Q:Build a movie plot around this: Where does Roschmanns high-tech company plan on sending radio gyroscopes and biochemical warheads? Helwan
A:
The movie opens in September 1963 with armored maneuvers in the Israeli desert. A top Israeli military leader confers with a Mossad agent, explaining that the Egyptians are massing 400 rockets in Helwan, arming the warheads with bubonic plague and radioactive Strontium 90. The missiles are targeted on Israeli cities, needing only an advanced guidance system to make them operational. The guidance system is being perfected somewhere in Germany under the sponsorship of ODESSA, an organization of former high-ranking SS officials. It is a race against time.The action switches to Hamburg, Germany in November of the same year. A young and ambitious freelance journalist named Peter Miller (Jon Voight) drives through the streets of Hamburg, which are festively decorated for the holidays. An announcement over Miller's car radio grabs his attention. President John F. Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas. As Miller sadly listens to the news, emergency vehicles speed past. Miller follows them and stops at an old apartment building, where the upstairs windows have been flung open. A policeman friend explains to Miller that a lonely old man has gassed himself and there is no story to be had. Back home in bed with his dancer girlfriend Sigi (Mary Tamm), Miller muses that the first photographs of Kennedy's killer might fetch two million marks. Sigi scolds him as a parasite who profits from other people's misfortune.The next day, Miller meets his police officer friend for lunch and is loaned the diary that had been kept by the deceased old man, Salomon Tauber. The police officer coyly suggests that Miller might find the contents interesting. Miller takes the diary home and discovers that Tauber and his wife Esther were German Jews who had been inmates at the Riga concentration camp. Tauber's diary details the sadistic butchery of camp commandant Eduard Roschman (Maximilian Schell). Tauber's wife had been gassed, but he was determined to survive and be a witness against Nazi war crimes. The diary goes on to detail an...