Tatort S2003E07 - Ballauf - 23 - Mutterliebe

Maria Wagner (Claudia Michelsen) has a child and doesn't know what to do next: the young woman is desperately trying to keep her pregnancy a secret. She even wants to get through the birth on her own. At home and without medical help, Maria Wagner gives birth to her child – only her sister-in-law Julia Wagner (Feo Aladag) is in on it. The situation seems so hopeless for the young mother that she gives her baby anonymously to the baby hatch of a hospital immediately after birth. Shortly thereafter, a nurse from the baby hatch is found murdered at her place of work. The flap is empty: someone has kidnapped the baby that was just dropped. Chief inspectors Max Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) and Freddy Schenk (Dietmar Bär) quickly have an initial lead: he is an urgent suspectEx-boyfriend of the dead, Bernd Schiffer (Erdal Yildiz).
He had threatened the nurse several times after their separation. But why would he kidnap a stranger's child from the baby hatch? The night after the birth, Maria Wagner was taken to the hospital with heavy post-operative bleeding – and identified as the mother of the kidnapped baby. Schenk and Ballauf look around Maria Wagner's environment: they are stunned to discover that the daughter-in-law of the wealthy chemical entrepreneur Heinrich Wagner (Manfred Zapatka) apparently had no reason to give away her newborn. What could have prompted her to take this step? Ballauf and Schenk suspect that the answers to their questions are hidden behind the bourgeois façade of the Wagner family...