In May, around 150 pro-Palestinian activists occupied the Institute for Social Sciences at the Humboldt University (HU) in Berlin and defaced the rooms extensively. As the HU told WELT in response to a query, the damage is estimated at 150,000 euros. “A large part of this is painting work, but carpentry, metalworking and cleaning work are also included,” says HU press officer Heike Bräuer.
The HU filed a criminal complaint for damage to property and for using symbols of a banned organization, among other things. The activists had sprayed the interior walls of the building with messages that were in some cases seriously anti-Semitic. The blockers also smeared upside-down red triangles, which Hamas uses to mark its enemies, on the walls.
The police had to evacuate the building after not all people complied with the final request to leave the premises. The HU filed criminal charges against them for trespassing. “In particular against those people who had barricaded themselves behind the barricade on the fourth floor,” says Bräuer.
“The university does not yet have any information about individual people who could be attributed to acts of harm.” If the investigating authorities were able to do so, the HU would assert civil claims for damages. It also did not want to rule out bans from the premises.
In the Science Committee in the House of Representatives in Berlin on Monday, Science Senator Ina Czyborra (SPD) said that two-thirds of the protests at the Free University and the HU were carried out by people outside the university. This was reported by the “Tagesspiegel”. When asked by WELT, the press office did not want to provide more precise information about the people, such as gender and age, for “data protection reasons”.