The charge is not just harsh but entirely legally incoherent. 
3. Germany’s Federal Security Council approved arms exports to Israel worth €326 million in 2023 alone, and a large portion of that involved components from Elbit subsidiaries on German soil.
4. Even after the November 2024 partial freeze, export licences for subsystems that end up in Israeli combat aircraft and drones were quietly maintained.
5. The Ulm facility could not operate without explicit government export licences. That means the very equipment the activists damaged was being produced with the active, bureaucratic blessing of a German state that now prosecutes those who tried to stop it.

The Ulm 5 acted to stop a genocide. For that, they face years in prison. The question is whether we will stand with them – or look the other way.

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