Series Review: "A Perfect Crime" ("Rohwedder: Einigkeit und Mord und Freiheit") (2020).

"Martyr. Capitalist. Occupier. Victim." This is A Perfect Crime (Rohwedder: Einigkeit und Mord und Freiheit). This German docuseries directed by Jan Peter, Georg Tschurtschenthaler and Torsten Striegnitz. The murder of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, shot as he stood by a window in his Düsseldorf home, shakes the nation. But insiders understood the danger he was in.

On October 16, 1932, German manager and politician, as member of the Social Democratic Party, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was born. In September 1990, he was named president of the Treuhandanstalt, responsible for the privatisation of state-owned property in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). On the night of Monday, April 1, 1991, at 23:30, Rohwedder was shot and killed through a window on the second floor of his house in the suburb of Düsseldorf-Niederkassel (Kaiser-Friedrich-Ring 71) by the first of three rifle shots. The second shot wounded his wife Hergard; the third hit a bookcase. The shots were fired from sixty-three miles away from a rifle chambered in 7.62×51mm NATO. It was also the same rifle that was used during a sniper attack on the American embassy in February committed by the Red Army Faction, a West German far-left terrorist group. An inspection of the scene found three cartridge cases, a plastic chair, a towel, and a letter claiming responsibility from an RAF unit named after Ulrich Wessel, a minor RAF figure who had died in 1975. The shooter has never been identified. In 2001, a DNA analysis found that hair strands from the crime scene belonged to RAF member Wolfgang Grams. The Attorney General did not consider this evidence sufficient to name Grams as a suspect of the killing. In 1993, Grams was killed in a shootout with police in Bad Kleinen. On April 10, 1991, Rohwedder was honoured in Berlin with a day of mourning by German President Richard von Weizsäcker, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau, and Chairman of the Board of Treuhandanstalt Jens Odewald. The Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus, the seat of the Federal Finance Ministry, is named in his honour.

The show has one of the most powerful endings of a documentary series, a passionate closing statement full of bravery and hope from one of the many victims who has been to hell and back. Not only will this likely catch on with true crime buffs, but the series is perfectly timed to coincide with the man's movements occurring today. The end result is a remarkable, ultimately heartbreaking saga with no easy answers. You won't come away from the show confident that you solved a mystery, but you might come away changed. Enter A Perfect Crime, which has given me more to look forward to in the decades ahead than any other story in recent memory. As distressing as the documentary is, it's also ultimately hopeful and triumphant. Not that the show is immune to the tricks of its genre. But its story, metastasizing from a single act of violence to depict a warped school culture, is riveting and painful.

Simon says A Perfect Crime (Rohwedder: Einigkeit und Mord und Freiheit) receives: