On 24 July 2010, a crowd disaster at the 2010 Love Parade electronic dance music festival in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, caused the deaths of 21 people from suffocation as attendees sought to escape a ramp leading to the festival area. 652 people were injured.
The Love Parade was a free-access music festival and parade that originated in 1989 in Berlin. The parade featured stages, but also had floats with music, DJs, and dancers moving through the audience. The Love Parade in Duisburg was the first time that the festival had been held in a closed-off area. Between 200,000 and people were reported to be attending the event and 3,200 police were on hand.
As a consequence of the disaster, the organizer of the festival announced that no further Love Parades would be held and that the festival was permanently cancelled. Criminal charges were brought against ten employees of the city of Duisburg and of the company that organized the event, but eventually rejected by the court due to the prosecutors' failure to establish evidence for the alleged acts of negligence and their causal connection to the deaths. On 18 April 2017 the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf stated that it would be reopening court proceedings for prosecution of 10 people involved in planning the event, accusing them of negligent homicide and mayhem. The first hearing of the trial was held on 8 December 2017. The trial was discontinued in May 2020, because it was adjudged that no individual did such a great wrong that ten years of trial were not already enough punishment.
Background
With the slogan "The Art of Love", the event was a prominent part of RUHR.2010, a campaign to celebrate Germany's Ruhr valley as one of 2010's European Capitals of Culture. The festival which had previously been a parade through Berlin was staged on the grounds of a former freight station in 2010. The confined area had a maximum capacity of 250,000 people; the average turnout of the previous years would have suggested a number of close to one million attendees for the event.
Bruce Cullen of Parker, Colorado, and founder of Trance Elements, a LoveParade artist/performer on float number 7, "The Ship of Fools", mentioned that he and other performers were concerned before the event that there would be problems, stating "we all said it seems like this is not going to work". Although Cullen did not witness the actual event, he stated: "These guys didn't have this planned out right", "They didn't have enough police at the entrances in that tunnel. I am just really upset because people died. Everybody was there to have fun".
Incident
Admittance to the festival grounds was supposed to begin at 11:00 but was deferred until as late as 12:00 CEST. At the convergence of a 240-meter (260 yard) long tunnel extending from the east and a series of underpasses from the west, was a ramp that served as the only entrance and exit point of the festival area; that is, excepting one smaller ramp between the westerly underpasses. In an effort to relieve overcrowding, police at the entrance began instructing new arrivals by loudspeaker to turn back. Despite being told that the tunnel's only exit was barred off, one which would have otherwise led to the parade area encircling the festival, people continued pushing on into the confined space of the tunnel from the rear. The fatalities occurred when the ramp between tunnel underpasses and the festival area overcrowded until there was a crush. One police officer reported that;
There was some debate as to how the deaths occurred. Some reports suggested they were caused by people falling off a staircase as they tried to escape the tunnel. However, autopsies showed that all of the fatalities were due to crushed rib cages.
A 2012 scientific analysis of the causes of the disaster dismissed the earlier descriptions of the incident as stampede or crowd panic, and instead found evidence of a phenomenon called "crowd turbulence". The study stated that most people died between the staircase and the billboard on the ramp.
Lopavent GmbH, the organiser of the Love Parade, released a film, depicting an explanation of the events. The film is based on CCTV recordings, explanatory animations, documents, press reports and eyewitness accounts released by the organiser.