Department store arson on April 2nd, 1968

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The department store arson on April 2, 1968 in Frankfurt am Main was politically motivated arson in which the later co-founders of the left-wing extremist Red Army faction , Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin , were involved. Together with Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein , they set three fires at night in two department stores and were sentenced to three years in prison for each. People were not injured, the damage in the M. Schneider department store amounted to 282,339 DM (today's monetary value 536,497 euros) and in the Kaufhof 390,865 DM (today's monetary value 742,717 euros).

prehistory

After the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg by police chief Karl-Heinz Kurras on June 2, 1967 in West Berlin , part of the student movement became radicalized . Damage to property (“violence against property”) was discussed as a legitimate means of political protest.

On May 22, 1967, the À l'innovation department store in Brussels burned down . 322 people were killed. This event inspired the Berlin Commune 1 to produce leaflets in which, on the one hand, regrets human suffering, but also compares it with the suffering of people bombed with napalm in the Vietnam War .

Leaflet No. 7 “Why are you burning, consumer?
[...] For the first time in a major European city, a burning department store with burning people conveyed that sizzling Vietnam feeling (to be there and burn with it) that we have so far been missing in Berlin. […] As much as we feel the pain of the bereaved in Brussels: we who are open to the new can, as long as the right measure is not exceeded, the bold and the unconventional, which, despite all the human tragedy, is in the Brussels department store fire , our admiration does not fail. [...]
Municipality I (May 24, 1967) "

A second leaflet with the same date became even more direct. The creators of the leaflets, previously known for throwing eggs and pudding attacks, indicated, for example, that the population could also go to the department store and discreetly light a cigarette in the dressing room.

Leaflet No. 8 “When do Berlin department stores burn?
[...] If there's a fire somewhere in the near future, if a barracks somewhere blows up, if the grandstand collapses somewhere in a stadium, please don't be surprised. Just as little as when the Americans crossed the demarcation line, the bombing of the city center of Hanoi , the marines invading China. Brussels gave us the only answer: Burn, warehouse, burn!
Municipality I (May 24th, 67) "

Because of the leaflets, the Communards Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel were charged in the so-called “ arson trial ”, but acquitted.

The arson

Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin met at the end of July 1967 in the environment of the extra-parliamentary opposition in Berlin. On August 7, 1967, they jointly carried out a symbolic smoke bomb attack on the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin .

Baader, Ensslin and Proll picked up Söhnlein on April 1, 1968 in Munich and arrived in Frankfurt am Main early in the morning on April 2 . They scouted department stores all day. Shortly before the M. Schneider and Kaufhof an der Zeil houses were closed , they set self-made incendiary devices with time fuses , which set off shortly before midnight. In the Kaufhof part of the sporting goods and toys department burned down, at Schneider the wall of a changing room on the first floor and a cupboard on the third floor. The damage caused by the incendiary devices was comparatively small, but triggered the sprinkler systems . Shortly before the incendiary device was triggered, a woman had called the Frankfurt office of the German Press Agency and said:

“It's about to burn at Schneider and in the Kaufhof. It is a political act. "

The process

The Frankfurt criminal police quickly established that there was arson, because plastic bottles and travel alarm clocks were found on all three sources of the fire , the condition of which left no doubt as to the cause of the fire. As early as April 3, 1968, the management of the department stores decided to offer a high reward . On the morning of April 4, 1968, the Frankfurt criminal police received a specific report that led to the arrest of the four arsonists in Frankfurt-Bockenheim .

The trial began on October 14, 1968 before the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court and was turbulent. The defendants, who were defended by the defense lawyers Otto Schily , Horst Mahler , Klaus Eschen and Ernst Heinitz , initially behaved in a noticeably good mood and mocked the judge and public prosecutor . A photo that shows the four defendants in the dock, some with cigars in their mouths, became particularly popular.

On October 29, 1968 the Frankfurt First Public Prosecutor Walter Griebel demanded six years imprisonment for each of the defendants. The scope ranged from simple damage to property to particularly serious arson . The prosecutor referred to the night watchmen who were present and insisted that human lives were at risk; the whole of Frankfurt city center could have burned down.

The Grand Criminal Chamber , chaired by District Court Director Gerhard Zoebe, only partially followed this with its judgment of October 31, 1968, imposing sentences of three years each in prison for attempted arson (Section 306 of the Criminal Code ). The accused showed themselves to be unreasonable and felt that the verdict was arbitrary , although the presiding judge granted them “a certain political motivation” in the grounds for the verdict. The interpretation of the “political happening ” as a simple crime was particularly disappointing for them. When Gudrun Ensslin was asked for a final word , she replied: “No. I don't want to give you the opportunity to give the impression that you are listening to me. "

Comments on the process

“It is okay for order to defend itself against disorder, for the ruling order to defend itself against attempts to abolish it; whoever disturbs the prevailing order must expect it to strike if it can. That is why it was pointless to set fire to someone else's cause on April 2, 1968; nothing else could be demonstrated with it. […] There are laws, the violation of which is less dangerous and yet politically more effective. ” Uwe Nettelbeck , in: DIE ZEIT , November 8, 1968.
“So it remains that what is being tried in Frankfurt is one thing that cannot be recommended for imitation - apart from the immense danger to the perpetrators because of the threat of severe punishment. But what Fritz Teufel said at the SDS delegates' conference also remains: 'It is still better to set fire to a department store than to run a department store.' Fritz Teufel can sometimes formulate very well. ” Ulrike Meinhof in: concrete 14/1968.

Unsuccessful appeal against the judgments and escape

The defendants' lawyers appealed on appeal . On June 13, 1969 - about 14 months after the arrest - the further execution of the remand arrest warrants was suspended, subject to conditions. On November 10, 1969, the revisions were discarded. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Thorwald Proll went into hiding and initially fled to Paris . Only Horst Söhnlein started his prison sentence. Thorwald Proll separated from Ensslin and Baader in Paris in December 1969 and presented himself to the Berlin-Moabit public prosecutor's office on November 21, 1970. In October 1971 he was released early from prison. Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin returned to Berlin in February 1970. Andreas Baader was arrested there on April 4, 1970, following a hint from an undercover agent, but was freed again by Ulrike Meinhof and others by force of arms on May 14, 1970 when Ulrike Meinhof and others were executed from the Tegel prison (main article: Baader liberation ). This is considered to be the hour of birth of the Red Army Faction (RAF).

Movie

The arson attacks were the reason for the 1969 for the TV film Brandstifter by Klaus Lemke (screenplay and direction) produced by the WDR with Margarethe von Trotta and Iris Berben as the leading actresses. The department store fires are also shown in the films The Baader Meinhof Complex and Who if Not Us .

literature

  • Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein: We do not defend ourselves against such a judiciary. Final word in the department store fire process. With an afterword by Bernward Vesper and a declaration by the SDS Berlin. Edition Voltaire, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1968. (Series: Voltaire leaflet 27)
  • Statement by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Söhnlein and Thorwald Proll who were accused in the department store fire trial. In: Charlie Kaputt No. 3, December 1968, Berlin
  • Rainer Langhans, Fritz Teufel: Steal me. StPO of the Commune I. Voltaire Edition, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1968 (series: Voltaire Handbook 2); Reprints (without the pornographic supplement): Trikont Verlag, Munich 1977; Rixdorfer Verlagsanstalt, Berlin undated [1982]
  • Bradley Martin: Blue Reality. Call for the dismantling of department store culture. Nova Press, Frankfurt am Main 1969
  • Thorwald Proll, Daniel Dubbe: "We came from another planet". About 1968, Andreas Baader and a department store. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2003 ISBN 3-89401-420-2 .
  • Peter Szondi : Call for arson. An expert opinion in the Langhans / Teufel trial. In: The Month , Berlin, Volume 19, H. 7, 1967, pp. 24-29; also reprinted in: Peter Szondi: About a "Free (ie. Free) University". Opinions of a philologist. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973 (series: es 620)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stefan Aust : The Baader Meinhof Complex . Hoffmann & Campe Verlag , Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-50029-5 .
  2. ^ Document: Leaflets of the Commune I on the Brussels department store fire. In: info.libertad.de. Retrieved January 18, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Leaflet No. 7 Facsimile
  4. ^ Archive "APO and social movements", Free University Berlin , folder KI , here quoted from Joachim Scharloth : 1968. A communication history. Wilhelm Fink Verlag Munich 2011, p. 145 books.google at fn. 400. Warehouse means a warehouse in English; a department store is called a department store. See false friend # English false friends . Perhaps the translation error was consciously accepted in the interest of consistency with “burn, baby, burn”, the battle cry of the Watts riot in August 1965. Cf. Alexander Sedlmaier: Konsum und Violence. Radical protest in the Federal Republic . Suhrkamp Berlin 2018, PT69 books.google at fn. 152 f .; Bob Baker: WATTS: THE LEGACY: 'Burn, Baby, Burn!' : What Began as a Radio Disc Jockey's Soulful Cry of Delight Became a National Symbol of Urban Rebellion . Los Angeles Times, Aug 12, 1985.
  5. ↑ Gerd Koenen : Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Primal scenes of German terrorism. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-15691-2 , p. 126f.
  6. ↑ Manfred Funke : Terrorism. Studies on the strategy and structure of revolutionary violence politics. Federal Agency for Civic Education 1977, ISBN 978-3-921352-24-3 , p. 272 ​​books.google . With (implausible) “act of revenge” instead of “act” in: The Baader-Meinhof Report. Documents, analyzes, connections. From the files of the Federal Criminal Police Office, the “Special Commission Bonn” and the [sic!] Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Hase & Koehler 1972, ISBN 978-3-7758-0840-8 , p. 10 books.google
  7. ↑ Cf. Christopher Tenfelde, The Red Army Fraction and the Criminal Justice. Anti-terror laws and their implementation using the example of the Stammheim process ; Osnabrück: Jonscher Verlag, 2009; ISBN 978-3-9811399-3-8 ; P. 158 f.
  8. ^ Photo from the courtroom
  9. ↑ StGB § 306 (arson) in the version valid until 1969. In: lexetius.com. Retrieved January 18, 2015 .
  10. ^ A b Uwe Nettelbeck: DIE ZEIT 45/1968 (November 8, 1968): The Frankfurter Brandstifter. In: zeit.de . February 23, 2006, accessed January 18, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Ulrike Meinhof: Department store fire foundation. in: Ulrike Marie Meinhof: Human dignity can be touched. Essays and Polemics. With an afterword by Klaus Wagenbach. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1981, pp. 153–156 Ulrike Marie Meinhof Department store fire foundation. In: infopartisan.net. Retrieved January 18, 2015 .

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