Loveparade stampede: Ten years later and the blame game continues

Christian from Germany was 25 years old, Clara from Spain was 22 and Giulia from Italy was 21 — they were among the 200,000 young people attending the “Loveparade” techno music festival in the western city of Duisburg on July 24, 2010.

21 men and women from Germany, Australia, China, Italy, The Netherlands, and Spain lost their lives when they were crushed to death in a narrow tunnel leading to the site. 652 were injured, many more left traumatized.

Read more: The businessman behind the ill-fated Love Parade

Who is responsible for this tragedy, which took place in Germany, a country with high safety standards?

Hannelore Kraft, who was premier of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the state where Duisburg is located, promised solemnly to establish who was responsible.

Christian’s, Clara’s, and Giulia’s parents were among the 60 co-plaintiffs in the trial that began in 2017, in which six city officials and four representatives of the festival organizer LopaVent were charged with negligent manslaughter and causing bodily harm.

The trial was so large that it was moved from the Higher Regional Court in Düsseldorf to the city’s exhibition hall.

It ended in May 2020 without a verdict.

The court said the remaining defendants were only suspected of minor guilt and that the trial might not be complete before the statute of limitations expired. The coronavirus’ impact on public life made an already tight timetable untenable, the court said.

Years of torture for parents and defendants

To coincide with the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the new documentary “Loveparade. The Trial” has been released.

Film director Dominik Wessely and scriptwriter Antje Boehmert attended all 184 days of proceedings. They interviewed victims, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, expert witnesses, defendants for their documentary, which offers a multi-faceted view on this legal endeavor to establish facts and responsibility.

Police did not manage to control the crowd passing through the tunnel

The Spanish-German documentary begins with a tracking shot through the tunnel to the festival venue, a former railway yard. It shows a ramp at the narrow tunnel entrance — the only entrance and exit point — which became a lethal bottleneck.

The documentary shows a series of short sequences depicting masses of people, emergency workers, police.

In an effort to prevent people from entering the overcrowded site, police at the exit of the tunnel began instructing new arrivals by loudspeaker to turn back inside, while people continued pushing on into the confined space from the rear.

Christian, Clara, Giulia, and the others were crushed to death here, they died of suffocation.

“I am not seeking revenge,” Christian’s mother, Gabriele Müller, says on camera on the first day of the trial, she says she just wants to find out what happened so she could find her peace.

Gaby Müller (m) lost her son Christian, Paco and Muria Zapater lost their daughter Clara.

Clara’s parents, Francisco Zapater und Nuria Caminal, have traveled from Tarragona in Spain. They each have a photo of their daughter pinned to their jackets as they enter the courthouse on the first day.

Clara’s father tells journalists about the day they got the message of their daughter’s death, how they had to identify the body, and take her home in a coffin.

A few months into proceedings he says that such a lengthy trial was  “real torture, not just for the victims, but also for the defendants.”

Clara’s parents were among the many who would have liked to have seen the mayor of Duisburg and the owner of Lopavent, the company organizing the event, stand trial.

But both of them were called only as witnesses, denied any responsibility, and stressed that they had not been involved on the ground.

None of the involved organizations or officials took the blame for the disaster; instead, they accused each other: The festival organizer accused the police of mistakes in crowd control. The NRW state interior minister stood by the police force, assigning all the blame to the organizer’s security concept and the festival personnel.

There was public anger against Mayor Adolf Sauerland,who was seemingly aware of substandard security provisions for the festival but pushed his administration to approve the plans anyway.

Defendant breaks into tears

“Good morning, please take your seats.” Every trial day begins with this greeting by Judge Mario Plein. In Germany, proceedings in the courtroom may not be filmed, so the makers of the documentary had actors read out testimonies from court documents and conducted interviews with observers. This is how they created an intense chronology of the trial.

46-year-old Judge Mario Plein is the top judge at Dusiburg court

Jürgen Dressler headed the construction department of the city of Duisburg in 2010. This was the office that gave the go-ahead for the festival to take place in the city’s former railway freight yard, although there had been early warnings that the venue would not be able to accommodate all the partygoers.

Dressler is the only high-ranking city official who ended up in the dock. He stood accused along with five of his co-workers.

It was only when the pictures and videos of the tragedy were shown in court, that the whole thing became real for him, he says.

“I sat there and cried,” he recalls. He says the pictures showed events that should never have taken place.

Dressler was one of seven defendants who accepted a deal in 2019 to pay fines in exchange for all criminal charges against them being dropped.

The three remaining defendants refused to take such a deal, saying they wanted to be acquitted in court.

