Franz Lang, Götz George, born in 1900, repeatedly falls short of his dream to be sent to the front during World War I. In the end, the teenager volunteers to work at a military hospital where he meets the wounded Hauptmann Günther, Sigurd Fitzek. The German Army officer frames a stark moral as the only sin: not being a “good German,” a theme that will haunt Lang for decades. The officer promises to enlist him in a regiment he is founding, planting the seed for Lang’s lifelong obedience to authority.
In 1917 Lang finally serves at the front under Captain Günther. While manning a machine gun, he witnesses the deaths of two comrades. One is urged to desert, but Lang chooses to honor their fallen leader’s wish to stay and fights on, even as the situation grows hopeless. Lang is severely wounded, dragging his machine gun behind the lines and collapsing unconscious, only to be found by Captain Günther. He survives and is promoted to non-commissioned officer as the lone survivor of a doomed assault.
The Weimar era does not soften Lang’s need for order. He keeps his soldierly dedication, but civil life proves harsh: a conflict with an elderly colleague at a machine factory leads to dismissal after shop stewards side with the latter. Lang drifts into nationalist circles and eventually joins the Freikorps Roßbach, intervening in anti-leftist actions in the Ruhr region and beyond. In a tense moment within a group of arrested insurgents, he recognizes a former wartime comrade and initially lends support. The group’s commander manipulates Lang’s loyalty by painting the prisoners as “Communists,” insisting that orders must be followed even if personal loyalties suffer. Lang ultimately shoots the fleeing comrade when pressed to do so.
After the Freikorps dissolves, Lang works as a construction laborer and faces mounting financial strain. The pressure and fatigue push him toward despair, and he contemplates suicide. A fellow worker, sensing Lang’s desperation, warns him to stay loyal to Germany and to take responsibility for the country’s fate, even if he is no longer a soldier. The worker leaves Lang a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter, and the rhetoric within galvanizes Lang to join the NSDAP.
By 1922 Lang steps into a local SA lodge to seek greater influence. He learns that his Roßbach service has earned him admission to the SA, receiving a uniform (the jacket of a shot SA member) to mark his new allegiance. As a member of the NSDAP and SA, Lang answers a call from landowners who want protection for their property and people.
A former Freikorps treasurer who had stolen funds resurfaces in Mecklenburg, and Lang attends a drinking session where the ex-comrade’s alleged Communist ties are exposed. Lang’s group abducts and beats the man in a forest, and Lang shoots him. When the authorities threaten investigation, Lang is sentenced to ten years in prison in 1924. In prison he reads Hitler’s Mein Kampf and becomes a fanatic Nazi. After nearly five years, an amnesty advances his release in 1928.
The Nazi Party helps Lang regain a foothold, and he soon gains backing from a party comrade, a former colonel named Baron von Jeseritz. The baron-turned-landowner provides Lang with an overlooked farm and urges him to marry Else, a woman who fits Aryan ideals; Lang complies, and at a party at the farm he meets Heinrich Himmler, Hans Korte. Himmler assigns Lang to organize a cavalry unit that will become part of the Schutzstaffel (SS).
With the Nazis in power, Lang becomes an Unterscharführer with the SS riders. Himmler later offers him an administrative post at Dachau, near Munich, a move Lang accepts as a duty to the party and the homeland, even though farming remains his preferred life. Lang’s experience as a former prisoner is cited as valuable, underscoring his loyalty to the regime.
At Dachau Lang trains to be the camp commander, rising through the ranks to SS-Sturmbannführer. During a wartime visit, Himmler shares the plan to annihilate the Jews and the camps that would be established in Poland. Lang accepts the role at Auschwitz, where Adolf Eichmann informs him of the camp’s “capacities.” He conceives the use of Zyklon B as a supposedly hygienic and efficient solution to deal with those deported to the camp, a method he implements with growing confidence and becomes even more entrenched in his rank after a visit from Himmler.
Lang’s wife Else, Elisabeth Schwarz, discovers the horrors of the camp and challenges him. He defends his actions by insisting it is his duty and implies that he would kill their children if ordered to do so. He argues that responsibility lies with the higher-ups, not with him personally.
As the war nears its end, Lang hides in the American occupation zone and is captured. During a tense interrogation, a US officer asks whether he believes the eradication of the Jews was right; Lang replies, “It is not relevant what I believe, I only obeyed.”
Lang is extradited to Poland, where he is sentenced to death and hanged in Auschwitz.
> It is not relevant what I believe, I only obeyed.
