Silke Bischoff

In August 1988, two armed bank robbers keep German police at bay for 54 hours during a hostage-taking drama that ends in a shootout and three deaths.

About a dramatic bank robbery on August 16, 1988, where the criminals escape with two hostages and the media is right in the middle of their chase. Two days later the hostage situation was put to an end in a police operation on the A3 motorway. Three people were killed during this crisis - two teenage hostages and a policeman involved in a vehicle crash. The whole episode became a media circus in Germany and the Netherlands.

It was the most spectacular hostage situation and at the same time one of the most sensational crimes in German criminal history: the Gladbeck hostage drama kept Germany in suspense from August 16-18, 1988. 54 hours of fear. On August 16, shortly before 8 a.m., Gladbeck, northern Ruhr area. Hooded and armed with MPs, Hans-Jürgen Rösner and Dieter Degowski penetrate a bank. They take two bank employees hostage, want an escape car and a ransom of 300,000 marks. What then followed with an odyssey through the Ruhr area, northern Germany and the Netherlands was a scenario in which all those involved - perpetrators and victims, police and journalists - lost control over their actions. In the end there were three deaths, many injured, grief and anger, mutual blame and the attempt to draw consequences for the future from the inconceivable event.

About the the hostage-taking/bank-robbing gangster Dieter Degowski and a recap of the crimes he committed with Hans-Jürgen Rösner during the Gladbeck hostage drama in August 1988. Some of the relatives of Degowski, along with his Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, plus the actual hostages and friends of those killed talk about the trauma they were involuntarily involved in.