The court failed to establish the individual defendant’s criminal responsiblity, says prosecutor Uwe Mühlhoff.

A policeman’s apology

3,200 police officers were on-site at the festival, they were responsible for crowd control. Torsten Meyer was one of them. He testified as a witness, describing how phone lines and the internet kept breaking down, making it hard to liaise with the organizers, hard to gauge how many people had actually arrived and impossible to steer the masses. He recalls looking down from the top of a staircase thinking it looked “dangerously crowded, but not deadly.”

When another officer said she could see dead bodies, he thought she must be mistaken. Later he was unsettled by the thought that he actually watched people die, “but I couldn’t see it,” he says.

He says it means a lot to him to be able to speak in court because he wants to tell the victims he’s sorry. “I have children of my own and as a police officer I want to make sure people are safe,” he says.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Everyone wants to get out

  Everyone wants to get home as quickly as possible after a football game. There is often a crowd jam when the stadium is emptying up. In this experiment, the researchers recorded the crowd flows in a regular stadium block.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Running around chaotically

  Participants running from three directions – a typical situation in an airport or a train station. Researchers from the Jülich Research Center (Forschungszentrum Jülich) want to find out how crowd flows are formed to make large events safer.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  No one has an overview

  A camera can identify people from above. But things are very different for someone in the crowd – people can hardly see what is happening a few meters away. That is how a dangeraous scrum can come about.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  3D routes

  Since the stadium stands are skewed, the cameras record the move of the people in 3D. The paths that they leave are displayed as lines. The places where most people have to go through also have many lines.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Crowd jams are visible

  Every ball is a person – red balls represent people who are stuck in a jam while green ones are those who have a free way. The 3D representation also shows people who are tall and those who are small. Large people have a better overview.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Inside in the computer

  The people are pushing through the exit. Their movements are recorded mathematically. The computer calculates certain formulas, which are later incorporated into models.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Ellipses to represent how people move

  If people are running, they need to have a lot of room in front and behind them. The legs are otherwise in the way. That is why the computer shows them as oval. By doing so, the computer models are very close to the real thing.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  From small to large

  The researchers at Jülich projected the models – they added more stadium stands together. By doing so, they were able to simulate large masses of people – not just with hundreds, but thousands of people.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  A whole stadium

  A stadium empties. So how many people are heading to the same buses and trains can be calculated. Are there problems at the parking lots or with public transportation? How many vehicles should there be?

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Corridors of different widths

  The researchers built three corridors: one is 90 centimeters, and the others were 100 and 110 centimeters. The difference is very low, but while only 42 people were able to go through the narrow corridor, 50 through the wide corridor.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  More space creates freedom

  The red lines show it – only 20 centimeters more are enough to offer freedom to move. That means more safety at the emergency exits and escape routes.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  How is oncoming traffic moving?

  In the image, people are moving in opposite directions above, and with each other below. The people in red are moving against the crowd. The experiment shows how people get distributed and whether they hamper themselves.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  How much room does every person have?

  The same scene as a density model. Every person has a given space around him. It is clearly visible how people moving in opposite direction hamper each other.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  Cultural differences

  Not all people walk in the same way. That is why the researchers at Jülich compared different cultures: Germans, Indians, Chinese and Japanese. They all had to walk in circles. The result was that Indians walk faster than Germans – maybe they also get crowd jams faster.

• Mass experiment on crowd behavior

  The computer can’t simulate everything

  Are the fans celebrating because their team won? Or are they furious because it lost? Are they drunk? Or are they in a hurry because they want to get on their train? Such factors cannot be easily simulated by the researchers.

  Author: Fabian Schmidt / csc

Jürgen Gerlach is a road safety expert. He confirms that there would have been a life-threatening congestion at the entrance of the tunnel even without the police cordoning off some of the routes. The fenced-in venue with the narrow entrance and exit were simply not suitable for such an event, he concludes.

Organized irresponsibility

When in May 2020, the trial ended without a verdict, the court issued a 44-page document explaining that it had not been possible to prove the criminal responsibility for any of the individual defenders.

Prosecutor Uwe Mühlhoff says all those who knew of the risks, but let things go ahead anyway, hold an “ethical responsibility.” He says there had been “organized irresponsibility” around the event in Duisburg, where many people were involved in the planning, but in the end, it was totally unclear who was actually responsible for what.

Director Dominik Wessely says he couldn’t find any easy answers

“There are no simple answers,” film director Dominik Wessely tells DW. The end of the trial must be unsatisfactory and difficult to accept, he adds.

