The stalls at the foot of the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church were brimming with mulled wine, gingerbread and nutcrackers and crowded with tourists from all over the world soaking up Germany’s famous Christmas atmosphere.
It is a scene replicated at hundreds of festive markets around Germany: a tradition that has been copied by many countries including Britain.
Shortly after 8pm last night, however, a black 25-tonne lorry with a Polish numberplate shattered the tranquillity with a fatal rampage through the crowds at a deadly 40mph. According to witnesses, the lorry appeared to have been aimed at the entrance to the market where it was at its busiest.
Killing at least twelve people and injuring almost 50, the masked driver and his passenger drove for 60 yards through a lane formed by wooden stalls, crushing dozens of people before veering back towards the street and smashing another stall. The dead were believed to have included tourists.
Sabrina Glinz, who was staying at a hotel near the market and had been there hours before, said: “There’s a white triage tent and you just keep seeing people getting loaded into ambulances and it doesn’t seem to end.”
Advertisement
One female employee of the Christmas market, who declined to be named, said: “The lorry passed through here with great speed. The people ran away and fell to the ground. I pulled a severely injured person from under the lorry. Then I saw the mess: all the dead and severely injured people lying in their blood.”
The market runs along the elegant Kurfürstendamm and around one of Berlin’s most famous and poignant landmarks — the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, preserved as a ruin after being devastated by British air raids 70 years ago.
“This church tower is a symbol of peace,” Anselm Lange, president of the church community, told The Times at the scene, his voice quivering. “And a Christmas market is a place where you come together to celebrate. To choose a place like this for a premeditated attack goes utterly against the spirit that radiates from this place and it will take a great deal of effort to keep that spirit. We in this church will strive to restore it.”
The attack was aimed at the heart of German culture. A strike on a Christmas market, the ultimate soft target, packed with people and with scores of entrances and exits, has been a nightmare scenario for authorities ever since the 9/11 attacks.
It was what many Germans — fearful of the influx of one million migrants into the country this year — had been braced for. In July a German-Iranian killed nine in a Munich shopping centre; days later a 27-year-old Syrian refugee detonated a suicide bomb outside a music festival in Ansbach, central Germany.
Advertisement
Last night’s attack appeared most similar to that carried out by a radicalised Tunisian-born Frenchman who drove his refrigerated truck into Bastille Day revellers on the seafront in Nice in the south of France, killing 86. That attack was claimed by Isis.
“I heard a big noise and then I moved on the Christmas market and saw much chaos . . . many injured people,” Jan Hollitzer, deputy editor-in-chief of Berliner Morgenpost, told CNN.
One young man who saw the incident said: “The driver wore a mask. He got out of the cab and as he ran off he tore off his mask.”
Scores of police cars and ambulances converged quickly at the scene as a huge security operation unfolded and the dead and injured were rushed to Charité, the big university hospital in Berlin. The hospital quickly declared an emergency situation but insisted that it was “under control”. In Nice paramedics and doctors had complained that they were braced for the type of injuries caused by massive bombs, but not of those inflicted by being hit by a large truck, at speed.
Amid the chaos, it appeared that the driver had tried to escape but was captured by police while another person appeared to have died in the lorry. It was not clear what his role was in the killings, if any. The owner of the lorry, Ariel Zurawski, declared on Polish television that it was “my truck, not my driver”. He said that he had last spoken to his driver at noon yesterday and that the driver’s wife had spoken to him at about 4pm. He had not been in contact since, they said.
Advertisement
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, said: “Many people who visited the Christmas market tonight have been killed, even more were injured. We do not know for certain what has happened tonight. The security forces are working hard to secure the site and find the perpetrators.”
Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, added: “I was notified directly after the terrible incident at the Berlin Christmas market. My thoughts are with the relatives of the victims and those injured in this incident. I am directly and constantly in contact with the people responsible for security in the state of Berlin and have offered every support of the federal police.”
At midnight people gathered at the police cordon to stare at the lorry, the back of which was tangled in a mess of Christmas tinsel, its windscreen shattered. Nervous police officers armed with sub-machineguns shouted instructions at passers-by to keep their distance.
The lorry passed through only a relatively small portion of the market; most of it was still intact, its stalls deserted and boarded up. Had the driver not veered back on to the road, the death toll would have been far higher.
It is difficult to imagine the market, the biggest in west Berlin, opening again before Christmas. It is a magnet for tourists because of its central location near the department stores and boutiques of Kurfürstendamm, one of Berlin’s showcase boulevards. Last night it stood forlorn, eerily lit by the blue lights of emergency vehicles and festive illuminations from surrounding streets. Markets across the country will be on high alert in the coming days during what would have been their busiest time.
