Lotte Jäger und das tote Mädchen (2016)

August 24, 1988, Schorfheide, Brandenburg: A young woman runs through the forest. A large party of hunters and their dogs is out there too. The young woman keeps looking over her shoulder. Men fire shots from various raised hunting stands. A young man appears—presumably the one who had been following her—and the two sink into the grass and kiss. Ewald Hassel is the new king of the hunt. The hunting party celebrates him and itself, while a large number of dead animals are laid out on a hedge in front of Hubertusstock hunting lodge. The men are served by Sonja Platschek and Birgit Wachowiak, the young woman who had been running through the forest. Some time later, Birgit Wachowiak is found dead in the woods. Twenty-seven years later: On the subway, a man appears to recognize someone. When the other man gets off, he follows him. Suddenly, he tumbles down the stairs, blood dripping from his ear. Chief Inspector Lotto Jäger’s cell phone rings. Her colleague, Detective Inspector Wehlich, tells her that a man named Jörg Teschke has fallen down the stairs at Alexanderplatz subway station for no apparent reason—the cause is unclear. The man is in an induced coma. When the two meet, he explains to Jäger that in 1988 Teschke was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his girlfriend, Birgit Wachowiak. According to his wife, whom he married about three years ago, however, he was innocent. Twenty-seven years later—that is, yesterday—he had come across the very man he believed to be Birgit Wachowiak’s real murderer. Teschke’s wife tells the officers that her husband had been pressured into confessing to the crime, but later recanted. After his release from prison, he repeatedly tried to find the murderer, but met with silence and rejection everywhere. She then points to a man pictured with Birgit Wachowiak and members of the hunting party. Birgit got into his car, she says, but no one believed Teschke. On the night of the murder, her husband had wanted to go to Birgit, but she had left him standing there and got into that man’s car instead. He was never able to find out the man’s name. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he had to serve his 15-year sentence to the end. From Kranz, the investigator who first handled the Wachowiak case at the time, Lotto Jäger learns that Teschke’s world had collapsed, as if someone had pulled the plug. The Stasi then took over the case. Kranz believes they needed a murderer. Jäger’s colleague Kurt Schaake has meanwhile tracked down the address of Birgit’s mother. She refers them to her daughter’s friend from back then, Sonja Platschek, and hints that everyone knew the “bigwigs” had also been having their fun with the women there. An initial conversation with Platschek gets nowhere. In a later conversation, the young woman tells Jäger that she and Birgit had “sort of got drawn into it.” She also admits that Wachowiak was picked up that night by a man named Herbert Brasch. She had persuaded Biggi to take part because the men were usually far too drunk for anything to happen—and if it did, so what. Things got pretty wild that night. She doesn’t know what happened to Biggi. The last time she saw her was down by the lake, after everyone had gone down to the boathouse. Biggi had been sitting with a West German, then suddenly she was gone. She doesn’t know any names; the men hadn’t introduced themselves. There is no time for a conversation with Herbert Brasch: he is found hanging in his apartment. He had terminal cancer. From Noack, a friend of Brasch’s who says he now wants to come clean, Lotto Jäger learns that Brasch pushed Teschke, and that Brasch and Noack merely disposed of Birgit Wachowiak’s already-dead body. They had only done what they were told to do. Noack still remembers the West German’s name: Ewald Hassel. When Lotto Jäger visits Hassel at his luxurious estate, a caregiver tells her that he is at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Hassel gives Jäger documents he had kept as insurance. They point to a man named Weigel, who held a senior position in the GDR’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and is now an influential businessman with several residences and extensive connections. He agrees to give a statement in the presence of his lawyer. They had placed the drunk Hassel beside the dead woman and left him there to wake up, so that he would believe he was responsible for the girl’s death. That made him useful to the regime and vulnerable to blackmail. The whole point had been to keep an important business partner under their control. Wachowiak had slipped in the bathroom while drunk; the surveillance video from the time proved it. At Jörg Teschke’s request, Jäger shows him the recording after he has been out of the coma for some time. He assures her that the woman in the footage is not Birgit Wachowiak. He knows every one of her movements. The key lies with Sonja Platschek. She had been jealous of Wachowiak’s relationship with Teschke and afraid of losing her. The two women were lovers. In the bathroom, Platschek pulled her friend by the hair, then pushed her so badly that Wachowiak hit her head on the sink and fell to the floor bleeding. For tactical reasons, they told Platschek they wanted to help her, whereupon she agreed to pose as Birgit Wachowiak for a recording. They did not tell her what it was really about.