Gert Heidenreich
In the feature film "Seed of Terror", a German secret service agent during her assignment abroad in Pakistan recognizes that attacks on civilians in Mumbai are imminent. It does everything in its power to thwart the attacks, but it must experience that their use is counteracted on different levels. Their fight becomes a race against time and various intelligence services.
Based on explosive investigations, the thriller "Meister des Todes" ("Master of Death") tells of a German arms manufacturer and their questionable weapon exports to Mexiko.
Follow-up to the TV trilogy "Heimat", this time for cinemas, set again in the fictional village Schabbach in the Hunsrück region of Rhineland-Palatinate.
About a dramatic bank robbery on August 16, 1988, where the criminals escape with two hostages and the media is right in the middle of their chase. Two days later the hostage situation was put to an end in a police operation on the A3 motorway. Three people were killed during this crisis - two teenage hostages and a policeman involved in a vehicle crash. The whole episode became a media circus in Germany and the Netherlands.
Shortly before Christmas 1987, three masked men kidnapped the two children of the drugstore king Anton Schlecker and extort 9.6 million marks, formerly 20 million, the highest ransom money paid in the history of the Federal Republic. The crime could only be solved eleven years later, more or less by accident in the course of another big crime. The public was amazed: the three perpetrators were of retirement age and for years had hidden many serious crimes behind the façade of honest men. The documentary tells the story of a spectacular criminal case and an (almost) perfect disguise.
On June 15, 1997, a married couple of manufacturers were found murdered in their villa in Morschen near Kassel. The police officers are presented with a horrific picture. The spouses have had their throats cut and lie face down in a large pool of blood - a real execution. One suspects a robbery, all rooms have been ransacked, but it seems strange how the perpetrators were able to get into the house, which was secured with surveillance cameras, signal transmitters, and alarm system. The two adoptive daughters are quickly suspected, but their alibis are watertight. The investigation finally reveals that the daughters have hired two contract killers. In the end, five young people are sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for double attempted murder and for murder out of greed. For her research on this documentation, the author spoke to the daughters and conducted interviews with neighbors, relatives and friends.
The discovery of two dismembered female corpses shook the inhabitants of the Baltic island of Fehmarn in 1970. The millionaire Arwed Imiela was the tenant of the hunting ground, where the body parts were found. Being an astrologer and for many of his female customers not only a life adviser, he was also their asset manager. His wealthy clients quickly gained confidence and appointed him general representative. He wrapped women around his finger, had charm, manners and charisma, as those who knew him still tell today. When the account holder's signature on a transaction for 150,000 Deutschmarks was exactly the same as that on other checks, a bank employee became skeptical. Imiela was then arrested on suspicion of fraud. But this was only the beginning of an ultimately unsolved riddle, as the alleged perpetrator remained coldly silent.
In 1993 he occupied the media with the “red light affair”: Hugo Lacour. The friendship with the racket, gambler and pimp, whom the local press made the "uncrowned king of Saarbrücken nightlife" and "king of the Saarbrücken underworld", shook leading local politicians. Everyone waited for “Dear Hugo” to carry out his threat and finally present embarrassing photos of the Minister in the “Cascade” night bar. But he didn´t. His criminal case has largely gone unnoticed. No one else has occupied the Saarland criminal justice system for so long. The man with a French passport has been on record as a violent criminal since his teenage days. In 1997, after two years of trial, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. The Saarbrücken jury court saw it as proven that he murdered the 62-year-old Heinz Weirich in 1985. Motive for the crime: greed. Hugo Lacour protested his innocence. A back and forth of the judiciary took its course.
Germany 1964: a child disappears, without a trace. Five days later, a blackmailer reports to the parents, sending a key for a locker in Central Station. They find a children's shoe-the one of her missing seven-year-old boy. What starts out like a detective novel becomes a German crime story. The case shakes the whole republic, there are new headlines every day, the entire population is called on to help, the media interest assumed previously unknown proportions and the parents are besieged and persecuted in their apartment in Wiesbaden. A newspaper even wants to 'buy out' the boy from the kidnappers. More than three years later, a magazine received an anonymous offer. For 15,000 DM, a stranger wants to present evidence that proves, that he was the perpetrator. "Quick" cooperates with the police. The boy's body is found in a cellar less than 500 meters from his parents' house.
1955,GDR: The victim was initially the 20-year-old Anna Denczyk, a worker in Saßnitz on Rügen. She and a friend only barely survived the pleasure of poisoned gingerbread from an anonymous package. Anna soon suspected a specific person behind the strange sender: Otto Bergemann, who worked on a state-owned estate near her hometown. It looked like an act of revenge by the over 50-year-old, from whose sexual advances she finally fled to Saßnitz. In addition, Bergemann had already noticed when Anna's little brother had died of poison in an unexplained manner, two years earlier. The investigations by police and Stasi against SED member Bergemann dragged on for years. When Bergemann finally confessed, an unspectacular, unspectacular act of relationship seems to have finally been resolved. But suddenly, Bergemann accused himself of participating in the shooting of Jews and in crimes against Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine in 1941.
