Soldiers of the Damned

A frontline unit is ordered to escort Professor Anna Kappel into a forest whispered about for its ancient powers. The mission unfolds under the pressure of 1944 combat on the Eastern Front. The group pushes into the trees, leaving the open battlefield behind.

SS Sturmbannführer Heinrich Metzger joins the squad, his ruthlessness and ambitions coloring the mission. Major Fleischer and the others sense that the true danger may come from within their ranks rather than from the forest. The march into the forest tightens with unease.

A Red Army squad bursts from the trees in a panic and Fleischer's unit eliminates most of them, leaving sniper Natalya Kovalenko alive to tell the tale. The encounter hints at a force in the woods beyond ordinary warfare. The surviving Natalya struggles to convey what she witnessed.

Dieter Baum chases Natalya, and she dissolves into dust before his eyes, as if the forest itself consumed her. Ethereal white-robed figures loom at the margins, witnessed by Metzger as something ancient stirs in the woods. Ackermann's wandering, demented warning shakes the group: leave while you can.

The team discovers the body of Bernd Dietrich crushed beneath a tank in a part of the forest where such machines should not reach. The sight intensifies the sense that this forest guards a power beyond comprehension. Rumors of a vanished expedition begin to justify their unease.

Fleischer confides to his aide, Tom Sawyer Fuchs, that Germany might fare better losing the war than being ruled by Metzger's brutal calculus. He voices suspicion that Metzger would sacrifice anything to seize power. The conversation foreshadows moral ruin if the relic's power falls into the wrong hands.

Fleischer learns that a previous mission led by Dietrich and Ackermann vanished in this same forest. The missing expedition hints at a peril deeper than battlefield casualties. The forest begins to feel like a trap designed to test the soul as much as the body.

Anna Kappel weighs in with Dietrich's belief in Aryan god-men who supposedly dwell in the woods and can bestow extraordinary powers. She explains that the mission's purpose is to locate a relic that could grant the SS influence and victory. The group's fear and curiosity intertwine as the forest's mystery deepens.

Strains mount as night voices speak in unknown tongues and the group suffers a cascade of chilling, inexplicable deaths. Fleischer starts to suspect the god-men are real—and entirely hostile—while Metzger's hunger for the relic grows. The forest seems to react to their every move with a malignant intelligence.

Tom Sawyer Fuchs experiences a temporal loop, being dragged back to a past moment where he witnesses the earlier expedition. He learns that Kappel is not merely a researcher but a senior director at the Ahnenerbe. The loop ends with Fuchs dying and leaving a bloody warning at a distant, monumental stone complex within the forest.

Fleischer, Kappel, and Metzger finally reach a monumental stone complex where a relic rests in a bag that glows green. A brutal struggle erupts as Metzger tries to seize the relic for himself. Fleischer defeats him and orders Kappel to bury the relic to end the forest's dangerous influence.

The forest intervenes as Kappel attempts to transform into one of the god-men, driving a knife into her own heart. Fleischer buries the relic and exits the forest aged far beyond his years, a quiet witness to the cost of power. In the coda, Red Army soldiers arrive at the forest's edge and kill the worn veteran Fleischer, sealing the forest's memory.