‘Babylon Berlin’s’ Final Season Prepares to Chronicle Hitler’s Rise to Power

After nearly a decade on screen, ‘Babylon Berlin’ is coming to a close, and the show’s creators have chosen to end their story at the exact moment Weimar democracy collapsed. The final season runs from January 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor of Germany, through March 5, when, following a violent campaign against his political opponents, Hitler held rigged elections that secured his absolute hold on power. It is a deliberate and sobering endpoint for a series that has spent four seasons building toward this exact historical hinge.

Based on the best-selling novels by Volker Kutscher, the series follows police detective Gereon Rath and flapper-turned-investigator Charlotte Ritter as they solve crimes in Weimar Germany, under the shadow of the rise of the Nazi Party. The fifth and final season closes that arc, and the people who built the show over the past decade are treating its conclusion with the weight the subject demands.

A Final Case Set in the Shadow of Hitler’s Rise

The plot of the final season, adapted from Volker Kutscher’s fifth Gereon Rath novel ‘The March Fallen’, reunites Gereon with Charlotte Ritter for one final case. After Gereon vanishes without a trace, Charlotte is left to work alone, investigating a series of murders of former frontline soldiers, and she begins uncovering evidence that points toward a much larger conspiracy.

That conspiracy reaches directly into Hitler’s own past. The investigation centers on a series of murders targeting former front line soldiers, with connections and motives that reach back to 1918, tied to an explosive missing file that casts Hitler’s own wartime service in a new light. It is a plot built to intersect with documented history rather than sit apart from it, which has been the show’s signature approach from the beginning.

The eight episode final season is set in the final days of the Weimar Republic before democracy gives way to Nazi rule. One of the show’s co-creators framed the intent behind that choice plainly, telling Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten that this is not about the downfall, it’s about the fight for democracy, a distinction the team clearly wanted viewers to hold onto going in.

The timing has not been lost on the people who made it. In an interview with Variety, Tykwer said the show’s resonance with the present day was something the writers never anticipated when they started, adding that the political world’s shifts had constantly weighed on the writing process over the years.

Familiar Faces and New Additions Join the Cast

The final season brings back nearly every major player from the show’s run. Alongside starring actors Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries, many familiar faces from previous seasons return, including Hannah Herzsprung, Karl Markovics, Lars Eidinger, Fritzi Haberlandt, and Christian Friedel, among others.

Joining that returning ensemble are several new names. Notable new cast members introduced this season include Clemens Schick, Ulrich Noethen, and Devid Striesow. Their characters have not been fully detailed in press materials, but their presence signals the scale the production is still working at for its closing chapter.

The reunion carries personal weight for the two leads as well. Bruch and Fries are returning for the series’ final season to work together on one last investigation, closing out a partnership that has anchored the show since its premiere. Their characters, Rath and Ritter, have carried the emotional core of ‘Babylon Berlin’ across four seasons of political upheaval, and the final run is built around bringing their story to a close alongside the historical one.

A Ten Year Journey Reaches Its Conclusion

The scale of what ‘Babylon Berlin’ built over five seasons is difficult to overstate. In its first four seasons, the series sold to more than 140 territories and was watched more than 94 million times on Germany’s ARD online platform alone. Across those same four seasons, the show earned a perfect 100 percent score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 90 percent score from audiences.

For the creative team, wrapping the series has been an emotional process. Von Borries described it as the end of a 13 year process and collaboration, recalling a screening with the crew where he found himself in tears because of how intense the moment felt. He added that hundreds of people worked on the project over roughly a decade, calling it the biggest thing he has made in his life.

Production partners have echoed that sentiment publicly. Co-producer Dirk Schürhoff of Beta Film said the team was bringing the show’s extraordinary decade long journey to a close with gratitude and a touch of sadness, crediting Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries along with the wider production team and audiences around the world. The series began as a co-production between Germany’s public broadcaster ARD and the UK’s Sky.

When and Where to Watch the Final Season

German audiences will see the season first. The season is scheduled to debut as a binge release in Germany on the ARD app, followed by a two part broadcast rollout, with the first four episodes airing on Saturday, September 19, and the remaining four episodes one week later on Saturday, September 25, 2026.

North American viewers will have to wait longer. ‘Babylon Berlin’s fifth and final season is set to premiere on Kino Lorber’s MHz Choice in the United States and Canada in February 2027, according to Collider, which shared the season’s first trailer exclusively ahead of release. MHz Choice previously carried the exclusive North American premiere of Season 4 in July 2024, after adding the first three seasons in spring 2024.

For longtime viewers, the closing of ‘Babylon Berlin’ marks the end of a show that treated its 1920s and 30s Berlin setting as more than a backdrop, using it to trace how a functioning democracy can unravel in real time. With Rath and Ritter facing their final case against the backdrop of Hitler’s actual ascension to power, fans who have followed Gereon and Charlotte since the first season are likely to have plenty to say about how the story lands its ending.