Johannes Curth

The film describes the activity of an ABV of the People's Police in its section in East Berlin. A mixture of “positive” characters from the beginning, the extensively staged “owl”, who is introduced as a criminal and over the course of time, especially due to the influence of the ABV, develops into a good citizen, and incorrigible characters, with whom the ABV fails with its extensive attempts at rehabilitation and who are arrested after having committed again offenses.

Albert Hauptmann is an out of work waiter in Cologne who is often confused with a former Captain of the Nazi Army. Albert uses this to his advantage and becomes the Director of the Montan Corporation, and a member of the West German Parliament. Herr Karjanke, the real Captain, learns of Albert’s ruse, and wants to claim his "rightful" position in Parliament. But Karjanke cannot come forward until his politicking "Doppelganger" succeeds in passing an amnesty law for war criminals. When Albert is finally brought before a judge on charges of fraud, he learns that this own amnesty law does not apply to him.

A Jewish chief of surgery in 1933 Germany remains blind to the rising Nazi threat, dismissing political dissent from his son and a patient, until his family faces increasing anti-Semitic persecution.

The young communist Artur Becker fights with the Interbrigades against the Franco putschists during the Spanish Civil War. He had experienced his baptism of fire in Germany at the time of the Weimar Republic during the Kapp Putsch. He was seriously wounded and arrested. After an unsuccessful escape attempt, he was interrogated several times by Spanish and German putschists and then shot.