Old as the olive trees, July 29, video: Judith Scheytt
This follow-up report covering trial days 13 and 14 on the ongoing Ulm5 proceedings is based on the trial observation by Insa Lee Koch on Monday 27 July and Aino Korvensyrjä on Wednesday 29 July. Insa was able to take notes during the trial due to a press accreditation, while Aino had to write up her observations after the trial. The report is also based on reconstructions developed in consultation with other court observers and attendants. All quotations are approximate rather than verbatim.
Trial Day 13, 27th July (Insa)
When I arrive at court on the morning of 27th July, the solidarity is once again running strong. A coach has arrived from Berlin carrying friends of the defendants and activists, some dressed as colourful clowns and charlatans in white puffy skirts, red and black tops, with their noses painted red. They are not the only ones who have come for today’s hearing. As I make my way into court and into the public gallery, I can see it is packed once again with family members, friends and members of the public. Vi’s brother is there. Vi cries when they spot their loved one in the public gallery. They did not know their brother would come. Two women who were imprisoned with Zo have also come, standing up and waving with big smiles as Zo is brought in. Zo’s face lights up when their eyes meet across the courtroom.
The two women tell me that they have been banned from visiting Zo in prison, so the court hearings are their only opportunity to see and to support them. While we are chatting before proceedings begin, one of the court officers wearing riot-like gear approaches us and tells one of them that she cannot wear her tinted glasses in court. “Why?”, she asks. “Not allowed” is the brisk response, before he takes her out to hand her glasses to another officer who will lock them away for the court day (Later that day, a similar scene will unfold when officers ask another member of the public to remove their bandana, explaining that head coverings are permitted only for religious reasons.).
Applications
Proceedings begin late again, at 10.30 am. The court opens with a moving statement from Vi about the seating arrangements – something that the lawyers have made applications about many times before. With a clear and loud voice, composed and calm, Vi speaks about how, on the thirteenth day of the trial, she and her comrades still remain cut off from their own trial, separated from both their lawyers and the proceedings by a glass wall.
Vi describes the arrangement as “shameful” (beschämend), arguing that it continues to dehumanise them while, outside, Germany’s largest aerospace exhibition (ILA) is taking place, where Elbit Systems is exhibiting military technology promoted as “battle-tested”. While attendees enjoy the exhibition as a family-friendly event, Vi tells the court, the same military technology on display is used to kill children and families elsewhere. Vi’s statement, which also functions as yet another application for the defendants to sit with their lawyers, is followed by the defence’s usual applications: to allow the proceedings to be transcribed by a designated transcriber seated with the lawyers; to permit members of the public to take notes (and, in particular, to allow MoP Nicole Gohlke from Die Linke to do so during her trial observation today).
The ruling
None of these applications are new. Yet today, for the first time, out of the blue and for no evident reason, Kathrin Lauchstädt, the presiding judge, has more to say, issuing a ruling (Verfügung) in relation to two of them: previous applications concerning the courtroom seating arrangements and the defendants’ request to speak with their lawyers in the holding cells during breaks without a separation wall. Everyone listens attentively as the presiding judge begins her ruling by rejecting both requests, along with a previous application by lawyer Düsberg to stay the proceedings. The seating arrangement, she says, reflects the spatial design of the courtroom, which was built for defendants to sit behind a glass wall. To change these arrangements, she argues, would create too great a risk that the lawyers would disregard the court’s rules.
She then lists what she describes as examples of alleged misconduct: on the first day of trial, the defence lawyers staged a collective walkout and, upon returning, seated themselves in the dock. More evidence of alleged misconduct follows. The lawyers have repeatedly addressed the public, despite knowing that the gallery had twice been cleared because of disturbances. Rejected applications are routinely met with comments bordering on insulting behaviour, she continues, while the defendants themselves have repeatedly initiated contact through silent applause (“stiller Applaus” – waving both hands in the air), and communicated with one another from within the dock, including by exchanging notes. Therefore, she concludes, she sees no reason to ‘relax’ the seating arrangements.
Disciplining and punishing
The audience is stunned. This is the first time the judge has given a substantive ruling on these applications, yet it sounds less like a legal decision than an act of discipline and punishment—the lawyers later use both words in court to describe her ruling. They request a three-hour break and, when they return—while the mothers and other family members, clowns and other supporters had spent the time seeking shade from the scorching sun in a nearby café and the gazebo outside—the lawyers are prepared.
Speaking collectively, passing the floor from one to another, they present a forceful rebuttal. None of the reasons given by the judge, they argue, can be justified on grounds of security. On the contrary, they tell the court, the ruling is designed to curtail the rights of both the defendants and their lawyers. Among them, they argue that the courtroom has sufficient space for all defendants to sit beside their lawyers, while the intercom system makes confidential and effective communication impossible.
