General George S. Patton died in a car accident in 1945. But was his death actually a murder. Is he targeted by Nazis angered by Germany's defeat? Or by Russians who knew that Patton had argued in favor of invading the Soviet Union towards the end of the war? Or is it because Patton is investigating the theft of a quarter of a billion dollars of Nazi gold? Or is it because his subordinate Colonels - the flamboyantly gay Colonel and his worried lover are fearful that he is getting too close to discovering the truth.
Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut Griem) has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.
After several Catholic school pupils are murdered, a teacher who is having an affair with one of his students becomes a suspect. When other gruesome murders start occurring shortly thereafter, the teacher suspects that he may be the cause of them.
The composer Kristian Wernher is supposed to transport uranium-containing rock samples from Brazil to Austria, specifically to Lake Wörthersee, for his father, the head of “Internationale Berg AG”. Everything is carried out in the strictest secrecy, but soon two agents are after Kristian. But that is not his biggest problem. An unpleasant surprise awaits Kristian at the delivery point.