Nahschuss (2021)

The young scientist Franz Walter, who has earned his doctorate with distinction at Humboldt University in Berlin, is promised a professorship. He and his newlywed wife, Corina, are also given a luxuriously furnished apartment in central East Berlin. In return, he is expected to work for one year for the Main Directorate A (HVA), the GDR’s foreign intelligence service. His case officer, Dirk Hartmann, tells him he is to be assigned to the prominent footballer Horst Langfeld, who has fled to the West and is continuing his career with Hamburger SV. The objective is the prestigious operation of bringing the player back to the GDR. Franz, an avid football fan who played for the same Berlin club as Langfeld, accepts the offer, pledges strict secrecy, and travels with Hartmann to Hamburg. There, the GDR intelligence service puts footballer Bodo Renner, one of Langfeld’s teammates, under such pressure with a sex trap that he provides information about Langfeld’s private life. At the same time, Langfeld’s wife, who has remained in the GDR, is led to believe that she has breast cancer and must begin chemotherapy. This fabricated illness is meant to persuade her husband to return to the GDR. Franz Walter becomes increasingly uncomfortable in his role and realizes that he is gradually becoming a perpetrator. His qualms grow even stronger when Langfeld is found dead in the bathtub of his apartment. The official cause of death is suicide. Acting on the GDR intelligence service’s instructions, Renner tells the West German media that Langfeld had never felt at home in the West. Franz Walter wants to end his work for the HVA, but the intelligence service will not let him leave and blackmails him. An eye operation for Walter’s mother is threatened with postponement; only after Walter resumes cooperating and becomes further entangled does she receive treatment. Walter begins drinking and grows estranged from Corina. He deteriorates physically and psychologically, and soon sees escape as his only way out. He steals intelligence documents from the safe in his office and smuggles them home. But this does not go unnoticed by intelligence headquarters. When MfS officer Schulte, from Walter’s circle, defects to the West, the intelligence service becomes nervous. In the end, Walter is to be made an example of. He is arrested, sentenced to death for “prepared and completed espionage,” executed by an unexpected close-range shot, and cremated.