The lawyers also insist that their actions on the first day of trial were neither irrational nor unlawful but a pragmatic response after being denied the opportunity to make urgent applications (“unaufschiebbare Anträge”), including applications alleging judicial bias. Sitting in the glass dock, they argue, was the only way they would have been able to communicate confidentially at all with their clients that day.
An absurd logic
The outrage expressed in the lawyers’ response brings into sharp focus what seems evident to many in the public gallery: that this ruling is not simply about seating arrangements. Much more is at stake – namely, the court’s desperate construction of the defendants, and by extension of their lawyers and supporters, as dangerous collectives in need of discipline, policing and pre-emptive punishment. It is precisely this construction of a collective threat, implied by the ruling, that more than one lawyer ridicules in their response today. If silent applause is considered a security threat, lawyer Schuster argues, then surely a smile from the prosecutor or the raising of an eyebrow should be treated in the same way – an implication that would inevitably expose the judge to the “Vorwurf der Lächerlichkeit” (the accusation of rendering herself ridiculous).
Lawyer Busl, meanwhile, argues that the judge’s conclusion that she sees no reason to relax the seating arrangement exposes the logical flaw in her own reasoning. The seating arrangement was never an inevitability. More importantly, she suggests, the judge’s wording applies the language not of the courts but of the carceral system, and reveals the underlying purpose of the ruling: not to safeguard the defendants’ legal rights, but to establish a moral relationship in which they must first “earn” the right to sit with their lawyers, much like prisoners who receive privileges only through good behaviour.
The power of expression
It comes as little surprise, when, after another fifteen-minute break, the judge confirms that her ruling will stand. The lawyers show no visible reaction. I can see some of the defendants and members of the public laughing quietly, some look despondent, and, above all, exhausted. Before proceedings conclude for the day, however, the lawyers make one final series of applications: that the panel of judges recuse itself on the grounds of apparent judicial bias displayed again on that day. The judge gives the defence until Thursday, 30 July, at 11 am to submit the application.
As the defendants are handcuffed and led back to the holding cells, Mimi, mother of Daniel, unexpectedly finds herself leading a chant for the first time in her life. “Free, free Ulm Five.” “I have no idea how that happened,” she tells me later. Her voice is clear and strong. Again and again, the public responds in echo, the chant building into a crescendo that fills the entire courtroom.
Later, Mimi tells me that the “note” exchanged between the defendants—which the judge had cited in her ruling as evidence of alleged misconduct—was, in fact, a quotation Leandra had shared with the others in the dock. It was her favourite line from Pessoa: “To express something is to preserve its virtue and to remove its terror.”
Trial Day 14, 29 July 2026 (Aino)
I arrive early on 29 July. While waiting in the long security queue, slowed down by procedures that seem to serve no other purpose than to delay the public’s attendance, I meet others facing prosecution for actions against German companies’ support for genocide. We exchange experiences. Since October 2023, I have observed numerous trials in Berlin targeting solidarity with Palestine and, before then, many others through my research and antiracist organising in southern Germany. One organiser tells us they have left Germany because of the repression while continuing their political work abroad.
Once inside, the room slowly fills with familiar and new faces: relatives and friends of the defendants, activists from different campaigns and groups, and others whose reporting from Stammheim I have followed closely. Behind the bulletproof glass sit the lawyers of the Ulm5 from Berlin and southern Germany, many of whom are known as much for their longstanding involvement in antiracist and left movements as for their defence work. After a brief singing lesson, we begin singing in canon the song that has on previous occasions filled the public gallery:
Old as the olive trees
The wisdom of those who fight to be free
Land and people will thrive
In a free Palestine
As the defendants are brought in, some members of the public clap; others keep singing. Vi, Zo, Leandra, Crow, and Daniel join in, singing this song they sang inside the Elbit Systems Ulm factory in September 2025. We meet each other’s gaze. The judges arrive, and the presiding judge, Kathrin Lauchstädt, calls for silence, bringing this moving moment of collective defiance to an end. The melody lingers in a low hum, exposing the fragility of her authority. The singing and humming will resurface throughout the day in this room, after the pauses to welcome the defendants, in the corridors and outside – and later in social media posts heard by tens of thousands in Germany and abroad (see the video at the beginning of the report).
Applications
Leandra speaks first. In a Southern Cone Spanish accent, with eloquence and sharp irony, she challenges the seating arrangement, an issue discussed at the previous hearing, and many times before. Her question to the presiding judge in June about why the defendants were kept physically isolated, as though they posed an imminent danger to everyone in the courtroom, has yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Anyone “with two eyes”, she notes, can see there is space for her between her two lawyers, making the court’s argument about courtroom design untenable and outright “absurd”. Although previous motions have been rejected, she reminds the court that the fundamental rights at stake are non-negotiable. “In our neighbourhood (en nuestro barrio)”, she says, “they would call this an abuse of power”. She links the highly restrictive seating order, the public’s note-taking ban, and the wider proceedings to an attempt to portray the defendants, lawyers, and supporters as dangerous, calling this a “show trial” (juicio show). This is another word that has been used repeatedly during the trial.
