A fire under a railway line in Hirschaid, Bavaria, caused the shut-down of the high-speed rail connection between the German capital Berlin and the South German metropolis of Munich.
As newspaper Bild reported, unknown suspects were said to have started a blaze in an underground passageway on July 4.
Wooden pallets and slats were torched and while firefighters arrived quickly the fire caused huge damages to a railway bridge above it, according to experts.
The repairs – which included the construction of auxiliary bridges – were initially expected to have been finished within a couple of days. Instead, on July 9 State railway operator Deutsche Bahn announced that the railway connection would remain out of order at least until mid-July.
The outage caused delays of more than 90 minutes on Germany’s high-speed Intercity Express (ICE) for trains between Berlin and Munich. They now had to be rerouted via Fulda in Hesse and Eisenach in Thuringia. Local train services between Nuremberg and Bamberg were also affected.
The Bamberg police have started an investigation into suspected arson.
At the time of writing, no-one had been detained and nobody had claimed responsibility for the apparent attack.
News portal Achgut noted on July 8 there have been several suspected sabotage attacks on German railway infrastructure in the past months, allegedly by left-wing extremists.
On July 29, 2024, fires damaged two cable ducts on the important railway line between Bremen and Hamburg, causing extensive disruptions to rail traffic.
Several days later, a letter claiming responsibility was published on Indymedia, an online messaging board closely affiliated with Antifa and the hard-left.
The authors wrote they wanted to disturb Deutsche Bahn “in its capitalist routine” and accused it of being complicit in military transports and colonialism.
On August 2, 2024, a suspected arson attack on a cable duct in Berlin caused widespread disruptions of intercity and local train services. Local newspaper Berliner Zeitung alleged left-wing extremists had claimed responsibility for the incident.
In a similar manner, left-wingers claimed responsibility for apparent arson attacks on railway cables in Berlin in February 2025 and in Southern Thuringia as well as in Saxony in April 2025.
