Böseckendorf - Die Nacht in der ein Dorf verschwand (2009)

Germany is divided in 1961. In Thuringia, near the inner-German border with Lower Saxony, lies the village of Böseckendorf. Mayor Manfred Lantz is a committed Communist and is trying to persuade the farmers of the benefits of a collective agricultural cooperative. But they want nothing to do with it and instead mock the FDJ by dressing their scarecrows in the organization’s blue shirts. The defiance of Böseckendorf’s residents is also a thorn in the side of SED officials led by Robert Grewe, who are based at the district headquarters in Erfurt. In particular, they intend to put an end to the residents’ refusal to attend the annual celebrations marking the GDR’s founding on October 7. Official Jutta Marx is therefore assigned to take the residents to the celebrations by bus, with support from the NVA. She is also supposed to track down an unknown escape helper who has been helping GDR citizens flee to the West for some time. She receives help from an informant in Böseckendorf, who supplies the officials with information. When Mayor Lantz is summoned to Erfurt to meet Grewe, he manages to catch a glimpse of a secret file on “Operation Cornflower.” According to the file, the plan is to forcibly resettle defiant and ideologically unreliable residents away from the border and into the interior of the country. The operation is planned for after the celebrations, following which the residents taken away by bus are not to be allowed back to Böseckendorf. The mayor tells his wife, Tonia, about it. Tonia Lantz confesses to her husband that she is the mysterious escape helper and urges him to tell the residents about the impending forced resettlement. They then decide to flee across the border. They also manage, by means of a trick, to expose Bea Radler as the informant and use her to feed the officials deliberately false information. On the evening of October 2, 1961, 53 people from 14 families finally escape to the West, making it the largest mass escape across the inner-German border in history.