The Alarm-Clock Firebombs - Hauptwache
Shortly before midnight on 2 April 1968, firebombs made from plastic bottles and travel alarm clocks set the department store on this square and the M. Schneider store on the Zeil alight; Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and two accomplices were arrested two days later and got three years each, the first step on the road to the Red Army Faction.
About this place
The Hauptwache, a small baroque guardhouse of red Main sandstone built in 1729 and 1730, once housed the city guard and its prisoners, and it has served coffee since December 1905. But the crime that wrote this square into German history happened in the department store at the corner of the Zeil and Große Eschenheimer Straße, in 1968 a Kaufhof. Shortly before closing time on 2 April 1968, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein hid homemade firebombs, built from plastic bottles and travel alarm clocks, in the Kaufhof and in Kaufhaus M. Schneider at the corner of the Zeil and Stiftstraße. Ensslin phoned the press agency dpa to announce 'a political act', and shortly before midnight three fires broke out in the two stores. The damage reached DM 673,204, yet because the stores were closed nobody was hurt. A tip led police to all four just two days later, and on 31 October 1968 each was sentenced to three years in prison. Released pending appeal in June 1969, Baader, Ensslin and Proll fled abroad, and Baader's armed breakout in Berlin on 14 May 1970 became the founding act of the Red Army Faction, whose terror lasted until 1998. Few of the shoppers crossing this square today know that this dark chapter began with two cheap alarm clocks ticking in the stores around them.
Key facts
- 673204 Deutschmarks — Total damage from the fires: DM 282,339 at M. Schneider plus DM 390,865 at the Kaufhof on this square. Nobody was hurt.
- 2 days — After a tip, Frankfurt police arrested all four arsonists in the Bockenheim district on 4 April 1968, two days after the fires.
- 3 years in prison — The sentence each of the four received from the Frankfurt regional court on 31 October 1968 for the department store arson.