Die Engel von St. Pauli (1969)

A gang war in the St. Pauli neighborhood. The well-established Hamburg pimp Jule Nickels, a man who presents himself as cultured and is always impeccably dressed, rules over the prostitutes of St. Pauli. Now he has some hard-nosed competition from Austria. A certain Hollek, a Viennese man with plenty of charm but no less brutality when it comes to achieving his aims, has set up shop on the Reeperbahn and in the surrounding area, hoping to get a slice of the big pie that is the world’s oldest profession. He has brought his own Viennese sex workers along with him. Encounters between the rival gangs turn ugly, and their thugs have their hands full trying to thin out the competition—or at least beat them to within an inch of their lives. Nickels immediately makes his position clear to Hollek: “This is St. Pauli, not some Viennese pastry shop, and if you can’t swallow that, then we’ll just have to bring out the really big spoon!” In the midst of all this, one of Jule’s prostitutes is murdered. A certain Herbert Priel, a client with erectile dysfunction and an underdeveloped sense of self-confidence, strangles the prostitute Lisa Naumann. As she struggles for her life, she cannot make herself heard: she is deaf and mute. The Hamburg detective inspector investigating the case, Beringer, is now facing trouble on two fronts: a German-Austrian—or rather, Hamburg-Viennese—gang war that threatens to escalate, in which, among other things, a gay gang member ends up under the wheels of a subway train, and a prostitute’s murder. The latter is entirely at odds with Jule Nickels’s plans, since it means a heavier police presence on the streets. So the underworld kingpin, following in the tradition of the safecracker in Fritz Lang’s classic film M, orders the suspected psychopathic prostitute-killer to be hunted down and neutralized. Before long, he becomes prey, pursued from all sides. Beringer’s ace in the hole, his informant Blinky, who is supposed to infiltrate the underworld, is not much use: he is eventually exposed and brutally tortured by the sadistic Radensky. Tied by his hands and feet to ropes between two vehicles, his legs are literally stretched out. Nickels and Hollek agree that a kind of truce will hold between their gangs until Lisa’s killer is caught. But Hollek only partly honors it and is already planning a final blow against his troublesome Hamburg rival. Nickels, too, in whose arms Lisa died, does not remain idle: he blames Hollek’s presence, at least in part, for the prostitute’s murder and its consequences.