The film centers on the trial of Wilhelm Grimm, a war criminal whose life unfolds through a series of flashback testimonies from witnesses. The prosecutor reveals that Grimm fought for Germany in World War I and lost a leg in combat, returning afterward to Lidzbark, a small German village that later becomes part of Poland. Despite the scars of war and the hostile memories of defeat, he is welcomed back and resumes his former role as a teacher, rekindling his relationship with Marja Pacierkowski in the very place where their prewar engagement began. Grimm is bitter about Germany’s loss, and the man who returns is a changed, resentful figure who treats the villagers with cold disdain and even shuts down his engagement, dismissing his Polish fiancée as a peasant whose only worth is her dowry.
The atmosphere hardens as trouble begins in the schoolyard. Taunted by the pupils, Grimm’s temper flares, and he molests a young girl named Anna [Shirley Mills], a moment that fractures the town’s sentiment toward him. The blame for the assault is thrust onto Jan Stys, another local figure, though the truth eventually surfaces through the trauma of Anna. The consequences escalate when Anna drowns herself in a lake, a tragedy that galvanizes the community into action and pushes the case toward a formal courtroom confrontation. The mob’s cries for vengeance collide with the legal process, and the trial becomes a battleground for memory, guilt, and accountability. In a painful moment of reckoning, Willie — Grimm’s nephew whom Wilhelm has tried to mold and control — casts a stone that blinds Grimm’s left eye, a symbolic reversal of power that intensifies the conflict but stops short of a conviction.
Grimm leaves Lidzbark behind and returns to Germany, seeking refuge with his brother, Karl Grimm. Karl, who openly despises the Nazi movement, clashes with Wilhelm’s polished veneer and the rise of their uneasy family dynamic. Despite Karl’s pleas, Wilhelm cannot resist the pull of power. He eventually joins the Nazi Party and climbs its ranks, a path that leads to decades of complicity and cruelty. The narrative twists as the political climate shifts and the Reichstag fire sweeps the nation into a deeper spiral of repression. Wilhelm’s brother’s resistance to Nazism is tested to the limit, and Wilhelm’s ambitions drive a wedge that tears the family apart; Karl’s son is dragooned into the Hitler Youth as a tool of control and intimidation.
When World War II erupts, Grimm reappears as the occupier in the same village where he once taught. Now a Reich Commissioner, he governs with brutal efficiency, forcing Marja — now a schoolteacher — to burn the children’s books while taunting her about how time has left her behind. He reminds her of their failed past and insists on replacing Polish culture with German books, a dehumanizing assertion that cements his moral decay. His nephew Willie remains under his command, while Willie’s longing to protect Janina, Marja’s daughter, compounds the personal stakes of the broader catastrophe. The regime’s cruelty expands to the deportation of Jews and other minorities, and Grimm’s authority seems unassailable as he directs the crowd under the rabbi’s (David Levin) warning.
In a pivotal moment, the rabbi—Rabbi David Levin—tries to turn the crowd away from bloodshed, urging rebellion instead of surrender. The Nazis answer with machine guns, and the rabbi falls to Grimm’s pistol-fire, a murder that seals the rabbi’s fate and crystallizes the moral crisis at the heart of the story. Father Warecki exchanges final words with Grimm as he dies, a quiet counterpoint to the brutal public acts that preceded it. The siege of violence continues as Willie discovers Marja and Janina hiding Jan Stys near the injured boy, and the grim reality of their world becomes all too personal. When Janina is relegated to the officers’ club — a grim euphemism for forced prostitution — Willie begs for mercy, but the system offers none. Janina dies, and Grimm’s nephew abandons his Nazi allegiance, finally recognizing the evil path into which he has been led.
As the courtroom returns, Grimm rejects any authority that challenges his propaganda. The presiding judge, perhaps overwhelmed by the volume of testimony and the horrors recounted, leaves the final decision to the public, a decision that echoes the uneasy tension between law and vengeance that has threaded through every act of the story. The trial’s outcome remains unresolved in the moment of the film’s conclusion, inviting viewers to confront the choices made by individuals under the pressure of history and the temptations of power, and to ask what true accountability looks like in the face of a regime built on fear and coercion.
