Bernhard Gunther, a former crime commissioner of the main police department of Berlin, opens a detective agency after the war. He gets a client, Britta Wartzok, who wants to find her husband, a war criminal who “lay low” in Argentina. As soon as Gunther starts on the trail, he is brutally beaten. The doctor caring for the detective invites him to restore his strength at the estate of his friend, Dr. Gruen, who is confined to a wheelchair. Gruen, by a strange coincidence, looks like two peas in a pod like Gunther. Taking advantage of this, the doctor sends a guest to Vienna to formalize for him the inheritance left to him by his mother. In Vienna, Gunther is blackmailed and then accused of murdering Britta Wartzok, whom he finds dead. Realizing that he was framed, the detective decides to take revenge.