"Tatort" in the check Did the Hitler songs from Tukur's retro thriller really exist?
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur, right) and his young assistant Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) don't always see eye to eye.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur) is stranded in a Hessian village because his car breaks down. The Nazi investigator soon has a case to solve there.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
When a Nazi special investigator and his entourage are stranded in the Hessian countryside with a broken-down car, they observe how a British airplane is forced to make an emergency landing.
Image: HR
Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon, left), Else Weiss (Barbara Philipp) and Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur) have to deal with a dead British soldier.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
The young officer Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) reprimands village landlady Clara Breuninger (Imogen Kogge, second from left) and her helper Else Weiss (Barbara Philipp).
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Exiled townsman Bernhard Tabler (Cornelius Obonya) and Gerda Lobus (Melanie Straub), the village blacksmith's wife, get on well.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur, left) interrogates the soldier Balthasar Herold (Marius Ahrendt). What does he have to do with the death of the English pilot?
Image: HR
In the presence of the opaque Bernhard Tabler (Cornelius Obonya, left), Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon, second from left) intimidates the postal clerk Karl (Gerd Lohmeyer).
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur, left) and Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) have to prepare for a few days in the Hessian provinces to get their car repaired.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur, right) and his young assistant Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) don't always see eye to eye.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur) is stranded in a Hessian village because his car breaks down. The Nazi investigator soon has a case to solve there.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
When a Nazi special investigator and his entourage are stranded in the Hessian countryside with a broken-down car, they observe how a British airplane is forced to make an emergency landing.
Image: HR
Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon, left), Else Weiss (Barbara Philipp) and Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur) have to deal with a dead British soldier.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
The young officer Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) reprimands village landlady Clara Breuninger (Imogen Kogge, second from left) and her helper Else Weiss (Barbara Philipp).
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Exiled townsman Bernhard Tabler (Cornelius Obonya) and Gerda Lobus (Melanie Straub), the village blacksmith's wife, get on well.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur, left) interrogates the soldier Balthasar Herold (Marius Ahrendt). What does he have to do with the death of the English pilot?
Image: HR
In the presence of the opaque Bernhard Tabler (Cornelius Obonya, left), Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon, second from left) intimidates the postal clerk Karl (Gerd Lohmeyer).
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Inspector Rother (Ulrich Tukur, left) and Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) have to prepare for a few days in the Hessian provinces to get their car repaired.
Image: HR/Bettina Mueller
Ulrich Tukur and the creative team at HR had another idea: "Tatort: Murot und das 1000-jährige Reich" was set primarily in 1944. As Nazi investigator Rother, Tukur sang songs of praise and mockery about the Führer. Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?
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- Off to the year 1944: In "Tatort: Murot und das 1000-jährige Reich", Felix Murot (Ulrich Tukur) investigates during the Second World War.
- The unusual crime thriller focused on two songs, one of which in particular denigrated Adolf Hitler - based on real life?
- Meanwhile, one or two viewers may have been familiar with a young actor whose parents both have a "Tatort" past.
Connoisseurs of "Tatort" with Felix Murot (Ulrich Tukur) know that no idea is too crazy for the Hessian creatives not to try out. This is what happened with the new case "Tatort: Murot und das 1000-jährige Reich". This time, 95 percent of the action takes place in 1944.
Because Murot was not yet investigating at the time, an alter ego had to be found who not only wore Tukur's face, but also shared his slightly eccentric nature and love of precise language and investigative logic: Nazi special investigator Rother was born - probably just for one case.
He even sat down at the piano to play Nazi mocking songs and praise Hitler - to observe the audience and find out who was loyal to the system or more critical. A nice idea when you consider that it was probably just to let retro fan and musician Ulrich Tukur play the piano and sing again.
Were the two very special songs invented especially for the movie or are they historical? And how did they manage to make an entire village look like someone had turned the clock back 80 years?
What was it about?
In the spring of 1944, Nazi investigator Rother (Ulrich Tukur), his young assistant Hagen von Strelow (Ludwig Simon) and a small entourage broke down in their car in the Hessian province. From the roadside, they watched a British fighter plane crash. After the travelers had been towed to a village, it was clear that it would take a few days to repair the vehicle. The Nazi policemen stayed at the inn run by Clara Breuninger (Imogen Kogge) and her helper Else Weiss (Barbara Philipp).
A short time later, the British pilot was found dead. He had not died in the wreckage of his plane, but had been murdered. Apparently the Briton had explosive papers with him that could be very relevant for the further course of the war.
