50 years ago, the shrill sound of fire brigade sirens roused the Marktheidenfelder from sleep. The district court was on fire. A participant at the time remembers.
On the morning of Sunday, March 5, 1971, two drivers passing by on Würzburger Strasse at around 4 a.m. noticed the fire in a building they believed to be a residential building. They reported this a few hundred meters further to the Marktheidenfeld regional police, which immediately triggered a fire alarm.
The commandant and district fire chief Josef Schwerdhöfer was notified by telephone. He had slept soundly because the volunteer fire brigade had held their general meeting the previous evening. It was late again. As a young man, the now 83-year-old quickly jumped into his operational clothing, sat down in his VW Beetle and drove to the scene of the fire.
The court was the workplace of the fire department commander
He was amazed when he noticed on Würzburger Strasse that no house was on fire there, but rather his place of work. In 1956 Schwerdhöfer joined the judicial administration service and was meanwhile in charge of criminal matters at the Marktheidenfeld district court. “Actually, I could have brought the keys to the fire from home right away,” remembers the later district fire inspector and bearer of the Marktheidenfeld ring of honor. People were not in immediate danger, the office building was uninhabited.
Even the first glance aroused suspicion in the original Hädefelder. Flames broke out from several windows and smoke penetrated them. Arson could only be the cause. Schwerdhöfer led the operation together with his deputy Willi Rauh. After just a few minutes, around 4:20 a.m., 45 fire fighters were on site with their three emergency vehicles. Later, six extinguishing groups from the fire brigades from Lengfurt, Erlenbach, Hafenlohr and Karbach followed, but only partially had to intervene. A total of over 100 emergency services were available.
The gate to the site was broken and entered the building through the smashed front door. There the flames blazed in at least six places on two floors. It smelled of gasoline and diesel. A nearby hydrant was available to supply the C-pipes used. Heavy respiratory protection was used in the building. As a precautionary measure, a hose line was run up to the river Main within a very short space of time.
The roof structure was in danger
Extensive extinguishing was carried out from the street side. The fire had already spread to the wooden ceilings and threatened to spread to the entire roof structure. A full fire was to be feared, especially since further sources of fire were also noticeable on the rear side. In the upper corridors and rooms one feared increasing danger of collapse during the operation. With combined forces, however, the flames were quickly brought under control. Already at around 5.30 am, “Danger over” was reported. This was followed by a twelve-hour fire watch with seven men.
The damage was considerable. It was written from 200,000 to 500,000 Deutschmarks. “That should not have been enough by far,” believes Schwerdhöfer with a view to what was necessary to clean up, supplement and restore the burned files. The land registers had survived in their steel cupboards. Guardianship files, association registers, internal administration documents and criminal files that had previously been ransacked were largely lost.
In the recently renovated building, four rooms in total and another 16 rooms were partly burned out or badly damaged. In 1887 Marktheidenfeld’s small “Palace of Justice” and the neighboring prison were completed in the neo-renaissance style. It was a proud architectural gem that took into account the separation of the state administration in the district office from the jurisdiction at the district court in Bavaria in 1862 with spacious rooms.
Arsonists wanted to destroy court records
Josef Schwerdhöfer’s suspicions were confirmed by the investigations of the criminal police. 3,000 D-Marks had been offered for relevant information, but this was not necessary to identify the perpetrators. In the week before the fire, a theft trial against a citizen of Marktheidenfeld began and was interrupted over the weekend. It threatened to get tight for the accused. The father of the family instigated two sons, apparently still underage, to destroy the criminal files. They had some problems actually setting the files on fire. It has not been proven whether her father actually controlled the crime remotely by radio. The district court of Würzburg later imposed severe prison sentences against those involved.
Immediately after the fire incident, the employees set about cleaning up and continuing the work of their authority. District court director Karl Meiler attached great importance to the fact that there was no vacuum in the administration of justice in Marktheidenfeld. At the beginning of the 1970s, major regional and administrative reforms had already been announced in Bavaria. They did not want to encourage the threatened closure of the court at the Marktheidenfeld location. It should come soon, though.
The representative building on Würzburger Strasse then became the home of the police inspection. Justice Secretary Josef Schwerdhöfer switched to the Main-Spessart District Office in 1977 and worked for the Marktheidenfeld vehicle registration office until he retired. The former district court building, which was almost burned down and which was thoroughly renovated in 2009, has a real peculiarity. For several years it has been mapped as a biotope in Bavaria, because around 150 bats make themselves comfortable under the roof in summer.
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