BERLIN – Police detained protesters and used pepper spray in central Berlin on Saturday, October 31, a RIA Novosti correspondent reported, as demonstrations over rising living costs, education and opposition to compulsory military service spread across Germany.
The correspondent reported that protesters threw what appeared to be empty bottles and firecrackers toward law enforcement officers before police began detaining individuals. The account did not give a detention total, identify the people taken into custody or establish what offences they might face.
The report came during a broader youth-led protest day, but Berlin hosted separate gatherings. That distinction matters: reports of confrontation in the city do not establish that the main afternoon rally became violent or that its organisers directed the people involved.
Earlier in the afternoon, Al Jazeera’s reporting from Berlin described a calm gathering at Platz des 18 Maerz, beside the Brandenburg Gate. Students in Halloween outfits stood alongside older supporters and activists as people arrived for speeches.
Euronews reported that the Brandenburg Gate protests remained peaceful through 5 p.m. It separately described a demonstration scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at Rosenthaler Platz under the slogan “Gen Z hat genug!” The organising initiative behind the earlier rally, Gen Z Regelt, had distanced itself from that second event. The RIA Novosti dispatch did not specify the precise location of its correspondent’s observations.
In an evening update on X, Berlin police said they were accompanying two marches through Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte and that pyrotechnics were occasionally being set off illegally. The post urged demonstrators to stay peaceful and to distance themselves from violence, but it did not mention detentions or pepper spray.
Gen Z Regelt had mobilised participants around education, affordability and opposition to military conscription. Al Jazeera reported that nearly 180,000 people across 34 cities had registered by Saturday morning, including nearly 12,000 in Berlin. Those figures measured sign-ups, not verified attendance.
The attendance estimates were different. Euronews reported around 5,000 participants at the Brandenburg Gate demonstration according to police, while organisers put the figure at 11,000 during the afternoon. Neither estimate is a count of people detained, and the gap between them cannot be resolved by substituting the larger advance-registration figure.
For Veronika Dinter, a 23-year-old political science student who travelled from Hannover, the dispute was personal as well as political. She told Al Jazeera that she had taken a part-time job to support her studies because living costs were higher than she had expected. She contrasted pressure on universities and social services with the government’s military spending.
Another student, 24-year-old Berlin resident Emma Heymann, described anger at cuts affecting young people’s quality of life while billions were directed toward the military. Their accounts put a different emphasis on the day from the reports of confrontation: the question of what public money buys, and whose needs are being deferred.
The German demonstrations followed student-led mobilisations elsewhere in Europe. The Eastern Herald previously reported on France’s protests over schools and living costs, where large daytime marches and subsequent clashes produced different accounts of the same protest day. Those events provide context, but their arrest figures and injury totals do not describe what happened in Berlin.
Before Saturday’s German rallies, political figures had raised concerns about the protests turning violent. Participants interviewed by Al Jazeera argued that the focus on possible disorder risked displacing the issues that brought them out. Dinter urged police not to confront demonstrators with violence and expressed solidarity with people seeking affordable living, greater education investment and an end to military buildup.
Opposition to compulsory military service was among the demonstrators’ demands. It should not be mistaken for proof that compulsory service had already returned, just as the presence of different groups at a rally does not establish that they share organisers or responsibility for subsequent incidents.
The RIA Novosti dispatch gives an attributed eyewitness account of detentions, not a complete official assessment of the operation. It provides no injury tally and no explanation from Berlin Police for individual detentions or the use of pepper spray. The number detained and the grounds for holding them remain unresolved in the material reviewed.
