Tomorrow night, fifty years ago (2 Apr 1968)....was the start of the Red Army 'war'. It began in Frankfurt at the old Zeil store in the downtown area....where the place was lit up and around 600,000 Marks of damage (roughly $300,000 US dollars) was reported. Oddly.....no one was hurt. Most of the damage? Because of the fire sprinkler system.
It took the Frankfurt cops around forty-eight hours to come up with the four individuals responsible: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein. The name that matters? Baader....who is to go on to create the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
It's not really a day marked down on the calendars of most Germans, and the Zeil store connection is rarely if ever brought up when you talk the RAF achievements.
Why Zeil? Zeil was the place where upper-class Frankfurt folks went shopping.
The Baader connection into this whole thing of the RAF? This is one of the odd parts of the thousand-page story, in which most all members of the RAF connected to some university setting....with the one exception of Andreas Baader.
Why Zeil was lit up? The comment made by Baader and his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin.....was that they wanted to make a message against the public acceptance of the war in Vietnam. Most people just accept this reasoning and never go back to dig into Ensslin or Baader in the month or two prior to the store fire.
Yep, the fifty year anniversary of the little 'civil' war in Germany.
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