Director Helmut Kautner retells William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in the context of postwar Germany. John H. Claudius (Hardy Krüger) returns from Harvard to find his mother married to his uncle after the death of his father, Paul (Peter van Eyck). His father, an industrialist, owned a steel plant that is bustling due to Germany's postwar boom. Although John's father is said to have been killed in an air raid, John is convinced his mother and uncle plotted the death together.