Foto: Ignacio Rosaslanda
In response, Senior Public Prosecutor Ronny Stengel once again cites a Stuttgart Higher Regional Court ruling on a complaint related to this trial that has been invoked in previous hearings, according to which the seating arrangement reflects the courtroom’s design while respecting both the presumption of innocence and the defendants’ fundamental rights. Daniel’s lawyer Düsberg replies that Leandra already noted the circularity of this reasoning. He compares it to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s assurances to the Irish press that defendants’ rights are respected in Stammheim. These statements came in response to critical statements by the Irish parliamentary delegation who attended the trial and visited Daniel in prison the previous week. Ignoring the judge’s attempts to cut him off, Düsberg then stands to welcome German MEP Martin Sonneborn (Die PARTEI), who is attending the hearing and is seated with his assistants in the public gallery. The lawyer sarcastically praises the courtroom’s “glass installations”, which, he suggests, allow Germany to compete with Russia in the “first league”. Like Leandra’s remarks, the comment draws quiet laughter from the public.
The defence then re-files applications to permit note-taking by the public, to allow a note-taking assistant for the defence, and to allow lawyers to meet privately with their clients during breaks without a glass partition. Crow’s lawyer Maja Beisenherz notes that such arrangements are standard in other cases heard in the same building.
Lawyer Nina Onèr presents a motion on behalf of Zo, whose wrists have been damaged by regular transports in heavy-duty handcuffs. Since the trial began in April, they have suffered persistent bruising, pressure marks, swelling, and pain, and have recently begun to experience numbness. The court has ignored repeated warnings from Zo and the defence, as well as defence efforts to secure alternative transport arrangements through the prison. The injuries, Onèr argues, require urgent documentation and examination to prevent lasting neurological damage. With carefully restrained fury, she accuses the court of avoiding responsibility: instead of initiating any action, the court has given the prison until the end of July to state its position. Citing the German Basic Law and the European Convention on Human Rights, she invokes the rights to bodily integrity and a fair trial, as well as the prohibition of torture.
After a short adjournment, the presiding judge announces that a forensic medical expert involved in parallel proceedings in the same building, Dr Hohner, could examine the matter. The judge appears more concerned with establishing fitness to stand trial (Verhandlungsfähigkeit) than with the pain and damage already caused.
State racism in action
Crow then speaks, passionately, addressing Zo as their brother:
“I appreciate the gesture of bringing in a doctor to check our hands. Nonetheless, I am upset and angry that this took more than ten hearings. Shame on you. You sit there with bored faces while my brother is in pain. We could see the marks on his hands from over here. Shame on you for hiding behind the law and misusing it to enforce suffering and torture on my brother. Shame on you for using our health and our rights as bargaining chips in your sadistic games of power. Shame on you for using our attempt to stop a genocide (…) to stage a show trial against us and terrorise us and the public. Shame on you. Shame on the judges. Shame on the prosecutor.”
In the public gallery, I cannot help but think: Why is Zo, a Black person, subjected to this form of violence, while state authorities simultaneously deny that it is taking place? I remember a press conference where their mother, Nicky, spoke about the torture and abuse they had been subjected to after their arrest; they were left naked in a cell with only a nappy and denied medical attention. I am reminded of the accounts shared by Black people I met during research and antiracist court watching in southern Germany over the past decade. They spoke of violent abuse and intimidation at the hands of state authorities and guards in pre-trial detention centres, immigration detention facilities, asylum camps, and police stations not far from where we sit. In the German criminal legal system, just like the immigration enforcement regime, infliction of pain and inhumane treatment are heavily racialised.
Lawyer Matthias Schuster reminds the court that the real issue is not fitness to stand trial but the shackling itself, which is physically harmful and humiliating, and cannot be justified by any danger posed by the defendants or by their conduct. The judge calls a one-hour recess, during which Dr Hohner examines Zo and Daniel, who also reported injuries. Rather than being an independent medical practitioner, Hohner works for the Society for Forensic Medical Examinations and Expert Assessments (GRUS GmbH), a Tübingen-based agency that provides expert reports for this court.
The witness
After the break, it takes me almost an hour to re-enter the building due to security controls. In the meantime, the doctor has already delivered their statement, confirming injuries commonly associated with the use of handcuffs. She recommended Zo to wear wrist warmers or socks between the handcuffs and their wrist.
