Die Ermittler - Nur für den Dienstgebrauch (2016)

The opening scene faithfully depicts the robbery of a bank in Eisenach on November 4, 2011, during which the two masked robbers (Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt) flee on bicycles to their motorhome. Witnesses see them switch vehicles, and shortly afterward a police patrol finds the motorhome parked in a residential area. Gunshots prevent the officers from entering the motorhome, and the vehicle catches fire. The fire department puts out the blaze. Dieter Wolter arrives, confiscates the firefighters’ photographs, and orders the motorhome to be removed immediately, before the forensic investigation can be completed. Investigators Paul Winter and Charlotte Ahler inspect the towed motorhome in a warehouse. From this point on, the film is told from the perspective of its main character, surveillance officer Paul Winter. Flashbacks show the period when Winter and his former colleague and supervisor Walter Ahler, Charlotte Ahler’s father, were assigned to track down the NSU trio. They took over the work of Mirko Kerber, who had been hot on the NSU trio’s trail and had compiled substantial incriminating material, but was removed from the case. They initially try to recruit the (fictional) right-wing extremist Jonas Breiling as an informant. Paul Winter makes progress in his investigation and discovers that Dieter Wolter has contacts in right-wing circles. In 1998, he goes to the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution to speak with its president, Helmut Roewer, and meets the ambitious young careerist Alexander Melchior, who has moved there from western Germany. He gets hardly any answers to his questions. Roewer says he has no time, but invites Winter and Ahler to a fine restaurant for an exchange of views with Melchior, where he explains his position on working with right-wing informants. Ahler is so disgusted by Roewer’s talk that he cannot clink glasses with him and leaves the table. On the drive back, Ahler is breathing heavily and tells Winter about his cancer diagnosis and impending death. Breiling gives Winter information about meetings of the right-wing extremist scene. While surveilling a meeting at a nightclub, Winter is attacked and brutally beaten by right-wing extremists. The center of the Thuringian Homeland Security is then raided, and copies of police files are found. A policewoman is eventually revealed to be the source of the leak. After Breiling’s girlfriend turns up at Winter’s and hands him a box of ammunition, Winter goes to see Melchior. No one is working on his floor that day. They are all at a company carnival party. A man dressed as Cupid tells Winter that he should not drink but stay alert, because “they’re playing cat and mouse with you,” and explains what he considers to be the Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s mistake in its thinking. Meanwhile, Breiling and others beat up a dark-skinned man in a nightclub. Breiling is arrested afterward. With the help of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, he is released into a witness protection program. As he gets out of Winter’s car, Breiling gives him a tip that Monika Windmann is the NSU trio’s courier. She is then placed under surveillance. When they storm an apartment belonging to the trio that Winter had visited, it has already been cleared out. Shortly afterward, Winter gives up the search for the NSU trio. This is where the flashbacks end. On November 7, 2011, Beate Zschäpe turns herself in. Winter is once again confronted with the NSU’s unsolved murders and acts of violence. Original footage from the official 2012 memorial service for the NSU’s victims at the Konzerthaus on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt, including Angela Merkel’s speech, is intercut. At the end of the film, Winter again seeks contact with Jonas Breiling, who is living in Lower Saxony under a new identity and has started a family. Breiling tells him he wants to say more and arranges to meet at his house. From a distance, Winter has to watch as Breiling dies in his burning car on the way home, just short of reaching his house, while a black minibus drives away from the scene of the crash.