Bernhard Kimmel

Long-term portrait of the burglar and bank robber Bernhard Kimmel, who became known in the 1960s as "Al Capone of the Palatinate", cracking up to three safes in one night with his gang. Director Peter Fleischmann met Kimmel in 1970, when he had just completed his first, almost ten-year prison sentence. He interviewed him and became friends with him. Kimmel resumed his criminal career until 1982, when he shot a policeman after robbing a savings bank and injured another so badly that the latter was left paraplegic - a tough test for the friendship between the director and the robber turned murderer. Kimmel was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released on parole after 22 years - and Fleischmann completed his portrait.

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A highly subjective documentary about the life of “professional criminal“ Bernhard Kimmel, who became a serious criminal as a teenager after the end of the war in 1945 by committing petty crimes with found weapons and made a name for himself as the head of the Palatinate Al-Capone gang in the early 1960s. Peter Fleischmann observed Kimmel between 1970 and 1987, interviewing acquaintances, police officers and repeatedly Kimmel himself, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985 for the murder of a police officer. The grand design of the long-term observation of a human life itself contributes to the creation of legends and is criminologically and psychologically unfounded.

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