Ostfriesenblut (2018)

Police officer Ann Kathrin Klaasen is supposed to have the day off, but when she gets home after a walk along the East Frisian coast, she finds a body outside her front door. The initial examination shows that the elderly woman has been dead for five or six days, and that someone deliberately left her at the detective’s home. Nobody in the neighborhood noticed anything, however, and, strangely, the security cameras at Klaasen’s house recorded nothing. According to a missing-person report from Leer, the victim may be Frau Renate Sieber. Klaasen and her colleagues inspect her apartment and are certain that she was tortured to death there. The murderer had tied her to her chair and left her to die of thirst. The circumstances are extremely mysterious, especially the fact that the victim’s eyes had been held open with adhesive tape, as if the murderer had wanted to force Renate Sieber to “look.” Klaasen discovers that a book is missing from the bookshelf, one that must have been there until recently. It is a book called Discipline & Obedience by Heinrich Jansen, who ran a children’s home in Moorweide for many years. The next day, Reinhold Münzner, owner of a concrete plant in Aurich, is found dead. The man was bludgeoned to death, and the murderer stuffed leftovers into his mouth. Klaasen’s colleague Rupert suspects the same killer as in Renate Sieber’s case. Initial inquiries reveal that Münzner was an orphan and grew up in the children’s home in Moorweide. The home therefore seems to be the link. Further investigation shows that Renate Sieber worked there as an assistant to the home’s doctor. The home itself has been gone for about 40 years and was demolished. Conditions at the time were almost unbearable for the children: they suffered not only from the sadism inspired by Jansen’s teachings in Discipline & Obedience, but also from discord and jealousy deliberately fostered among the children themselves. Since Heinrich Jansen appears to still be alive, Klaasen and her colleague Frank Weller want to question him. When they arrive at the retirement home, Jansen has vanished without a trace. Shortly before the detectives arrived, Thomas Hagemann had sneaked into the home and kidnapped Jansen, who had been suffering from dementia for some time. Thomas Hagemann got the idea after a doctor’s appointment, where he was given confirmation of his cancer diagnosis, when he happened to run into Heinrich Jansen. He then searched online to find out which of the people who had made his childhood so miserable were still alive. Jansen is now the last person on Hagemann’s list. He takes him to the ruins of an old brickworks and ties the elderly man to a chair. He now torments him using his own methods of “black pedagogy,” first making him experience what it means to be hungry. The detectives pick up Hagemann’s trail after they manage to track down one of his former fellow sufferers. He tells the officers how they were punished back then, and how they often stole food from the kitchen because they were so hungry. Jansen used Reinhold Münzner as his kapo; among other things, during one punishment, Münzner had stuffed leftovers into Thomas Hagemann’s mouth. Jansen rewarded him with privileges for doing that kind of dirty work. Renate Sieber, the doctor’s assistant, could have helped the children if she had not turned a blind eye to their injuries, which were often caused by beatings. Hagemann had even eaten a frog once because he was so hungry, and from then on he was called “Frog.” The attempt to locate Hagemann fails because he has been “off the grid” for weeks and has deregistered his residence. Klaasen has no idea that Hagemann has chosen her and has been watching her for days. He saw her on television in an interview with Rudi Cerne on the program Aktenzeichen XY, where she said that she always tried to put herself in the perpetrator’s shoes and understand him. Finding someone who understood him finally persuaded him to send the detective pieces of the puzzle from his crimes, giving her clues. He had also taken it as a sign of fate when he happened to be hired to install security cameras at her home. Just as Klaasen begins to see how everything is connected, Hagemann acts again and kidnaps Susanne Mönninghoff, the woman vying with Klaasen for her husband’s affections. Shortly afterward, he contacts Klaasen directly at her home and, at her request, takes her to the hiding place where Jansen and Mönninghoff are being held. The police colleagues find their trail and make their way to the old brickworks. While Klaasen tries to persuade Hagemann to give up, he wants to punish her husband’s girlfriend and thus do “his” detective a favor. He first shoots the elderly Jansen and tries to provoke Klaasen into killing him. But the arriving SEK prevents this. Hagemann is arrested and initially admitted to an oncology clinic.