Rainbow memorial bench for Berlin CSD attack victims destroyed in Tiergarten

Discovery in Tiergarten

Unknown perpetrators destroyed a rainbow-colored memorial bench located in Berlin's Tiergarten park during the night or early morning hours of Tuesday, 1 September 2026. An employee of the local parks department discovered the damage at approximately 8:00 on Tuesday morning and alerted the authorities. Berlin police confirmed that the wooden bench was still fully intact on Monday evening. The attackers used substantial physical force to rip the multicolored wooden slats completely out of their metal anchorings, leaving them scattered on the ground. Berlin police initially registered an offense of property damage, and the state security division took charge of the investigation due to suspected hate crime.

Response from Berlin officials

Alfonso Pantisano, the Berlin Senate commissioner for queer affairs, published a photo of the destroyed installation on Instagram on Tuesday morning. Surrounding memorial items, including photographs, flags, and candles left by mourners, also suffered damage during the incident. Authorities from the Berlin-Mitte district office removed the dismantled structure before noon on Tuesday, confirming that the structural damage was too extensive to permit repairs on site. A district spokesperson confirmed that the memorial bench will be rebuilt and reinstalled at the site.

Pantisano expressed disbelief over the destruction of a place dedicated to victims of violence.

Anyone who damages a place where people mourn a dead person and remember the injured of a terrorist attack crosses a line for which I am slowly running out of words.

The July 25 attack

The bench marked the exact location of an Islamist terror attack carried out on the evening of 25 July 2026. During the closing gathering of the Christopher Street Day parade, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout steered a delivery van directly into a crowd of participants in the Tiergarten before crashing into a tree. Ballout then exited the vehicle armed with a machete and attacked bystanders before fleeing on foot. The assault resulted in the death of a woman from Poland and left 31 other people injured, several of them with severe wounds.

Police officers located Ballout on 26 July 2026 in an allotment garden in Berlin-Spandau and shot him dead during an attempted arrest. Investigators discovered a confession video stored on his mobile phone and confirmed his classification as an Islamist threat. Because criminal investigations cannot proceed against deceased individuals, the Federal Prosecutor's Office subsequently closed its case against him.

History of the memorial site

The Berlin-Mitte district administration installed the rainbow bench on 6 August 2026, roughly twelve days after the violence took place. City workers planted a new maple tree alongside the bench to replace a damaged tree that required felling after the vehicle collision. The newly planted tree was not damaged during the overnight vandalism. District officials created the site to offer a space for quiet reflection and to demonstrate solidarity with the queer community following the fatal attack.

Pantisano described how community members gathered at the location in the days following the July incident.

At this exact place we stood in the days after, cried, laid flowers, lit candles and tried to understand what actually happened.