Stefan Ludwig

Adventurers, explorers and conquerors: the Vikings are considered the greatest heroes of the Middle Ages. Is this interpretation justified? In fact, they left a far darker and lesser-known mark on history: they were ruthless slavers, human traffickers and hostage-takers. „Victims of the Vikings“ is the first TV documentary to investigate this infamous and often horrifying aspect of the Nordic warriors.

In the spring of 1902, Viennese working-class daughter Marie König runs away from her beating father and is lured into a high-class brothel by an agent. Instead of the promised self-determined life "with horse-drawn carriage rides and silk dresses", she experiences closed doors, violence and exploitation. Only after years of agony does Marie confide in the journalist Emil Bader, who makes the conditions in the brothel public and takes the owner, Regine Riehl, to court.

The final decades of the Roman Republic: For nearly a hundred years, the rival aristocratic cliques that dominated politics had been fighting each other for power. The newcomer Octavian, underestimated by many, fought ruthlessly and cruelly for sole rule. He was the nephew of Julius Caesar, who allied himself with Mark Antony after his assassination. Soon, these two, too, were fighting each other. Historians have called Octavian a "butcher." Yet, with the honorary name Augustus, "the Exalted," he went down in history as a peacetime emperor.

Augustus is reputed to have been a violent, adventurous, power-hungry and unscrupulous warlord. Yet as founder of the Roman Empire, he ushered in a period of peace and prosperity. Drawing on the analysis of several historians, this documentary traces an extraordinary destiny: posthumously adopted by his great-uncle Julius Caesar, Octavian, the future Augustus, accepted an inheritance fraught with consequences. Having made his own empire prosper, he wrote his political will at the age of 76, without naming an heir. How was the succession of this childless strategist organized?

Shadowing a team of door-to-door canvassers working for worldwide relief agency Malteser International, this revealing documentary charts their daily struggles with success and failure when it comes to convincing people to give to charity.