A prologue outlines the story's alternate timeline. The failure of the D-Dayinvasion causes the United States to withdraw from the European theater and General Dwight D. Eisenhower to retire in disgrace. The US continues the Pacific War against Japan and, led by General Douglas MacArthur, uses atomic bombs in its victory. In Europe, Nazi Germany successfully achieved the invasion of the United Kingdom, which results in George VI and the rest of the British royal family fleeing to Canada in exile while it still rules the Empire. Under Nazi supervision Edward VIII regains the throne while Wallis Simpson becomes his queen. Winston Churchill also goes into exile in Canada and lives there until his death in 1953. Germany corrals the rest of Europe into the Greater German Reich, abbreviated to as "Germania". German society is largely clean and orderly, at least on the surface, with the SS reorganised into an elite, peacetime police force. Germania is a state embroiled in its perpetual war with the Soviet Union, which is still led by the 85-year-old Joseph Stalin well into the 1960s. The 1960 election of Democratic PresidentJoseph Kennedy, whose anti-Semitic views have been well-publicized, gives the Nazi leadership a chance to secure a détente with the United States and its South American allies. In 1964, as Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday approaches and Kennedy heads to Germany for a summit meeting, the nation opens its borders to the media of the US and of Latin America. The week before the summit, a body is discovered floating in a lake near Berlin by Hermann Jost, an SS cadet in training. SS Major Xavier March is assigned the case and questions Jost, who admits that he saw the body being dumped by Odilo "Globus" Globočnik, an Obergruppenführer in the Gestapo and a right-hand man of Reichsführer-SS Reinhard Heydrich. The dead man is revealed to be Josef Bühler, a retired Nazi Party official who managed the Jewish resettlement to Germany's Eastern European territories during the war. The Gestapo takes over the case for "state security" reasons, and Jost dies in an apparent training accident. Meanwhile, Charlotte "Charlie" Maguire, a member of a visiting US press entourage, is discreetly given an envelope by an old man at her hotel. Inside is a photograph of several high-ranking Nazi officials outside a villa. A note on the photograph leads her to Wilhelm Stuckart, another retired Nazi Party official, but she finds him dead at his apartment. March is reassigned to the Stuckart case, but when he takes Charlie to the crime scene, the Gestapo claims jurisdiction, and March's superior, Arthur Nebe, warns him against further investigation. When they follow up on the photo, Charlie and March visit Wannsee to learn the identities of the men, who attended the Wannsee Conference. Each is found to have died under suspicious circumstances except for Franz Luther, who gave Charlie the picture. March tells Charlie to get out of Germany since he now realizes that there is a plot at the very highest levels to cover up whatever was discussed at the conference. Luther contacts Charlie and asks her to meet him on a train, where he requests that she communicate his desire for safe passage to the US, in exchange for what he knows about "the biggest secret of the war." SS troops corner Luther and kill him, but March rescues Charlie. March later blackmails a colleague to get Luther's file and learns that he had a mistress, former stage actress Anna von Hagen. Posing as an official of the US embassy to process Luther's safe passage, Charlie visits Hagen and obtains Luther's papers. Hagen reveals that the Jews were not really resettled, but killed en masse by the Germans during the war, as planned at the conference. March, horrified by the photos and the documents that prove the genocide to have happened, agrees to join Charlie in escaping Germany with his son Pili. However, the Gestapo has already persuaded Pili to betray his father, and March is lured into a trap set by Globus. During his escape, March kills a Gestapo agent but is mortally wounded. He manages to reach a phone booth and calls Pili one more time before he dies. As Kennedy arrives at the Great Hall, a member of the press entourage helps Charlie slip the documents to him via the US ambassador. Kennedy looks at the materials and decides to fly back to the US immediately. The epilogue reveals that the narrator is a grown-up Pili. He notes that although Charlie was eventually arrested by the Gestapo, the revelation of the mass slaughter of the Jews derailed any prospect of a strategic alliance with the US and resulted in revolutions across Europe and the Nazi regime's eventual collapse.
bought the film rights before the novel was published in the United States. When a theatrical film proved unfeasible, the production moved to HBO. The film was budgeted at $7 million and was filmed entirely in Prague. The newly-opened Praha Penta Hotel, today's Hilton Prague Old Town, doubled for Berlin's Hotel Adlon, where Charlie stays. The headquarters of Radio Free Europe, today the New Building of the National Museum, served as the Berlin Police HQ, where March works. The National Monument in Vitkov was used as the Sepp Dietrich SS Academy. The rear facade of the headquarters of Motokov, the Czech state car company, today the City Empiria tower, served as the exterior of the Reichsarchiv. The Nazi rally in the finale was filmed at Letná Park, including at the former Stalin Monument.
Critical reception
The film received mixed reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 50% from six reviews. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly graded the film at B+. He states that the book's plot was faithfully reproduced and helped pull good performances from Hauer and Richardson. He also took note of Menaul's directing by adding small details such as advertisements on the Beatles' shows. However, Tucker said the predictability of the revelation detracted from the film. Since its release, Harris has announced he was disappointed with the adaptation. Speaking to The Independent in 2012, he said:
