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Luckily the terrorists had only wanted to harm the facility and no people: they let the bomb explode at 3 a.m. on a Sunday and told a priest to tell the security guard to get out in time. Thus nobody was hurt.
The bomb was planted by the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) headed by the famous Baader-Meinhof gang. They left a very long and boring politically confused 8-page letter nearby turgidly explaining their actions - quite fascinating in its misguidedness. Apparently they thought that the IBM Research Centre with its computer networking activities was supporting the "Rasterfahndung" (whereby a terrorists are identified by computers, databases, telecommunications networks etc.). This was not true.
However in other respects they had done their homework: they knew where
it hurts most. The sensitive parts of the building are the computer centre
and the best thing to destroy is the data on disk drives - not the more
easily replaceable processors. The bomb was hidden in a fire extinguisher
which was placed outside this critical spot. They caused several million
DMs of damage and caused severe disruption to our work for several weeks.
The holes in our computer centre:
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