Occupied Berlin is a bombed-out city where a desperate man can easily hide or assume a new identity. SS surgeon Gerhardt Schwarzenbach wastes no time in becoming Dr. Gerhardt Lutzke, safely burying the crimes he committed in a Nazi concentration camp. Then one day he finds himself staring into a face from the past: that of the Jew Leonhard Grunwald.

 

Thus begins a deadly chase between Schwarzenbach, who must kill to sever the last tie to his past, and Grunwald, who is haunted by secrets of his own.