- Lotte Jäger (Silke Bodenbender), special investigator for the Potsdam murder commission for unsolved old cases, investigates a murder case that has not been solved for 16 years in a Brandenburg village. "Lotte Jäger and the Village of the Damned" is currently being shot in Brandenburg and Berlin. The screenplay for the second case in the ZDF crime series was again written by Rolf Basedow. Franziska Meletzky directs. In addition to Silke Bodenbender, Sebastian Hülk, Hansjürgen Hürrig, Nellie Thalbach and others will play. In the summer of 2001, Manuela Kirschner (Nellie Thalbach) falls victim to a brutal violent crime after the promotion party of the SV Grün Weiß Großlühne football club. The responsible chief inspector Konrad Dahlke (Hansjürgen Hürrig) suspects a sexual murder, but cannot solve the case. Traces are blurred, potential perpetrators have no memory. The party was too long and the celebrations too intense. Suspicion grows in the village - the killer is among them, that's for sure. The files were never closed. Now, sixteen years later, Dahlke, who is now retired, is sent a video of the party at the time - sender unknown. He asks his former protégé Kurt Schaake (Sebastian Hülk) and Lotte Jäger to reopen the case. The investigations lead the commissioner into a swamp of distrust, resentment and repression. No one in the village wants to conjure up the demons of the past again, and the wall of silence seems impassable. Lotte Jäger no longer knows who to trust and what to believe, and, increasingly plagued by restlessness and panic, soon begins to doubt herself too.—Aziz
- Chief Inspector Kurt Schaake introduces Chief Inspector Lotte Jäger, special investigator in the Potsdam murder commission for unsolved old cases, to retired Chief Inspector Konrad Dahlke, his former trainer. Dahlke and Schaake remember an unsolved murder case in the Brandenburg village of Großlühne that happened 16 years ago. The day before the murder of a young woman, the whole town was still in a frenzy because the local football club had won an important promotion game. Kurt Schaake remembers that Manuela Kirschner, who was later murdered, left the party around two o'clock after saying goodbye to her fiancé Jan Stober. Then she went away alone. Manuela must have opened the door for someone, perhaps because she thought it was her fiancé or because she knew the person in question. The perpetrator tried to rape the young woman and stabbed her again and again. The murder weapon, a knife with a blade a good 10 cm long, was never found. Only the victim's father and brother, who were away at the time, were definitely innocent. Everyone else in town had something to hide. Questioning turned up nothing because most of them were heavily intoxicated that night and didn't even know how to get home. The circle of suspects was then limited to three young men and the then boss of the football club. Schaake presented Jäger with a picture of the then 18-year-old main suspect Tom Riebe, who had no alibi for several hours on the night of the crime. At the party he kept dancing with Manuela, who then probably blocked further attempts because of her fiancé.
Dahlke says that a video cassette containing footage from the night of the crime was anonymously leaked to him. At the time, a desperate but unsuccessful search was made for this cassette, explains Schaake. You don't just send something like that, adds Dahlke. At the time, the entire village held together, explains Dahlke, and he still believes that everyone knows what happened back then.
Jäger sets off for Brandenburg in her convertible and rents a room in the inn in Großlühne. There is hostility towards her in town. At night she has nightmares. She talks to Kurt Holler, the landlord of the inn, whose wife Ulla had a fatal car accident ten months ago for reasons that are incomprehensible. At that time, everyone in the village actually died, says Holler. Next, Jäger talks to Jan Stober, who is now married to the mayor's daughter. He blames himself for not accompanying his fiancée. Jäger also talks to Hans Breth, Manuela's former landlord, who says that he hasn't been able to rent the apartment since then and that he liked Manuela. She was courageous, together with Ulla, the wife of innkeeper Holler, she fought to ensure that they weren't given a lot of wind turbines. Now both women are dead.
Jäger discovers that the parental home of the prime suspect at the time, Tom Riebe, is directly opposite the house where Manuela lived and that he could see the young woman's room from his window. Riebe's parents react dismissively to Jäger. His wife Claudia even threatens the commissioner subliminally. Further discussions with local residents do not really lead to any progress in this case. Florian Grasso, who runs a flight school, tells Jäger that everyone in the village who suspected him died for him. Jäger flies around the village with him and is enthusiastic about the experience. After that, the inspector talks to Jan Stober and then observes a strange gathering of different people.
After Jäger spoke to Lore Kosch and drank a glass of juice with her, she had interruptions while driving. When she regains consciousness, she finds herself in the wrong room in the inn and realizes that Kurt Schaake, who was worried because he couldn't reach her, has arrived in the meantime. Jäger seems desperate, you're going in circles, she says to Schaake, everyone is lying. It is now known that there was a landfill site in the village, which influential local residents operated for four years, for which they received generous grants from the trust. Could it be that Manuela Kirschner and Ulla Holler not only put up a fight against the wind turbines, but also against a landfill site. Hans Breth shows the investigators photos that prove that radioactive waste was disposed of at the landfill. Maybe that's why so many people in the village got sick, including Manuela's mother.
Jäger has an intuition about the murder knife, which is actually made using metal detectors is found on the delimited area. Holler is now coming out with the fact that his wife had put together documents with which she wanted to make the public aware that, among other things, there was groundwater contamination. Not only radioactive waste was disposed of at the landfill, but also nuclear waste from the Russian barracks. That would have saved investors a lot of money. No expensive hazardous waste disposal, he says bitterly, just throw it away with us. His wife didn't want to listen to him anymore - and then she was dead.
The villagers are summoned by a court order for a saliva sample. The result of this test is more than surprising. None of the villagers is the culprit. The DNA result found a match with a man who has been in prison for years for another crime. Suddenly life comes back to life in the village and the old sense of community, a year-long burden has been lifted from the shoulders of the residents.
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