(new: more details and background)

ERKELENZ (dpa-AFX) - With a massive contingent, police began to clear the town of Lützerath in the Rhineland lignite mining area, which was occupied by climate activists. There were scuffles. According to the police, Molotov cocktails, stones and pyrotechnics were thrown at the officers in isolated cases. But according to observers, the officers did not encounter the massive resistance that had been feared during their operation on Wednesday morning.

After about two hours, the police described the situation as "stable". The task forces had cordoned off the entire area. Police officers could begin removing barricades and moving activists outside throughout the site. The eviction is intended to lay the groundwork for energy company RWE to mine the lignite under the site for power generation.

Conditions on the day of the eviction presented special challenges to everyone in Lützerath. It was raining heavily and persistently, a strong wind was blowing, and the ground was soggy. Early in the morning, the police pulled together hundreds of emergency forces from all over the country around the occupied site.

As it slowly became light, the activists also sounded the alarm. Sirens and alarm bells rang through the occupied site. "There is a never-ending chain of police cars driving through the open pit mine," the squatters wrote on their Telegram channel. Some climbed high monopods and tripods - which are logs tied together with platforms. They were erected in recent days to make it as difficult as possible for police to get to the activists.

At the border to the village of Lützerath, which has belonged to the energy company RWE for years and has long since been abandoned by its former inhabitants, police officers and activists faced each other in confrontation. "This operation can't have been the reason you became a policeman," one of the activists shouted at the officers.

Then everything happened very quickly: shortly after 8:30 a.m., hundreds of police moved forward and broke through the first chains of demonstrators without much resistance. Scuffles broke out. "You can leave the area here now without any further consequences for you," police loudspeaker announcements said. A little later, the tone became harsher: anyone who did not leave now would have to "reckon with the use of immediate force."

Some climate activists followed the call and left voluntarily. They were escorted off the site. But many want to continue resisting. "People are determined to stay there, to hold out, to protect the trees and the buildings," said Mara Sauer, a spokeswoman for the "Lützerath lebt" initiative. After the police advanced, however, the activists could largely only hold out in their tree houses. According to police, about 25 tree houses had been erected, some of them at great heights.

Some demonstrators also deliberately protested against the police deployment in hushed tones. One activist sat in the middle of the rain at an old piano and played while the officers advanced into the village. Others had gathered around a cross, prayed and sang "Wonderfully sheltered by good powers."

Energy company RWE announced that the first thing it would do after the police operation would be to build a one-and-a-half-kilometer fence around the site. "It marks the company's own construction site, where the remaining buildings, ancillary facilities, roads and sewers of the former settlement will be dismantled in the coming weeks. In addition, trees and shrubs will be removed," the group wrote.

The coal, which lies beneath Lützerath, is needed to save gas for power generation in Germany during the energy crisis, RWE argued. The activists dispute this, pointing among other things to a study by scientists from several universities who have joined forces as the "CoalExit Research Group." According to this study, the coal in the current mining area is sufficient - even under the conditions of the energy crisis triggered by the Ukraine war.

Lützerath is a district of Erkelenz, a town with 43,000 inhabitants in the west of North Rhine-Westphalia. The hamlet, located in the middle of fields, is now right on the edge of the Garzweiler open-pit lignite mine. The coal underneath is to be extracted for power generation.

Aachen's police chief Dirk Weinspach had stressed in advance that the operation in Lützerath would be one of the most challenging in recent years. For this purpose, emergency forces from all over Germany had been brought together./mhe/DP/jha