Audio Interview: Scott Tatina, Bombing Witness

May 11, 1972. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Holger Meins and possibly others leave three pipe bombs around Frankfurt’s IG Farben building, which housed the Supreme Allied Command of the US military. In the early evening, the three bombs go off in rapid succession. One bomb, planted inside the main building, destroys a magazine stand and injures dozens. Two bombs, planted in the Officer’s Club behind the IG Farben building, shatters a pane of glass, sending a shard into the neck of Lt. Col. Paul Bloomquist. Bloomquist dies at the scene, following a massive loss of blood.

A few hundred yards away from the blasts, Scott Tatina and his friends are walking through the adjoining park when they hear the first bomb go off, followed by two more. They run towards the Officer’s Club, arriving in time to help a young soldier with a tramautic shrapnel wound to his back.

In a communique released after the bombings, the Baader-Meinhof Gang would claim that the attack was in response to the United States’ mining of North Vietnamese harbors. Lt. Bloomquist would be the first American victim in the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s war on American Imperialism.

The following interview was conducted with Tatini on May 22, 2009

[display_podcast]

The massive IG Farben building of Frankfurt, site of a 1972 bombing by the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The large annex building behind the main building is the Terrace Club, home of the Officer's Club, where Lt. Col Paul Bloomquist lost his life and 17 people wer injured when two bombs went off (smaller green circle). Another bomb, placed inside the main building, destroyed a magazine stand and injured many more (larger green circle). The bombs caused and estimated $718,000 in damage.