Easter Rally in Berlin

With more than 6,000 participants, the Easter March through Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district sent a strong message for peace. The "Freedom Not Fear" campaign was also an official supporter of the demonstration and took part. The participation and visibility of the trade unions IGM, ver.di, and GEW were encouraging. Due to the U.S.’s wars of aggression, people from Iran, Palestine, Venezuela, and Cuba were also strongly represented; they spoke at both the opening and closing rallies and called for a condemnation of the wars against their countries.

In a powerful speech, Lühr Henken warned against the war propaganda designed to instill fear of an alleged Russian attack. He posed the following question: "The prevailing propaganda tries to drum into us day in and day out that we must be ready for war within three years at the latest to deter Russia from attacking NATO territory. ... Once the war against Ukraine is over, Russia would no longer be using those weapons in combat, and that would become dangerous for us. ... This makes me wonder why Russia didn’t do that four years ago" [when we weren’t spending hundreds of billions on rearmament].

His full speech is linked below.

A highlight of the opening rally was the musical tribute to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, who, as a senior officer in the command center of the Soviet satellite surveillance system, correctly identified a system-reported attack by the U.S. with intercontinental ballistic missiles on the USSR as a false alarm, thereby preventing a counterattack and averting the end of humanity as we know it.

This courageous decision also reminds us of the poem by Wolfgang Borchert, who warned us in 1947 after the horrors of World War II

Say NO

You. Man at the machine and man in the workshop. If tomorrow they order you to stop making water pipes and cooking pots — and instead make steel helmets and machine guns — then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Girl behind the counter and girl in the office. If tomorrow they order you to fill grenades and mount scopes on sniper rifles, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Factory owner. If tomorrow they order you to sell gunpowder instead of powder and cocoa, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You, the researcher in the laboratory. If tomorrow they order you to invent a new death to replace the old life, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You, the poet in your room. If tomorrow they order you not to sing songs of love, but songs of hate, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Doctor at the sickbed. If tomorrow they order you to declare men fit for war, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Pastor in the pulpit. If tomorrow they order you to bless murder and sanctify war, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Captain on the steamship. If tomorrow they order you to stop carrying wheat — and instead carry cannons and tanks — then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Pilot on the airfield. If tomorrow they order you to drop bombs and phosphorus on the cities, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Tailor at your workbench. If tomorrow they order you to cut uniforms, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Judge in your robe. If tomorrow they order you to go to a court-martial, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Man at the train station. If they order you tomorrow to give the signal for departure for the ammunition train and for the troop transport, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Man in the village and man in the city. When they come tomorrow and bring you the draft notice, there’s only one thing to do: Say NO!

You. Mothers in Normandy and mothers in Ukraine, you, mothers in Frisco and London, you, on the Yellow River and the Mississippi, you, mothers in Naples and Hamburg and Cairo and Oslo — mothers in every corner of the earth, mothers of the world, if tomorrow they order you to bear children, nurses for war hospitals and new soldiers for new battles, mothers of the world, then there is only one thing to do: Say NO! Mothers, say NO!

For if you do not say NO, if YOU do not say no, mothers, then:

In the noisy, steam-filled port cities, the great ships will fall silent with a groan and, like titanic mammoth carcasses, sway sluggishly, weighed down by water, against the dead, desolate quay walls, their once-shimmering, roaring hulls overgrown with algae, seaweed, and mussels, reeking of fishy decay like a graveyard, brittle, sickly, dead —

the streetcars will lie there like senseless, lusterless, glass-eyed cages, stupidly dented and peeling, beside the tangled steel skeletons of wires and tracks, behind rotten, roof-riddled sheds, in lost, crater-torn streets –

a mud-gray, thick, leaden silence will roll in, voracious, growing, will spread through schools and universities and theaters, across sports fields and children’s playgrounds, gruesome and greedy, unstoppable –

the sunny, juicy wine will rot on the decaying slopes, the rice will wither in the parched earth, the potatoes will freeze to death in the fallow fields, and the cows will stretch their stiff, lifeless legs toward the sky like overturned milking stools –

In the institutes, the brilliant inventions of the great doctors will turn sour, rot, and grow moldy —

In the kitchens, pantries, and cellars, in the cold storage rooms and granaries, the last sacks of flour, the last jars of strawberries, pumpkin, and cherry juice will go bad — the bread under the overturned tables and on shattered plates will turn green, and the spilled butter will stink like soft soap, the grain in the fields will have slumped down beside rusted plows like a slain army, and the smoking brick chimneys, the smokestacks, and the stacks of the pounding factories will, covered by the eternal grass, crumble — crumble — crumble —

then the last human, with torn intestines and plague-ridden lungs, will wander aimlessly and alone beneath the poisonously blazing sun and beneath wavering stars, alone among the vast mass graves and the cold idols of the gigantic, concrete-blocked, desolate cities, the last human, gaunt, mad, blasphemous, lamenting — and his terrible lament: WHY? will fade unheard in the steppe, blow through the shattered ruins, seep into the rubble of the churches, crash against high-rise bunkers, fall into pools of blood, unheard, unanswered, the last animal cry of the last animal, Man — all this will come to pass, tomorrow, tomorrow perhaps, perhaps already tonight, perhaps tonight, if — if —

if you don’t say NO.

Unless you say NO.

[Sorry for the very little lyric translation.]

On May 1, there will be another opportunity to demonstrate for peace and against "war-mongering". Join us!

Read more /images/docs/20260404OM-BerlinRedeLuehrHenken.pdf
and the call of German Unions /images/docs/202604DGB-AufrufOstermaersche.pdf
and the other Easter Rallies https://www.friedenskooperative.de/ostermarsch-2026

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