German drama 'Blindspot Berlin' revisits 2016 Christmas market attack

A decade after the deadliest jihadist attack in Germany's history, a new six-part TV series looks at the institutional failures that allowed it to happen.

"Blindspot Berlin," which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows the year-long police investigation that failed to stop Anis Amri — a Tunisian whose asylum applications had been rejected, and who was already known to German security services — from driving a hijacked truck into a crowded Christmas market at Berlin's Breitscheidplatz on December 19, 2016.

Twelve people died, including Lukasz Urban, the Polish driver Amri shot before seizing his vehicle. Dozens more were injured; a 13th victim died of their injuries in 2021. Amri fled the scene and made his way across Europe before being shot dead four days later by Italian police, near Milan, during a routine identity check.

"What happened behind the scenes of that attack is in many ways just as disturbing," says "Blindspot Berlin" director David Nawrath . "[It's] a picture of overwhelmed institutions, systemic failure and a staggering blindness to the threat that was developing right in front of our eyes."

Inside the Salafist network

Set in the year before the attack, the series follows police investigator Frank Laudin (Albrecht Schuch, of "System Crasher" and "All Quiet on the Western Front") and Isra Al-Husseini (Bayan Layla), a young officer and Arabic-language translator, as they try to infiltrate the Salafist network around Abu Walaa, the Iraqi preacher based in Hildesheim who recruited for extremist group "Islamic State" (IS). Frank recruits Murat (Tamer Trasoglu), who risks his life as an undercover informant. Inside the network, they find Amri: volatile, and getting more dangerous.

But despite repeated warnings, their bosses refuse to take the threat seriously. They dismiss Amri as a possible terrorist, in part because he is also a drug dealer, something the authorities see as incompatible with being a radical Islamist.

Fiction built on the parliamentary record

The series writers and production team closely based "Blindspot Berlin" on the facts of the Amri case, and the years-long parliamentary investigation into the institutional failures that made the attack possible. The main characters in the series — Frank, Isra and Murat — are fictionalized, but the events play out as they did in real life.

"We tried to keep as close as possible to what is known about the attack and what led to it," producer Simon Amberger told DW. "There is still a lot that isn't known, that is speculation. There we tried to leave things open."

Germany's Christmas markets open amid security concerns

Understaffed, uncoordinated, unheeded

The facts of the case are damning enough.

The parliamentary inquiry committee found that the criminal division investigating Amri and other suspects was grossly understaffed, that judicial and security agencies failed to coordinate the exchange of information, and that officials made serious errors of judgment. Amri's asylum claims were rejected, but he was never deported.

At one point the bureaucracy tipped into farce. Amri tried to leave Germany to rejoin his family and was stopped at the border, where police confiscated his passport on the grounds that he lacked the correct papers to go.

Not only a German story

The producers knew from the start that the story reached beyond Germany.

The Breitscheidplatz attack came at the end of a run of assaults across Europe: the Bataclan and coordinated shootings in Paris in 2015, the suicide bombings at Brussels airport and Maelbeek metro station, and a similar truck attack in Nice, in 2016.

Despite the lessons learned in the past decade, threat levels remain high. On July 25, a man drove a van into the crowds of Christopher Street Day gay pride celebrations in Berlin, killing one and injuring dozens.

The Breitscheidplatz attack also continues to resonate today, as it raises questions on "how far a free democratic society is willing to go, how much of its freedom it is willing to sacrifice for security," says Amberger.

Fears of political misuse

He's aware, however, that a story of Islamic extremism, and the failure of the German state to protect its citizens, lands differently now, in the wake of recent elections that have seen a surge of support for the anti-immigrant, Islamophobic far-right AfD party.

"There is a danger that this story, this series, could be misused to support a simplistic, populist political agenda," Amberger admits. "But it isn't that simple. [In the series] we show how extremism arises in marginalized groups that feel isolated, unseen and powerless. The solution isn't 'stop immigration.'"

"Blindspot Berlin" premieres in Germany on public broadcaster ARD in October; its international distribution is also being planned.