Massacre in Germany | M6 | 66 minutes

Shortly after 9h30, on Wednesday February 11 2009, the local police at Winnenden, in the South West of Germany received a distress call from the town’s high school : a madman had burst into classes and was shooting at the students. When the first police officers arrived on the scene it was too late : the gunman, a boy of 17, had killed 9 students and 3 teachers. In a crazed rampage through the area he was to kill 3 more people, before finally putting a bullet into his own head. It was the second massacre on this scale in a German school since the slaughter at Erfurt in 2002. Despite having some of the strictest gun laws in Europe, Germany is second only to the United States in experiencing this sort of tragedy. Our crews went to the scene the day after the event to try to understand, to pinpoint the character of the killer, Tim Kretschmer. How could this former student of the school, shy and with no previous history, from a comfortable family background, have committed such a crime ? There is total incomprehension in the neighbourhood where he grew up. For the neighbours and the students who knew him, Tim Kretschmer was unremarkable. Yet as our investigation progresses a troubled personality emerges. Between a love of violent sports and an unhealthy shyness, between a real and a virtual world, Tim Kretschmer, unbeknown to all, forged the personality of a killer. There’s one disturbing fact: of the 15 victims of his murderous lunacy, 11 were girls. Was there some deliberate intention ? When Tim Kretschmer entered those school corridors did he already know who he was going to kill ?