Inside a life-threatening crowd: Analysis of the Love Parade disaster from the perspective of eyewitnesses

•Content analysis of witness statements of the 2010 Love Parade disaster in Duisburg, Germany.•A combination of falls (often after people had fainted) and transversal waves of the crowd are the most dangerous dynamics.•In the tightly packed crowd, fallen people create a “hole” into which more people are pushed.•Helping behavior is the most prominent behavior, but visitors also tried to get out of the crowd without regard for others.•Witnesses describe feelings of intense fear while disagreeing with the idea of mass panic. During the Love Parade disaster in 2010 in Duisburg, Germany, twenty-one visitors lost their lives and more than five hundred were injured in a very dense crowd on the route to and from the festival area. Approximately nine hundred visitors who had been among this crowd were subsequently interviewed by police officers as eyewitnesses. This paper analyzes a random sample of 136 of these witness statements, focusing on how those present perceived the crowd, how they behaved, how they experienced the event emotionally, what happened to their bodies, and which collective dynamics they described. This approach provides a perspective from within crowd dynamics which are usually observed from a top-view perspective. Almost all the attendees became strongly focused on the staircase and the pole—the only visible ways out of the crowd. In some cases, they tried to reach these destinations by all means and at the expense of others. But at the same time, helping behavior is the behavior most frequently mentioned. Although witnesses described feelings of intense fear, they reject the idea of mass panic. As the most dangerous dynamics, a combination of falls (often after people had fainted) and transversal waves (which made people fall on top of each other) could be reconstructed. When people fall in a tightly packed crowd, a hole can form which pulls in more people due to the pressure on those standing around the edge of the hole, thus creating a pile of wedged bodies.