Résumés(1)
In the years before World War II, Albert Richter was one of the highliest respected cyclists in Germany and abroad. In 1933, he became the amateur world champion sprint and Germany's most famous professional cyclist. In 1939, he also won the profesional world championship in Berlin. His triumphal procession seemed unstoppable. Three weeks later, he was dead. Albert Richter was killed by the Gestapo in his prison cell. The Nazis carefully tried to cover up all tracks of his life, often with success. This film attempts to reconstruct Richter's life and the dirty affair that ended it. He was raised in a worker's family and was by no means an advocate of the Nazi regime. He would not allow his success to be misused for propaganda goals, he refused to give the Hitler salute, and he remained faithful to his manager Ernst Berliner. Berliner, a Jew, had guided Richter since the beginning of his career, but could no longer execute his function as a manager in Nazi Germany. He had to flee to Holland. Richter disagreed, but was powerless. Richter's aversion to the regime was betrayed by a colleague, and he landed up in a jail near the Swiss border. Collaborating cycling officials, among whom sports journalists, hushed up the killing of Richter: nobody was to blame. After the war, a great number of accomplices remained active in the same positions for years. However, some witnesses have survived the war and the period following it. Filmmaker Raimund Weber and co-director Tilmann Scholl traced them and recorded their statements on film. The interesting edit of archive material and contemporary witnesses drags the spectator into the clarification of a thrilling criminal offence. At the end of the film, the camera reveals the last unsolved aspects of the Richter-case. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)
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