In Stammheim's Glass Cage: The Ulm 5 and the Criminalization of Solidarity with Gaza

Five people have been sitting in a bulletproof glass cage in a Stuttgart courtroom, for months, over a break-in at an arms factory. On the night of September 7–8, 2025, activists from Palestine Action Germany entered the Ulm offices of Elbit Systems Deutschland, a subsidiary of Israel's largest weapons manufacturer, smashed equipment and daubed the walls red. Elbit supplies up to 85% of the land-based equipment and drone systems used by the Israeli military. The damage is put at roughly a million euros. None of the five resisted arrest. All five — Daniel Tatlow-Devally, Zo Hailu, Crow Tricks, Vi Kovarbasic and Leandra Rollo — have now spent close to a year in pre-trial detention, much of it in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day, before the trial even opened on April 27, 2026 at the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart, on the grounds of Stammheim prison.

The venue is not incidental. Stammheim is where West Germany tried and held the Red Army Faction in the 1970s, a courthouse built for state theatre as much as jurisprudence. Putting the 'Ulm 5' there, behind reinforced glass, separated from their own lawyers, is a message before a single verdict is read: dissent against Germany's arms trade with Israel will be treated as a matter of state security, not property damage. The prosecution isn't content with charges of trespass and criminal damage — it has added membership in a criminal organization under Section 129, a charge that carries up to five years and unlocks far more invasive surveillance powers, applied here to five people who filmed their own action and turned themselves in.

This is the sharp edge of Staatsräson, the doctrine that West Germany's guilt over the Holocaust obligates it to unconditional support for the Israeli state, applied downward onto its own citizens and residents. Germany is the second-largest arms supplier to Israel after the United States, with export approvals rising roughly tenfold since October 2023. The activists argue their action was necessity — an attempt to slow a documented genocide by interrupting the supply chain that feeds it. The state's answer is to reclassify anti-war sabotage as organized crime and treat five defendants who confessed on camera as if they were the second coming of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

It matters who has shown up to watch. Irish, British, German and Spanish/Argentinian solidarity networks have sent delegations; Irish TDs, senators and MEPs have sat in on hearings and pressed their government to raise the prison conditions with Berlin. Greta Thunberg appeared in the public gallery in May. None of that solidarity changes the math of a court that reportedly denied a habeas corpus appeal without even hearing the defense, and that pre-judged a sentence exceeding two years before the trial had properly started. A "fair trial" concern raised by an Irish barrister with two decades of legal experience isn't rhetorical flourish — it's a description of a specific and documented process failure.

The point isn't whether you'd have done what the Ulm 5 did. The point is what a state chooses to treat as terrorism, and what it lets pass as ordinary business. Elbit's parts keep shipping. The five people who tried to interrupt that shipment are the ones behind glass, headed for a verdict expected in January 2027. Solidarity means not looking away from a courtroom built to make an example — and not letting "criminal organization" become the default label for anyone who acts on what they see happening in Gaza.

Sources

Wikipedia (DE): Prozess gegen Palestine Action Germany
Wikipedia (EN): Ulm 5
socialistworld.net, Sept 4 2026: Solidarity with the 'Ulm 5'
WSWS, June 27 2026: The 'Ulm 5': How Germany is criminalising opposition to the Gaza genocide
An Claíomh Glas: Are the Ulm5 on Trial — or German Politics and Justice?