Gegen Ende der Nacht (1998)

In the height of summer 1945, a family of five is brutally murdered at a secluded mill in American-occupied Württemberg. Even the farm dog is not spared. The dead are the miller Danner, his wife, both their sons, and their daughter Inge. The latter is found hanging upside down, her bare back defaced with bloody SS runes. Two other residents of the mill, Rudi, a Wehrmacht deserter who discovers the bodies, and Karin Katte, a young refugee, are unharmed because they were away on the night of the crime. They had spent several days at a neighboring farm helping Lina, the farmer’s wife, who was ill. There is no trace of the perpetrators. The investigation is assigned to Captain Dave Gladbaker of U.S. Army Intelligence, an officer of Jewish-German background whose parents were murdered in a concentration camp. Unfamiliar with local conditions, he recruits German detective Walter Fehleisen to assist him. A former police inspector and party member, Fehleisen has been interned in a military prison for six weeks. At first he refuses to collaborate with the Americans, whereupon Gladbaker points out that he had no problem working for Heinrich Himmler. Before long, both investigators are convinced that the crime was an act of revenge carried out by outsiders, and that the miller’s dead daughter was apparently mistaken for the intended target. Fehleisen describes the miller’s family as decent people, so their murder was unlikely to have been an act of revenge by people who had been denounced or by forced laborers. It seems likely that Karin Katte was actually the intended target; she also reacts with striking composure in the face of the dead. When questioned about it, Karin replies that she spent three years as a nurse in a field hospital on the Eastern Front. The young woman increasingly comes under suspicion of being a guard from the Majdanek extermination camp, wanted by the occupying authorities. This suspicion appears to be confirmed when she initially does not clearly deny it. She claims to have lost her identity papers while fleeing. Dave Gladbaker, who can scarcely resist her allure despite—or perhaps because of—her unresolved identity, initially treats her with a mixture of mockery and contempt. When Fehleisen tracks Rudi down in a cave in the forest, he finds a crate of weapons there, as well as a photograph of Karin beside an SS officer. She is wearing a jacket that could also be part of a uniform. The back of the photograph bears the stamp of a photo studio in Lublin, although she had denied ever having been there. This unsettles Gladbaker even further: by now in love with Karin, he has to suspect that she was an accomplice of his parents’ murderers. But the young woman, too, has developed feelings for the investigator. At last Dave and Karin confess their love to each other and spend the night together. When he wakes in the darkness, he finds her sitting on the floor of the room, crouched against a wall. Apparently traumatized herself, she tells him that in Lublin she worked as a nurse with a road-construction detail. When a selection had to be made from a transport of a thousand prisoners, she chose three hundred who were fit for work, thereby condemning the rest to die in the gas chamber. The task was actually supposed to have been carried out by a doctor, who was unable to work because of her morphine addiction. Karin justifies herself by saying that those selected would not have been able to withstand the physically demanding forced labor and would have died within a few days anyway. She claims she can no longer remember whether, when she made the decision, she was already aware of its fatal consequences. Dave Gladbaker is torn between his love, his hatred of the murderers, and his sense of justice as a lawyer. In order to do his duty, he would have to arrest the young woman, after which she would presumably be extradited to Poland. He does not want that. Karin ultimately spares him from having to make the decision: she gets dressed and leaves. She takes Gladbaker’s pistol with her, and the search for her proves unsuccessful.