The Lost One

A German scientist working through the war years learns that his fiancée has been selling the results of his secret research to the enemy, and kills her. The regime buries it, because his work is needed. After the war he is living under another name as a doctor in a refugee camp, and when he meets somebody who knows what he was, all of it opens again. This 1951 film is the only one Peter Lorre directed. He had come back from Hollywood to Germany, co-wrote the script and took the lead himself. The story came from a newspaper report about a doctor who killed his assistant and then stepped in front of a train. An early and very dark attempt at making postwar Germany look at its own guilt.