1945: Berlin - a town in ruins. Susanne Wallner returns from a concentration camp to her former apartment, which is now occupied by Dr. Mertens, a surgeon. Susanne und Mertens have to share the apartment. Mertens encounters Brückner, the former commander of his battalion, whom he had believed to be dead. Brückner, who had ordered the execution of more than 100 civilians during the war, is now a successful industrialist. Mertens decides that justice must take its course. Susanne is able to convince him that retaliation for such a crime should not be taken into his own hands. Rather, the war criminal must be tried in court.

Berlin, 1945, after capitulation. The city is in ruins. Susanne Wallner returns to her old flat from the concentration camp in which she was a prisoner. Her flat is now occupied by Dr. Mertens, a surgeon who has come from the war plagued by a complex and deep-seated feeling of guilt. Mertens witnessed a mass murder in Poland and tried in vain, perhaps without sufficient force, to dissuade his captain from the action. The man is now a physical wreck, an alcoholic and out of work.

In their need, Susanne and Mertens share the derelict flat. Susanne finds a letter which Mertens was supposed to deliver to a Mrs. Brückner, informing her of her husband's death in the front lines. However, Ferdinand Brückner has survived the war and is building up a factory in Berlin. Mertens is shocked by the news: Brückner was the captain who had ordered the massacre of more than a hundred Polish civilians in 1942. Mertens visits Brückner, who responds with jovial self-complacency and full of joie de vivre. Mertens wants to shoot the war criminal. His first attempt is thwarted by a woman looking for a doctor: her child is suffering from diphtheria. After having failed to be reinstated in his profession only a few days earlier on account of his mental state, Mertens performs an emergency operation on the child and saves its life - and saves himself from murdering Brückner at the same time.

Mertens and Susanne have come to know one another better, but the man's past catches up with him time and time again. On the first Christmas after the war, Mertens leaves the flat with the renewed intention of shooting Brückner. Susanne stands in the line of fire and keeps him from pulling the trigger: “We don’t have the right to pass judgement.” Mertens responds: “No, but we have the duty to indict someone and demand atonement on behalf of millions of murdered innocents.” The two go away together. We see Brückner behind the bars of a factory window as he proclaims his innocence whiningly. He does not even understand what he is supposed to have done wrong.

The sequence is reminiscent of a comparable scene in the film The Dreyfus Case (director: Richard Oswald, 1930) that was shot by the same cameraman (Friedl Behn-Grund). Brückner’s compulsively repeated screams of “But I’m innocent” are commented on by Staudte with a field of crosses and war cripples superimposed over the scene in double exposure. One can also see a connection to the final scene of the American anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (director: Lewis Milestone, 1930). This film was one of Staudte’s key cinematic experiences. At the time, Staudte’s voice had been used to dub the lead role of Bäumer in the German version, and he had experienced Nazi attacks against the film. An interesting journalistic coincidence is that film reviews of DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS were published in the same issue of many newspapers as articles or comments on the enforcement of death sentences from the Nuremberg Trials. One example is an excerpt from the review of Staudte’s film in Berlin’s Tägliche Rundschau from 19.10.1946: “DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS was the film, in which, on the eve of the enforcement of the Nuremberg judgments, German art and the German people emphatically demanded that scores be settled for crimes carried out during both the war and the pre-war period. Not that the story of the film in any way refers to the trial, but Captain Brückner (...) is cut from the same cloth as the Nuremberg defendants, who refused to acknowledge the guilt of their actions, claiming to have only done what was their duty.”

DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS was the first film to be produced in Germany after the war. Although Wolfgang Staudte possessed an English licence for his film production, he had sought the Allies' consent to his exposé for DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS in vain. The film was finally produced by Defa (Deutsche Film AG which was just being founded at that time) in the Soviet occupation zone. According to the original film script, Mertens did actually shoot the war criminal Brückner, but this finale was changed at the request of the Soviet cultural officer, for it was felt that the film should not end by propagating personal justice – the suspicion that the film could legitimise or even promote vigilante justice was to be avoided at all costs.

Presumably, Fritz Bauer never saw Staudte’s film, but its legendary last sentence contains the same impetus that shaped Fritz Bauer’s legal career and way of thinking. As early as January 1947, he alluded to the film by preparing one of his newspaper articles for the German news with the headline “Murderers Among Us”. Another time, in 1958, Fritz Bauer entitled one of his essays “Murderers Among Us” in commenting on the tasks and complexities faced by the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, Ludwigsburg, in the journal Stimme der Gemeinde (Voice of the Community), published by Martin Niemöller and Gustav Heinemann.

Above all, however, this film marks a beginning: it is the first attempt by the German film world to come to terms with the crimes committed by national socialism, but the events were still too fresh for a real analysis. Hildegard Knef, who plays the part of a stunningly beautiful Susanne Wallner returning from the concentration camp and looking after the distraught man with all her feminine goodness, ultimately remains an implausible figure. The surgeon's courageous efforts aided by only the most primitive tools to save a child from death by suffocation and his later reports of his own first lung operation are fatally reminiscent, from today's point of view, of the superficial television series raising doctors to the position of "demi-gods in white" which were produced in subsequent years.

Staudte's real achievement was that he tackled the country's recent history and its effects on the present as a subject at that time - a time in which many other productions had already begun to play down history. In this way, DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS also became an authentic film about very different attempts by very different people to find their way about and settle down amidst all the destruction. The pathos which creeps in occasionally belongs to the conduct of those who survived the horrors.

Staudte himself may already have sensed the danger of a deficit and therefore added the episode concerning the old optician Mondscheint who was vainly waiting for news of his missing son and misconstrued the "message" of an unscrupulous astrologist - these were good times for metaphysical racketeers - as an indication that he should commit suicide. In stylistic terms, DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS is a successful mixture of expressionist traditions and an accurate documentary point of view. The figures repeatedly trace their steps through the endless heaps of rubble in the bombed-out remains of the former capital and the film includes numerous authentic photographs of the destruction. At the same time, the ruins rise up into the sky like dark expressionist edifices highlighted by light and shadow as if they had been created by a film architect of the 1920s. On several occasions, Staudte shows his figures standing in front of broken mirrors and glass panes as if the picture of the world had been cracked beyond repair. As was later to be the case in Fassbinder's films, the frames of mirrors and windows served as strict visual boundaries enclosing the figures. At the end of the film, Susanne Wallner declares that "we do not have the right to pass judgement!", whereupon Mertens counters "But it is our duty to ensure they do not go unpunished!". Staudte's film is a decisive first step on the road to realizing that goal.

Production Period

1946

Production Year

1946

color

b/w

Aspect Ratio

1:1,33

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Justice, World War II, Psychology, Holocaust

Available Media

DCP, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, 35mm, Digital Film

Original Version

German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Italian (it), Chinese (zh), Japanese (ja), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Hebrew (he)

DVD

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Italian (it), Chinese (zh), Japanese (ja), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar)

Note on the Format

Parallelwelt:Film - Ein Einblick in die DEFA

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Italian (it), Chinese (zh), Japanese (ja), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Hebrew (he)

35mm

Subtitles

English (en)

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Italian (it), Japanese (ja), Russian (ru), Turkish (tr), Arabic (ar), Hebrew (he), Chinese (short)