Zonk! Pow! Nosh! The Crusader Caper Pits Goodies vs. Evil

Thieves dressed as superheroes make off with $2,000 worth of goodies from a Hamburg store April 28. (Frankfurter Rundschau)

"Superflex is familiar with every type of job contract: part time, full time, internship. All the stress led him to a pleasant mutation of his molecules."

"Operaistorix survived the last few years with the help of his unemployment module."

"Spider Mum's mutant body developed somewhere between the kindergarten and unpaid and paid cleaning jobs. In her hands, Ajax and a mop turn into merciless weapons."

"Santa Guevara dodges all control checks and disappears without a trace. With this power, he is able to escape from the boredom of call centers and university seminars."

Although police have failed to catch the group, super sleuthing skills appear unnecessary to track down members of Hamburg for Free. A call to the student government offices at the University of Hamburg produces a swift invitation: We'll be happy to talk.

Appearing in a park on a recent afternoon are a young woman and man who claim to have participated in the heist at Fresh Paradise.

"It's not that we hate rich people, but we want this kind of wealth for everybody. That's the point," says the man, a thin, dark-haired guy in his twenties who describes himself as a university student nearing graduation. "We wanted to show that there is rebellion, that you can stand up and fight."

The woman, blond and soft-spoken, says she used to work in a small clothing store but hated the "bad working conditions," like having to stay until 8 some nights.

In addition to organized purloining of pat?, Hamburg for Free also encourages individual acts of rebellion, they say. Favorite tactics include taking longer-than-allowed coffee breaks at work, daring to ride the subway without a ticket and downloading pirated software and music from the Internet.

Law enforcement is not amused.

"The police must treat this as any other crime," says Ulrike Sweden, a spokeswoman for the Hamburg police. "These robbery cases are given the same priority as every other crime. It might be up to a judge to evaluate the crime's severity, but it is the police's job to stay neutral and find the criminals."

Authorities suspect many of the Fresh Paradise bandits are university students, but "what the police know and what they can actually prove are often two very different things," Sweden says. "The members came and left very quickly; they left no trace."