The Devil Strikes at Night

Hamburg, 1944. Women are being murdered and the police cannot find the man doing it. Eventually a name surfaces, and the officer working the case realises it touches something bigger than himself. The regime cares as much about how the affair looks as about who the killer is, and the file becomes a political problem overnight. Robert Siodmak made this in 1957, after returning to Germany from Hollywood, and aimed it squarely at the Nazi order. West Germany put it forward for the foreign language Oscar. The Bruno Lüdke case it draws on is now disputed: the man never received a fair trial, and the attribution of those murders to him is seriously questioned by historians.