Crime scene: when stones speak

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Episode of the series Tatort
Original title When stones speak
Country of production Germany
original language German
Production
company		 SWF
length 81 minutes
classification Episode 15 ( list )
First broadcast February 13, 1972 on German television
Rod
Director Erich Neureuther
script Bruno Hampel
production Gig Malzacher
music Rolf-Hans Müller
camera Helmut Stoll ,
Immo Renz
cut Renate Struve
occupation

When stones speak is an episode of the ARD crime series Tatort . The episode produced by Südwestfunk (SWF) was first broadcast on February 13, 1972 on ARD. It is the only episode with Commissioner Pflüger.

action

A homeless man is beaten up and seriously injured. He is being admitted to a hospital. The man, who had recently been in Munich , talks to the hospital staff about a murder and wanted to go to the criminal investigation department. He also mentions a bunker.

Inspector Pflüger can find out from him that it is about the Westwall bunker on the banks of the Rhine and that a Lothar was murdered there in May 1939. After that, the homeless man can no longer speak, and shortly afterwards he is murdered in the hospital by a stranger by injecting air into his veins.

On the banks of the Rhine, an angler is identified as a witness who saw the homeless man who was at the bunker and who hit the bunker. Another man saw him doing it and followed him. It can also be determined that the victim is probably Lothar Windegger, who has been missing since May 1939. At that time it was suspected that the man from Munich had fled to the Foreign Legion in France.

Inspector Pflüger visits his colleague Veigl in Munich and visits the missing person's mother with him. She gives Pflüger a photo on which her son can be seen together with the homeless man who was killed and two other men. It can be determined that the hospital masseur Pohl is one of the two unknown men in the photo. He was also in the hospital when the homeless man was murdered there. Pohl was also present when the nurse informed Commissioner Pflüger about the homeless person's statement and then asked about the patient's well-being.

Pohl becomes nervous when the police are investigating him and seeks out the wealthy building contractor Wolfgang Bernbacher to ask for money for his escape. Bernbacher advises him not to flee. The conversation shows that the two men have known each other for decades and that Pohl had fled the GDR twelve years earlier and that Bernbacher helped him financially because of his old acquaintance to gain a foothold in the West. At that time, Bernbacher had worked with the other three men for a construction company, later married the daughter of his boss and thus took over the construction company. He is now one of the most respected citizens of Baden-Baden .

Bernbacher is the fourth man in the photo and all four built the bunker on Westwall in 1939. Because they felt cheated by Windegger while playing cards, they killed him and cast him in concrete in the bunker. The corpse can be found by Pflüger using equipment provided by the Bernbachers company.

The homeless wanted to ease his conscience about the crime at the time and was therefore murdered by Pohl. Bernbacher cannot be proven to be involved in the crime, but nobody comes to his annual summer festival, which shows that he is socially ruined.

particularities

It is the only case of the Commissioner Pflüger, who is also the first “one-day fly” among the crime scene investigators.

The case was based on the then prevailing legal opinion that murders from the 1930s are statute-barred because at that time the statute of limitations was 20 years. However, in the Erich Mielke case , the Federal Court of Justice made it clear in its judgment of March 10, 1995 that the prohibition of retroactive effect in the Criminal Code only applies to the act itself, but not to the statute of limitations , so that acts that were not yet applicable at the time the statute of limitations was changed were barred, can still be prosecuted. In this respect, the hospital masseur Pohl should not only be convicted of the murder of the homeless Matysiak, but also of the murder of Lothar Windegger. A possible inciting Bernbacher to murder Windegger, however, would in fact be statute-barred.

The film was last repeated in 1993 and is therefore one of the longest not shown crime scene episodes without a blocking notice.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source: jurisprudence on hrr-strafrecht.de, accessed on June 12, 2014.
  2. ↑ The five dustiest episodes of the crime scene , tatort-fundus.de, accessed on December 30, 2018
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