In the 1980s he was one of the most unscrupulous men in the Hamburg red lights: Werner Pinzner, nicknamed "Mucki", earned his living as a hit man. In April 1986, a police detachment arrested him with the charge of five murders. At his last interrogation on July 29, investigators wanted to know if there were more. What happened then made Pinzner go down in crime history. It was a hot summer day. Next to his wife Jutta in room 418 of the police headquarters at the Berliner Tor, he was sitting, enjoying drinks and rolls from a desk, announcing to admit to further deeds. Also in the office were his lawyer, public prosecutor Wolfgang Bistry, two police officers and a secretary. When the interrogation was about to begin, Pinzner surprised with the words "Gentlemen, this is a hostage-taking!" - and suddenly pulled a revolver. The headshot injured the public prosecutor in a life-threatening manner. Wolfgang Bistry sinks to the floor of the interrogation room. And this was just the beginning.
While the other prisoners were celebrating Christmas 1969 in the jails chapel, Alfred Lecki calmly opened the prison gate with a duplicate key he made and disappeared with his prison buddy Helmut Derks. It was the third escape of the legendary "escape king", who had just returned to custody sat - this time in Essen and for the murder of a police officer. Never in the history of the Federal Republic had the hunt for an "ordinary" criminal been so high. On the run, Lecki expanded his reputation as an unscrupulous robber. In June 1970 he was the mastermind of the largest armed robbery to date on a money transport. Also known as the "man with a thousand faces", because he knew how to change his face, hair and appearance, 30 false passports were seized from him over the years. A quite unique story, reconstructed in this documentary.
The documentary tells the "Lebach case" from the perspective of the criminologists, trial reporters and witnesses from the perpetrators' environment. The convicts didn´t want to make use of the opportunity to critically reflect on what they had once done. An ammunition depot near Lebach/Saarland was the scene of several murders in a night in January 1969. They met the national Bundeswehr in the midst of peace and literally revealed security deficits. The largest manhunt in German post-war history led to something quite banal. Four young soldiers had to die because three other young men dreamed of a carefree life under the southern sun. The next crime was to follow: extortion on a large scale. But in the end, the perpetrators had to realize, that they had achieved nothing, except to shoot four sleeping young men and almost killed a fifth. More than thirty years later, only one of the convicts is still in custody. The other two lead a normal civil life, in freedom.
The documentary tells about the crime case of Erwin Hagedorn, unprecedented in the history of the GDR. A case that made it clear, how much the contemporary judiciary was overwhelmed with such a sex offender. The protagonists, but especially the footage that the criminal investigation team shot for an educational film, allow you to look deep into the inside of a perpetrator. The chief psychologist discovered strong parallels to the so-called funfair killer Jürgen Bartsch, who had tortured four boys to death in the west of the country, just a few years earlier. Among other things, Hagedorn immediately confessed and was extremely cooperative. A film crew from the investigation department recorded everything, that Hagedorn willingly and very vividly demonstrated for the camera during local appointments. Future generations of criminologists should be able to benefit from this teaching material.
The documentary is about the murder on the 15-year-old Sandro Beyer, committed by three young people . The perpetrators were the founders of a Nazi-black metal band and due to their interests, the act was presented in the media as "satanist" motivated, but had nothing to do with actual Satanism. The film mainly documents the murder, shows the exact course of the crime and the court hearings of the three perpetrators. It also presents some interviews of friends and other people from the social environment and reveals what one of the murderers did in his free time: he dealt with black copied horror movies, some of which were indexed or banned nationwide. In an interview he did not describe the murder as Satan's murder, but rather as rescuing fellow human beings from his victim.
In the mid-1980s, a mysterious series of murders spread terror in the Swabian province. The perpetrator ambushed his victims near lonely forest parking lots, shot them in the face in order to seize their car to rob small bank branches. There, he knocked a hole in the security glazing with a sledgehammer, sticked out his pistol and demanded cash. After the second attack he was called "the hammer murderer". The police were under enormous pressure, they didn´t want to admit what was quickly becoming apparent: the perpetrator comes from within her own troups. Shortly before the spectacular series of crimes was solved, the man killed his family and ultimately himself. The documentary traces the life stages of the murderer, his path from a humble man to a serial killer and bank robber. Friends, colleagues, journalists and police officers were interviewed, possible motives, speculation about the psyche of the killer, but also the search of the police, their mishaps and helplessness.
It´s the most spectacular German criminal case of the post-war era: the murder of the Frankfurt high-end call girl Rosemarie "Rebecca" Nitribitt. Her trademarks are a black Mercedes, large pot hats, fur coats, mink stoles and a poodle. In the years of the economic boom it moved the still young Federal Republic. The story of the red-light district of the city quickly mutated into a full-blown moral scandal in stuffy Germany of the 50s. And the police investigations fail one after the other. The apartment prostitution in Frankfurt's center prospered, as did the city itself, the fair, the stock exchange and the red light district. The documentary paints the true picture of Rosemarie Nitribitt, beyond the image of a supposedly glamorous courtesan. She was a foster child, raped at the age of 11, who learned from it and soon realized, that sex is just another commodity.
A documentary directed by Hans Beller.
