May Day, the same procedure every year
By Fabrizio Bensch
Every year I know how my Labour day will end in Berlin. May day concludes in Kreuzberg with riots between radical leftists, the so-called “Autonomen” (autonomists), masked and wearing mostly black clothes and the police.
Since 1987, May Day has become known for very violent riots in Berlin’s Kreuzberg or Prenzlauerberg districts. This annual ritual is repeated but with less violence in recent years. Three years before the Berlin wall came down, violent riots broke out in West Berlin by radical leftists during a demonstration in Kreuzberg, where protesters set cars on fire, built barricades and looted a supermarket.
Looking into the eyes of a mass murderer
By Fabrizio Bensch
A lot has been written about Andres Behring Breivik, the 33 year-old Norwegian man who a year ago was unknown.
He lived completely withdrawn on a small farm far from Oslo, alone to work on his diabolical plan. He built bombs to explode in central Oslo, and in the following chaos drove to Utoeya island and shot as many teenagers as possible. In all, he killed 77 people that day.
Today, for the first time, I looked directly into the eyes of this man – the eyes of a mass murderer.
Back on the afternoon of July 22nd, I heard the first news about what was happening in downtown Oslo and on the island of Utoeya. Of course at that time, no one knew the full dimension of these two attacks. I took the very first flight from Berlin to Oslo, then drove straight through the night to Utoeya island. The first photographs I took were of survivors. As the number of victims on the island grew, clues emerged as to what terrible tragedy was hitting this country.
It was early the next morning when a colleague and I rented a boat to go to the island. Red Cross boats were everywhere, as were police searching for bodies in the Tyrifjorden lake. As we approached the island I looked through my telephoto lens at the white sheets on the shore. The closer we got, the more and more precise the details became. Shoes, jeans and feet. The bodies of the victims were still laying on the shore.
Following a nuclear train
By Fabrizio Bensch
126 hours from La Hague to Gorleben; the longest ever nuclear waste transport from Germany to France
This is a retrospective on the past 10 years, during which I have covered the nuclear waste transportation from France to Germany many times. The German nuclear waste from power plants is transported in Castor (Cask for Storage and Transport of Radioactive material) containers by train to the northern German interim storage facility of Gorleben.
As the train came closer to its final destination, I would end up with only a few hours sleep, mile-long marches on foot through forests and fields and never-ending police checkpoints. But in the end each castor transport reached its intended destination.
Nuclear waste from German nuclear power plants was reprocessed at the French plant at La Hague. The train used to transport it was protected in Germany by up to 20,000 policemen. Each transportation was different, but the pictures each year were very similar. There were blockades on the railway tracks, activists chaining themselves to the tracks, peaceful and violent protests along the route and the waiting patiently for hours for the train to move further along.
The way to the island of horror
It was a typical Friday afternoon in Berlin — traffic in the streets and people looking forward to their weekend. A few hours earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had finished her traditional summer press conference in the capital city, where she answered with quite a lot of humor and unusual looseness, journalist’s questions about the Greek crisis and the EU summit in Brussels before she left for summer vacation. I was at home and not aware of the latest news when I got a phone call from the Berlin office: “It’s an emergency. There was a bomb explosion in Oslo. Can you book a flight to Oslo and immediately fly there?” At first I did not know what exactly had happened. My wife searched for information online and the first breaking news images from Oslo had flooded the media. People were wandering amid the rubble in the governmental area of the Norwegian capital.
I booked the next flight from Berlin to Oslo. I had just two and a half hours until departure. I quickly packed my equipment, took a 500 mm telephoto lens and a few days worth of personal belongings. At the airport check-in I met other journalists — a mix of foreign colleagues and the Reuters cameraman with whom I would fly to Oslo. The plane was packed, every seat occupied, mainly with journalists. This was one of the fastest routes to Norway after the bombing. There was free internet onboard so I was able to check the latest news non-stop. There was now concrete news trickling in about a shooting on Utoeya island, about 40 kilometers (24 miles) northwest of Oslo, with a number of people reported dead.
WITNESS: The day that changed my life
BERLIN (Reuters) – When it was announced on the evening news that Communist East Germany was opening the Berlin Wall, I had a feeling that it was not just the world that was changing — so was my life.
Taking pictures of the Wall had always fascinated me. Earlier in my 20th year I even rode my bike all along the west side of the 160-km (100-mile) barrier. I’ve still got the pictures I took with my trusty Altix camera.
So there I was on November 9 at the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, waiting with hundreds of Westerners on the west side of the Cold War barrier that had split my hometown for 28 years.
At first there was nothing, but you could feel the tension rise as the crowd on the East side grew. Finally at about 9 p.m. one man came running through the crossing holding up his blue East German passport.
He dashed over to the first Westerners he saw, total strangers, embraced them and just started crying. It was an incredible sight. After that thousands came pouring through.
At 11 p.m. I heard that some people had climbed up on top of the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, which was about two km away, and I ran over.
The 3.6-meter high Wall, which was built on East German territory, was always a no-go zone for us in the west and especially those over in the east.
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