Enforcing discipline among the ranks is more critical than ever now that ground commanders are questioning Hitler's assertion that Germany will win this war. Bernie Gunther investigates Polish mass graves in an attempt to clear the Wehrmacht's name from the atrocity and keep it from being tried for the war crime. All Bernie has to do is prove Russian involvement, and Germany may once again have a fighting chance.

It is 1956 and Bernie Gunther has a new name (Christoph Ganz), a clean passport, a chip on his shoulder, and a menial low-paying job in Munich. And then an old friend arrives to repay a debt. He encourages Bernie to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company. When Bernie tries to confront Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war, he finds that somebody else has gotten to him...

Bernhard Gunther, a private investigator in Germany in 1938, is hired by a rich widow to discover who has been blackmailing her, and by the Berlin police to track down a serial killer, and runs into bizarre psychotherapy and medicinal practices and Nazi occultism.