Investigator Rother tried to get to know the people of the village better in order to assess who was still loyal to the system in the declining Nazi empire and who was merely feigning loyalty to the Führer. Could anyone in the village, their own staff - or even Rother himself - have an interest in the Briton never arriving with a mysterious cargo?
What was it really about?
The "Crime Scene: Murot and the 1000-Year Reich" deals - in addition to a murder with a clear circle of suspects in the good old Agatha Christie tradition - with the imminent invasion of the Allies in the background. This actually took place on June 6, 1944 - 80 years ago. The fictitious murder victim transported the plans for the military action, which the Allies did not want to fall into the hands of the Nazis under any circumstances.
The special thing about Michael Proehl and Dirk Morgenstern's crime thriller (screenplay) was that their story not only searched for a murderer, but that the investigation took place in an atmosphere of fear.
This arises when you know that it is not a fair, democratic legal system that is judging. HR editor Jörg Himstedt comments: "It was important to us to build a bridge, to tell what a dictatorship does to people, whether there is civil courage and what the price can be. At the same time, of course, we were interested in transposing the 'Tatort' format into a different context and at the same time telling an exciting case - just in a completely different way."
Who was the nasty young officer?
The young Hagen von Strelow, a rather nasty model Nazi, is played by 27-year-old Ludwig Simon. From January 2017, he appeared for several episodes as the son of former Saarbrücken "Tatort" detective Jens Stellbrink, played by Devid Striesow.
The special thing about this is that Simon is actually Devid Striesow's biological son. However, he got his surname from his equally well-known mother: Maria Simon, who used to work as "Polizeiruf 110" investigator Olga Lenski in Brandenburg. However, the relationship between Ludwig Simon's then young parents did not last. Both went on to have more children with new partners.
Where is the old village where the film was shot?
Such a perfect retro village as in "Tatort: Murot und das 1000-jährige Reich": there's no such thing in real life, is there? In fact, director M.X. Oberg filmed at Hessenpark, an open-air museum in Neu-Anspach in the Hochtaunus district (near Frankfurt). There are more than a hundred historical buildings on an area of 65 hectares, where the history of Hessian village life over the past centuries lives on.
However, the equally historic pub where Ulrich Tukur sings and investigates to the piano is not there. It is in Büdingen, Hesse, where an empty pub had to be converted over three weeks so that "historical" could be filmed.
What songs does Ulrich Tukur sing in the pub?
In one scene, Ulrich Tukur once again plays the piano and sings Adolf Hitler songs in the pub in front of the eyes and ears of the village community. The two songs performed, "Adolf Hitler's favorite flower is the simple edelweiss" and "Hitler has only got one ball", are historical - they really do exist.
The former was written by composer Otto Rathke after the Nazis seized power in 1933 in honor of the Führer: "Adolf Hitler's favorite flower is the simple edelweiss" with lyrics by Emil Gustav Adolf Stadthagen, sung by opera singer Harry Steier. In 1939, the Reich Music Review Board banned the song on the grounds that it was "national kitsch". However, it remained popular in Nazi and later neo-Nazi circles.
The song "Hitler has only got one ball", on the other hand, is a British mocking song that was sung during the Second World War to the melody of the "Colonel Bogey March" composed in 1914. The melody is known from the movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai" or from the Underberg advertisement ("Come along to the Underberg").
The original lyric reads: "Hitler has only got one ball, Göring has two, but very small". In fact, about ten years ago, a doctor's document that was thought to have been lost surfaced, proving the one-testicle theory of the English. During a physical examination of Hitler in prison after his failed coup attempt in 1923, "right-sided cryptorchidism" was diagnosed.
What's next for the Tukur "crime scene"?
At the end of May 2024, Hessischer Rundfunk published an announcement that the new "Tatort: Murot und der Elefant im Raum" is currently being filmed. The film is expected to be broadcast in fall 2025.
The screenplay was written by Dietrich Brüggemann, who also directed the movie, as he did for "Tatort: Murot und das Murmeltier". It is about a mother (Nadine Dubois) who abducts her five-year-old son from the family court and hides out in the Taunus mountains.
This is where Murot and his colleague Magda Wächter (Barbara Philipp) want to search with the help of a special psychological technique: Murot's therapist Dr. Schneider (Robert Gwisdek) has developed a machine that allows you to take a walk in your own psyche as if it were a landscape.
