Europa

Leopold Kessler arrives in the U.S.-occupied zone and takes a job as a sleeping car conductor for Zentropa. He is fresh-faced and idealistic, believing he can contribute to making the world a better place, but he struggles to adapt to German customs. The setting establishes a tense, morally fraught atmosphere on the railways.

Kessler meets Katharina Hartmann, daughter of Zentropa's founder, at the Hartmann family mansion. She shows him bodies hanging on trees and explains they are Werwolf victims, warning him that Nazi remnants still use the railways. The encounter makes the danger of the postwar rails feel personal.

At dinner with the Hartmanns and Colonel Harris, Kessler is recruited to keep watch for Werwolf activity on the trains. Harris explains that any Nazi collaboration could jeopardize Hartmann's business. Kessler hesitantly agrees, balancing duty with doubt about the occupiers.

Kessler is given two children to watch on a Zentropa train, as Werwolf recruits one boy for a suicide mission. The mission highlights how even civilian lives are exploited as weapons after the war. The threat on the rails feels intensively personal to him.

On the day of the survey, Harris secures false testimony that Hartmann rescued a Jewish American, aiming to rehabilitate him. Hartmann later commits suicide out of shame. Leopold and Katharina have sex, and she reveals she had been Werwolf, using that past to blackmail her father.

Kessler stops the Zentropa train to facilitate Max Hartmann's funeral, a gesture that clashes with the U.S. occupiers' rules. The moment tests the boundaries of authority and tradition. The scene tightens the emotional and political stakes on the rails.

Werwolf agents pull Kessler into a car after the funeral and formally invite him to join their cause against the Americans. He remains hesitant about which side to choose, caught between old loyalties and new pressures. The temptation of power hangs over his future choices.

Kessler marries Katharina, beginning a fragile married life. On their honeymoon she reveals that Zentropa trains carried human transport during the war, which explains her father's suicide. The revelation deepens the moral complexity surrounding the company and its past.

Katharina is kidnapped by Werwolf, who also kill Lawrence Hartmann. The group pressures Kessler to use explosives to blow up the train during a bridge crossing. The threat intensifies as personal and political vendettas collide on the tracks.

The stress of Katharina's kidnapping leads Kessler to plant the explosives, and he briefly flees the train. Moved by the potential victims, he climbs back aboard to disable part of the device. His quick mercy creates a fleeting hope amid the looming catastrophe.

US forces uncover the Werwolf cell, and Kessler finds Katharina in handcuffs. She admits she was Werwolf all along and had sent extortion letters to her father. She condemns his supposed cowardice for not choosing a side, insisting there are no innocents in Germany.

Driven to despair, Kessler detonates the explosives. The train crashes into the river, killing several people including his uncle and Katharina. Kessler himself drowns in the sunken car, his fate sealed by the war's lingering moral carnage.