Then Mr Kienast is questioned as a witness. He was one of the police officers involved in searching Leandra’s phone after her arrest. His face looms large from the big screens on either side of the courtroom, amplifying the familiar theatrics of the trained police testimony. In response to defence questions, he repeatedly cites the limits of his authorisation to testify, refusing to answer questions about inter-agency cooperation, internal matters, and working practices, a justification repeatedly invoked by police witnesses in this trial. For instance, he withholds information about the software used to search Leandra’s phone, including its name and the search terms employed, and about his cooperation with Mr Gropp, an officer previously heard as a witness.
Leandra’s defence confronts him with documents from the case file, including an extraction report generated by UFED (Universal Forensic Extraction Device), a software developed by the Israeli company Cellebrite. In this way, more than 10,000 images on Leandra’s phone were examined to identify nine or ten deemed “relevant to the proceedings”. Kienast acknowledges having little substantive knowledge of the topic of Palestine himself. He repeatedly appears to conflate “Palestine Action” with “Palestine-related actions”, for instance by presenting them as alternatives separated by a slash (Schrägstrich). This creates the impression that any Palestine-related action is associated with the UK-based group.
Mathes Breuer asks whether Cellebrite’s Israeli origin poses a potential conflict of interest in the investigations. Implicit in this is the question whether software developed by an Israeli company might treat support for Palestine as inherently suspicious. More fundamentally, the issue is this: what does it mean when German authorities investigate actions targeting a German subsidiary of an Israeli arms manufacturer while relying on Israeli-developed surveillance technology? Kienast says he has never considered the matter and was unaware of the company’s origins.
Several of his answers provoke quiet laughter in the public gallery, for instance, when he initially refuses to answer the defence whether he has met the Senior Public Prosecutor, Ronny Stengel. Given the routine cooperation between police and prosecutors in German criminal investigations, the question seems unremarkable. Pressed further, Kienast concedes that such meetings are possible but says he cannot remember how many took place. At one point, the presiding judge admonishes the public, insisting that the courtroom is not a place “to laugh at people” (auszulachen).
Applications concerning Elbit Systems Germany
Nearly four hours into the hearing, more substantial material is introduced. Düsberg submits an application to take evidence, seeking to admit delivery records from the global transport and logistics company DSV. These document shipments of military goods from Elbit Systems Germany’s Ulm facility to Israeli ports and airports between March and October 2025, both before and after the defendants entered the site. He argues that this evidence will establish that the defendants’ actions were justified under § 32 StGB (Notwehr), which permits necessary defensive action against an unlawful attack and encompasses the defence of others (Nothilfe).
The attack consists of “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza”, in which the defence argues the Elbit group is complicit through its near-monopolistic role in supplying the Israeli military. Moreover, Elbit weapons systems used in Gaza are subsequently marketed as “battle-proven”. The shipments in question include laser warning systems and military communications equipment. Düsberg refers to reports by the Irish magazine Ditch that deliveries continued into May 2026. He further requests that arms-trade researcher Ruth Rhode of Shadow World Investigations UK be heard as a witness. Rhode is expected to testify on the nature and military uses of Elbit technologies in Gaza and elsewhere, including the E-LynX software-defined radio system, artillery rockets and guns, laser target markers, and surveillance systems.
In a further motion, Beisenherz requests that Jan Erbe, Vice President of Elbit Systems Germany, and Haim Delmar, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Elbit Systems Ltd., be heard as witnesses. They are expected to testify to Elbit Systems Germany’s key role in developing integrated military information and communications systems, including the E-LynX communications system. Produced by Elbit Systems Germany, E-LynX is used by various countries’ armed forces and is being further developed with the Bavarian start-up Cucuyo GmbH. It forms an integral part of the Israeli military’s tactical communications infrastructure, including in operations in Gaza. Referring to earlier applications to take evidence, including that of Düsberg and another one filed by Breuer on 22 July, Beisenherz argues that the evidence will establish that the defendants’ actions were justified under Section 32 StGB [Notwehr/Nothilfe].
A 2,5 week recess
The court reserves its decision on the applications for later. Defence lawyer Onèr notes that, rather than investigating Elbit, the proceedings have been repeatedly delayed. As the chamber enters a further 2.5-week recess, she urges the judges to think of the five human rights activists held in overheated cells for opposing a genocide, recalling Crow’s remarks at the opening of the hearing. The public responds with applause before Kathrin Lauchstädt restores order.
Shortly after 3 p.m., the hearing ends. The public again applauds and chants, “Free, free Palestine, free, free ULM5”, in farewell to Vi, Zo, Leandra, Crow, and Daniel. We file out through the security gates, humming and singing the olive-tree melody, before gathering at the roundabout to wave to the defendants. They will remain in isolation until 14 August, when the next hearing is scheduled, again at 9 a.m.