Carla’s parents are now considering taking the matter to the European Human Rights Court.

Right before the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the NRW parliament voted to increase the compensation payments for the victims. A commission is to be established to rework the regulations for big events and come up with guidelines to facilitate the analysis of them — measures which lawyer Julius Reiter describes as “a necessary reaction to the disappointing end of the trial.”

“If guilt can not be proven in court, that does not mean there is no moral responsibility,” former NRW State Premier Hannelore Kraft said in parliament that day. She read out all 21 names of the victims. She wants to send a signal to survivors and victims: “We are asking for your forgiveness.”

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Four DJs, three cars and just 150 party-goers

  Matthias Roeingh, better known by his stage name Dr. Motte, organized the first Love Parade in Berlin in 1989 along with fellow DJs Jonzon, Westbam and Kid Paul. Roeingh said he wanted the festival to be seen as a protest for peace. Some 150 party-goers, followed by three cars blaring techno music, danced down Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm boulevard under the banner “Peace, joy and pancakes.”

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Europe catches the love bug

  It wasn’t long before the Love Parade grew into one of the largest music festivals in Europe. As the number of party-goers increased, so did the number of artists and event organizers who brought their own floats, or “love mobiles,” to the parade.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Partying in the heart of the German capital

  After almost half a million people flooded Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm for the Love Parade in 1996, it became clear that a larger venue was needed. The following year, the festival was moved to Berlin’s Straße des 17. Juni (17th of June Street), with the Victory Column, Brandenburg Gate and Tiergarten Park providing a historic backdrop to the frenzied techno rave.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  More stress than love

  But as the festival attracted ever more revelers, it also attracted more trouble … and much, much more rubbish. Mountains of garbage in the Tiergarten became a common sight, to the disgust of many locals. However, because the Love Parade was still, in theory, a political festival, Berlin’s state government had to bear the costs, both for security and for the mass clean-ups.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Ravers protest festival commercialization

  For all its controversies, the main point of criticism directed at the festival was its increasing commercialization. Love Parade organizers made a pretty profit through licensing, advertising and merchandise sales. However, that also drove many techno heads to distance themselves from the Love Parade, with some even starting an annual counter festival, know as the “F*** Parade” (pictured above).

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Out with the politics

  In 2001, Germany’s Constitutional Court revoked the Love Parade’s classification as a demonstration. The court found that the festival offered no clear political message, a requisite for any protest. Since organizers did not want to bear the security or clean-up costs, the 2004 and 2005 Love Parade festivals were cancelled.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  ‘The Love is back!’

  Under the banner “The Love is back!” the Love Parade relaunched in 2006, bringing more than a million revelers to Berlin. But it would also be the last edition to take place in the German capital. That year, Rainer Schaller, an entrepreneur who runs a chain of fitness centers, took over the company in charge of organizing the festival. His plan was to bring the Love Parade to Germany’s Ruhr area.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  A record attendance in the Ruhr metropolises

  According to the Love Parade organizers, more than a million flocked to the city of Essen for the first edition of the festival in western Germany in 2007, while some 1.6 million people partied in Dortmund the following year. Several people, however, have claimed that the numbers were massively inflated by organizers, likely for marketing purposes.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Bochum refuses Love Parade invitation

  High on the festival’s successes in Essen and Dortmund, organizers wanted to bring the Love Parade to the city of Bochum in 2009. However, city officials refused, citing security concerns. This ultimately forced the party to be cancelled in 2009, provoking outrage from seasoned ravers and parade-goers.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  The horrific ending

  Organizers wanted to make up for the lost year by staging a massive festival in Duisburg in 2010. The festival coincided with the city’s selection as a European Capital of Culture and attracted over a million visitors. But the party ended in tragedy. Panic broke out as crowds converged in a tunnel leading to the festival grounds, resulting in the deaths of 21 people, and injuring a further 650.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Never again

  The very same day as the deadly stampede, Love Parade organizers announced that there would be no further festivals. Every year on July 24, Germany comes together to commemorate the victims of the festival tragedy.

• Love Parade: From humble beginnings, to major music festival, to tragic ending

  Love Parade disaster goes to trial

  In December 2017, more than seven years after the tragic Love Parade incident, prosecutors launched criminal proceedings against six Duisburg city employees and four festival organizers. The trial is set to be one of Germany’s largest ever court cases, with 70 lawyers involved — 32 representing defendants and 38 representing 65 joint plaintiffs, mainly relatives of the young people killed.

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/loveparade-stampede-ten-years-later-and-the-blame-game-continues/a-54243446?maca=en-rss-en-ger-1023-xml-atom