The German Autumn and the night of death in Stammheim were 40 years ago. The aftermath of this traumatic time affects the current case of detectives Lannert and Bootz. Marianne Heider is said to have died in a bathtub accident. However, her ex-husband Christoph believes that she was murdered by her current partner Georg Jordan. Christoph Heider is caught kidnapping the body from the cemetery chapel in order to have it autopsied abroad. For Thorsten Lannert and Sebastian Bootz, this shouldn't be a case at all - after all, the public prosecutor's office has already filed Marianne Heider's death as an accident - and Chief Public Prosecutor Lutz expressly instructs Emilia Álvarez not to reopen the case.
But Thorsten Lannert and Sebastian Bootz find Heider's account credible enough to investigate the matter. They find out that Georg Jordan was used as an undercover agent for the protection of the constitution against the Red Army Faction in the 1970s. Is that the reason why the inspectors constantly encounter resistance from the police authorities and the public prosecutor's office during their investigations? And is Wilhelm Jordan actually Wilhelm Jordan? The man bears an amazing resemblance to a former RAF member who later worked with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and, of all things, made statements about the question of how the weapons that killed Baader and Raspe got into the Stammheim high-security wing.
William Jordan,Whoever he is, has been the subject of various crimes, but has never been punished or even charged. Along with Emilia Álvarez, Thorsten Lannert and Sebastian Bootz begin to wonder if witness protection would itself include the murder of Marianne Heider. On the night of October 18, 1977, after the liberation of the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" in Mogadishu and the assassination of the employer president Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the so-called German Autumn came to a head in the "Stammheim Night of Death", in which Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe died in their prison cells and Irmgard Möller suffered life-threatening injuries.
This historical situation, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this fall, forms the background for Dominik Graf's "Tatort: The Red Shadow" in Stuttgart. The long shadows of that night and the fight against RAF terrorism reach into the present day at the scene of the crime. Just like the unresolved questions associated with it, for example: How did the weapons really get into the high-security cycle of the Stammheim prison? How far does the leeway for the protection of the Constitution extend? Why is it not possible to clarify beyond doubt what happened on the night of October 18? Dominik Graf deals with these questions in his first "crime scene" in Stuttgart. Past and present intertwine. To do this, Dominik Graf uses historical material, which he skillfully interweaves with scenes that have been filmed after the fact.(