‘A Perfect Crime’: True story of German politician Detlev Rohwedder's assassination explored in Netflix docuseries
True-crime series and documentaries are only good if they hook you right from the beginning. And in terms of good crime content, so far Netflix has fared well. Over the past few years and even during the Covid-19 pandemic, the video streaming platform has offered documentaries or docuseries that have kept us engaged over the past few months.
A true-crime series becomes even more intriguing if there is still some mystery or unsolved elements left in the actual case. Netflix's newest docuseries 'A Perfect Crime' goes back to after the end of the Cold War era when West and East Germany reunited to form Germany. Detlev Rohwedder was a German politician and a member of the Socialist Democratic Party who was killed in April 1991 by a sniper. To this day, the exact shooter has not been identified; however, the German far-left militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) had claimed responsibility. The series will re-visit the case through archival footage, re-enactments, and interviews of experts. Here’s a peek into who Rohwedder was.
Detlev Rohwedder
In April 1991, Rohwedder, the head of Treuhandanstalt, the East German Privatization and Restructuring Agency, was assassinated in Dusseldorf while standing at the window of his home. These shots were fired from 63 m away from a rifle with a 7.62×51mm NATO standard caliber, the same rifle that was used during the RAF's sniper attack on the American embassy in February that year.
During an inspection of the crime scene, three cartridge cases, a plastic chair, a towel, and a letter claiming responsibility from an RAF commando named after Ulrich Wessel was found. Wessel was a minor RAF figure who had died in 1975. The shooter has never been identified. RAF was a radical left terrorist group and was also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, whose members killed more than 30 people in the 1970s and 80s, as per BBC.
In 2001, a DNA analysis found that hair strands from the crime scene belonged to RAF member Wolfgang Grams. However, the evidence was considered insufficient by the Attorney General to name Grams as a suspect of the killing. According to a 1991 Associated Press (AP) report, many politicians and observers had expressed their doubts about the involvement of the members of former East Germany’s Stasi secret police, in order to cause a problem. A week before the assassination, according to AP, German justice officials had alleged the Stasi had trained RAF members who had allegedly tried to kill a US general and other soldiers in West Germany in 1981.
It was also reported that a week before the assassination, unknown assailants firebombed a Treuhandanstalt office in Berlin. There was speculation, still unproven, that Stasi agents were allegedly involved because information about former secret police workers was kept there. According to a 2018 report by Handelsblatt Today, Rohwedder’s high-profile position made him vulnerable and a target for anti-government activists and former East German officials complaining about the ransacking of their home by West German politicians.
This position also gave Rohwedder access to former East German files, possibly permitting him to crack down at least 800 million deutsche marks that were stolen from the SED, East Germany’s ruling party, as per Handelsblatt Today. Rohwedder’s widow Hergard, a retired judge, told Handelsblatt Today, “Afterwards I learned from two different sources that he was in fact relatively close [to finding where the money went]. But anyway, regardless of the hidden assets, politicians who had something to do with the former GDR [German Democratic Republic] believe it was the Stasi who planned the assassination.”
The Netflix series is an attempt to examine the available evidence to determine who killed Rohwedder.
'A Perfect Crime' will be available to stream on Netflix from September 25, at 12 am PST.