Dahlmanns letzte Bescherung (2025)

Alfons Dahlmann, the founder of the Dahlmann meat and sausage factory, invites his three adult children, Leander, Jochen, and Therese, and their partners to spend the Christmas holidays at Villa Tiefenthal, his hunting lodge in the mountains. Leander, the eldest of the three and Alfons’s adopted son, arrives with his wife, Susa, and daughter, Tabea; writer Therese comes with her partner, Emma. Jochen has just been released from prison early. The cook, Karl, is Alfons’s best friend. Also among the guests, unexpectedly, is rival businessman Dr. Leonard Windemeyer, heir to Windemeyer Holding. Alfons announces that he will retire from the company at the end of the year and that he intends to name his successor the following day. Before he can do so, Alfons is found dead, with a stab wound in his back. Police officers Greta and Oliver take charge of the investigation. Jochen has completed anger-management training for assault. He was in prison for embezzling four million euros and falsifying the accounts at his father’s company. Because he made a voluntary disclosure, his prison term was reduced to two years. Jochen and Tabea drank alcohol together that evening; Jochen can no longer remember what happened afterward. Later, he finds a bloody knife among his belongings. Emma suspects Therese of murdering her father because the murder happened exactly as she had described in one of her crime novels. Viktoria is Alfons’s former secretary and, after Mimi, who died young, his second wife. Emma accuses her of having married Alfons only for his money. Alfons had also asked her about this on the night of the murder. Greta consequently suspects that Viktoria stabbed her husband in a fit of anger. Leander was angry with his father because Alfons did not want to put him in charge of the company. He and his wife have slept separately for years, so he has no alibi either. He has an injury on his back, caused by the antlers of a roe deer buck that he impaled himself on when he tried to open his father’s safe, which contained important documents, and had to hide when someone unexpectedly appeared. Afterward, the safe was gone. Therese had always lived in her brothers’ shadow and never received the recognition from her father that she wanted. Emma had hidden the safe. Inside are documents showing that Alfons had transferred the company to Leonard Windemeyer. Leander accuses Windemeyer of fraud: he claims Windemeyer forced Alfons to sign the documents and then murdered him. The previous day, Alfons had asked everyone present to sign a confidentiality agreement for the discussions planned for the following day. Leander, Jochen, and Therese had also signed a clause transferring their existing shares in the company to their father. According to Windemeyer, Alfons gave him the company because none of his children was capable of running a corporation, and he would have had to watch it all go to ruin. The police find the bloody knife that Jochen had disposed of. Tabea says she and Jochen drank alcohol and took MDMA. While high, he set off the fireworks intended for New Year’s Eve in Leander’s vehicle. After that, he wanted to talk to Alfons. Jochen claims that it was his father, not him, who embezzled the four million euros. He says he went to prison in his father’s place to protect him. Leander accuses his brother of stabbing Alfons like a wild boar. This leads police officer Greta to realize that the blood on Alfons’s wound is wild boar blood. Karl confesses that he found Alfons dead that evening. He suspected Alfons had taken his own life with pills because his children and wife hated him. Karl says he stabbed the already-dead Alfons in the back because the life insurance would not pay out in the event of suicide. He then staged a break-in by ransacking the office and smashing a windowpane from the inside. Because the dead man had not bled, Karl used wild boar blood. Jochen had taken the knife from Alfons’s back while high, without remembering it the next day. Viktoria then reveals that the company is bankrupt because people are eating less and less meat, the low-cost competitor Windemeyer is driving down prices, and Alfons did not want to lay off any staff. He had gambled away his fortune on futures and derivatives. The four million euros for which Jochen went to prison were only a fraction of that amount. Alfons did not want to leave his children with debts, so he transferred the debt package to Windemeyer. Police officer Greta counts Alfons’s pills. None are missing, so it was not suicide; the forensic pathologist suspects a heart attack. The reconciled family celebrates Christmas together and raises a toast to Alfons.