Die Moerder Sind Unter Uns

Production: Defa. Director Wolfgang Staudte; Screenplay Wolfgang Staudte; Camera Friedl Behn-Grund, Eugen Klagemann; Music Ernst Roters
Crew: (B&W) Extract of a review from 1946. Running time: 80 MIN.
With: Hildegard Knef Wilhelm Borchert Arno Paulsen Robert Forsch Albert Johann Erna Sellner

Publish date: 2024-08-27

This first postwar German production is a serious film concerned with the knotty problem of the individual German's guilt for Nazism. While not fully successful, either as drama or ideology, film is marked by superb camera and montage technique recalling some of the firstrate German productions before the Nazi era.

This first postwar German production is a serious film concerned with the knotty problem of the individual German’s guilt for Nazism. While not fully successful, either as drama or ideology, film is marked by superb camera and montage technique recalling some of the firstrate German productions before the Nazi era.

Framed against the ruins of Berlin, story is concerned with a young medico haunted into drunkenness by the memory of mass executions which were ordered by his captain in Poland. When the doctor once again meets the captain, now a kindly family man, he determines to kill the war criminal. At the last moment, however, the doctor’s sweetheart intervenes.

Basic flaw of this film is the slow pace with which the story unfolds. Shallow sentimentalism in the romantic passages between the doctor and his girlfriend also is damaging to this otherwise adult production. Although made in the Russian zone of Germany, the film is not weighted with heavy-handed propaganda. On the contrary, all the questions which it raises are left unanswered.

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Especially standout roles are turned in by Wilhelm Borchert, as the doctor, Armo Paulsen, as the captain, and Hildegard Knef, as the girl. Good score also contributes importantly to the film’s sombre quality.

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