Since September, the “Ulm 5” have been held in pre-trial detention on charges of sabotage at the Israeli drone manufacturer Elbit. A court has issued a preliminary ruling on the matter. An initiative of relatives is criticising the repression.

On 8 September 2025, five young activists living in Berlin were arrested for sabotage at the arms company Elbit Systems in Ulm, Baden. Since then, Daniel, Zo, Walt, Vi, and Leandra – three women and two men from Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, and Germany – have been held in pre-trial detention in prisons in southern Germany.

Close relatives of the “Ulm 5” have now gone public. At a packed event on Sunday and a press conference on Monday in Berlin, sisters, a mother, and a partner of the detainees denounced the length of the pre-trial detention and its conditions.

Also made public were the most recent individual rulings by the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court, according to which the five are to remain imprisoned beyond the maximum period of six months. None of those affected have any prior convictions. Courts had rejected release on bail, even though the activists had allowed themselves to be arrested by police without resistance, had filmed the action themselves, and had uploaded a video of it to the internet.

Eleven people had entered an office building belonging to the Israeli company in the Böfingen district of Ulm in the early hours of that September morning and destroyed furniture and technical equipment. In a technical laboratory, devices had also been damaged. Another part of the group had covered the exterior of the Elbit building in red paint. The trial is scheduled to begin on 27 April at Stuttgart-Stammheim – the high-security prison made famous by the RAF terrorism trials of the 1970s.

According to supporters, the aim of the action was to disrupt the supply of weapons for the war in Gaza. According to the company’s own statements, the Israeli military is among the major clients of Elbit Systems, one of the three largest arms companies in Israel. Through their lawyers, the defendants had already demanded in November, with reference to the war in Gaza, that the Public Prosecutor’s Office should investigate Elbit for possible complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Instead, those who had sought to prevent this by invoking a “right to emergency assistance” were being prosecuted – despite surveys showing that two thirds of the population in Germany believe the Israeli army is committing serious crimes in Gaza and that these should be classified as genocide. Andrew Feinstein of the British NGO Shadow Investigations also drew attention to this on Monday.

Germany remains, however, Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States. The German-Israeli cooperation with Elbit is even being expanded: it emerged in February that ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and Elbit Systems had opened a factory for submarine components in Israel.

The “Ulm 5” are charged with trespassing and criminal damage, as well as the use of symbols of unconstitutional organisations – the latter apparently relating to the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” uttered in a video of the action, which the Federal Interior Ministry pursues as a “Hamas symbol.” Added to this is the charge of membership of a criminal organisation under Section 129 of the Criminal Code, which provides for a custodial sentence of up to five years. A lawyer for the defendants explained on Monday that this charge was also responsible for the courts’ hard line on bail.

The most recent decision to continue pre-trial detention was issued without the defence being heard. In its reasoning, the Higher Regional Court stated that the expected sentence would likely exceed two years and would not be suspended. The defence lawyers see in this a politically motivated prejudgement that undermines the right to a fair trial: the actual verdict is not due to be delivered by the Stuttgart Regional Court until the summer.

The detention conditions of the “Ulm 5” are also reportedly particularly harsh, according to their relatives. Four of the five defendants are locked in their cells for between 20 and 23 hours a day, with one of them held in solitary confinement. Visits are limited to one or at most two hours per month and are always monitored by at least one investigator and, where applicable, an interpreter, who passes the content of every conversation on to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Letters sometimes take up to four months to arrive – if they are delivered at all.

A further complicating factor for the defendants in the trial, which is soon to begin, is that attacks on Elbit have been carried out in other countries for years as well – some under the umbrella of Palestine Action, now banned in Great Britain, and others in Sweden and most recently in the Czech Republic, where a hall belonging to a drone company that claims to produce for Elbit Systems was burned down on Friday.

Investigations in these cases have so far yielded little success – and the German justice system may respond with deterrence. At the end of July, the three judges and two lay judges in the trial against the “Ulm 5” are expected to deliver a verdict.

Published in German in „nd“.

Image: Alongside the sabotage action, other protest actions took place against Elbit Systems in Ulm – pictured here, a blockade of the entrance in August (Shut Elbit Down).