Schweigend steht der Wald (2022)

Forestry intern Anja Grimm is working on a soil-mapping project in a forest in the Upper Palatinate, where her father vanished without a trace during a family vacation when she was eight years old. Although the project is supposed to map only the soil in the forest, she takes a sample from a meadow. She notices an anomaly that suggests deep excavation work. Anja returns to the meadow to take a control sample. There, she is startled by Xaver Leybach, a confused eccentric she remembers from her childhood vacations, who threatens her with a gun. After this incident, Anja visits the Gollas family, who own the forest. She has left her tools behind but does not want to retrieve them alone. Rupert, Waltraud’s son, accompanies her. He also suggests they visit Xaver and explain the situation, saying that then Xaver will leave Anja alone. But they find him with a bloodstained shovel. He has beaten his dependent mother, Anna, to death. Konrad Dallmann, a local police officer like his now-retired father, Gustav, discovers that his father investigated Xaver in connection with Anja’s father’s disappearance, for no apparent reason. When Konrad asks him about it, Gustav tells him that in 1979 Franz Josef Strauß visited the nearby Flossenbürg concentration camp with Italian Prime Minister Pertini. To avoid complications during the visit, he wanted to get the confused Xaver out of the way, so he detained him preemptively. Gustav urges Konrad to get Anja to leave as soon as possible, though at first it is unclear why. Anja files a report against Xaver for murdering her father and demands that the clearing be searched. Gustav suggests they give her what she is looking for to stop her from making further inquiries. They show her her father’s grave and blame Xaver for the murder. Anja tries to speak to Xaver, who is being held in a forensic psychiatric facility, but is denied access. Xaver has seen her, however, and shortly afterward kills himself. Rupert sees the events jeopardizing his plans to establish a fairy-tale park in the forest. He does not believe that Xaver murdered Anja’s father. Anja realizes that her father’s murder is only part of the secret surrounding the forest. Photographs taken before her father was murdered show an unusual growth of nettles in a rectangular area, suggesting a high concentration of nitrogen. The cause is a mass grave created during a death march by inmates from Flossenbürg. The townspeople know about the mass executions and cover them up so the town will not fall into disrepute. Xaver, who was still a child at the time, was traumatized by witnessing the executions. It was not Xaver who killed Anja’s father, but his mother, Anna, who killed him when he got too close to the truth. As Anja wanders through the forest once more before leaving, she comes upon the Dallmanns and the Gollas trying to make the remains from the mass grave disappear beneath a concrete foundation for the fairy-tale park. Determined to do whatever it takes, Gustav shoots and wounds Anja, sending her tumbling into the pit containing the remains of the executed prisoners. Konrad Dallmann points his gun at his father and orders him to leave her alone. Everyone stops and stares at one another. Looking directly down the barrel of Gustav’s gun, Anja sees a muzzle flash; then the image goes black. At the end, a notice appears stating that the remains of buried victims are still being found along the death-march routes. Residents of the villages along the routes also took part in hunting down escaped prisoners, a fact that is still being covered up today.