The Murderers Are Among Us (Deutsche Film [DEFA], Herzog-Filmverleth, Donau-Filmgesellschaft, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Long, Long Trailer on September 20 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for a film I was particularly interested in: The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), the first film made in Germany after World War II. Eddie Muller showed it as part of his “Noir Alley” series, and it turned out to be fascinating historically as well as quite good as entertainment. The Murderers Are Among Us was written and directed by Wolfgang Staudte, who unlike most of the geniuses who worked in the German film industry during the Weimar Republic (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder et al.) stayed in Germany and worked throughout the Nazi era. According to Muller’s introduction, Staudte originally rationalized that he was serving German art and culture by remaining in Nazi Germany and continuing to make films for it, but eventually he decided he’d just been used by the regime as one of their in-house propagandists. (During the first five years of the Nazi regime, 1933 to 1937, there was still a surprising level of freedom for German filmmakers because the biggest German studio, UFA, was owned by Alfred Hugenberg, a Right-winger but a monarchist instead of a Nazi. Then in 1938 Joseph Goebbels decided to nationalize UFA and put all German filmmaking under his personal control. This is what led Detlef Sierck to flee and ultimately settle in the U.S., where he made great films as Douglas Sirk.) Staudte apparently started writing the script for The Murderers Are Among Us while the Nazis were still in power – in secret, since he knew he could have been arrested or even executed if the Nazis had found out what he was writing. He constructed a powerful, if somewhat didactic, story about two survivors, Dr. Hans Mertens (Wilhelm Borchert) and Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef, who later got a contract offer from David O. Selznick, who told her to “Americanize” her last name to “Neff” and tell people she was from Austria, not Germany. “Hitler was Austrian,” she reminded Selznick as she refused).

Dr. Mertens was a retired surgeon who tells us he quit practicing medicine because after the war he could no longer stand the sight of blood or the sounds of people in pain. Later we find out that he personally participated in the summary execution of over 120 civilian men, women, and children. Susanne Wallner was just released from a concentration camp. The two fight over an apartment, which Mertens is squatting in and Susanne lived in before the war started and she and her father were arrested. Susanne insists on moving in and Mertens stays there because he has nowhere else to go, so the two end up living together. At first there’s an arm’s-length relationship between them, but ultimately they end up falling in love. Mertens is out to kill a major industrialist, Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen), because Brückner was his commanding officer during the war and gave him the order for the extermination of civilians. There’s also Susanne’s grandfather, an elderly man who makes his living fixing other people’s glasses, and a letter supposedly written by Susanne’s father and sent to his family with instructions that it only be opened after his death. One of the film’s major plot points is that it’s uncertain whether Susanne’s father is alive or dead; at one point someone gives the letter to a phony medium who claims to be able, from the psychic emanations of the letter, to tell whether its author is alive or dead and where he is in either state. Only the false medium is able to cop out when someone cries out at his séance and he says the communication was broken. There’s a powerful scene midway through the movie in which Mertens flashes back to his experiences during the war, but though we hear the sounds of combat on the soundtrack the only thing we see is Mertens’s face registering fear and revulsion. At first I wondered if Staudte had staged the scene because he couldn’t afford to create a visual scene of combat, but later in the movie he does give us a visual flashback to the mass murder Mertens committed on Brückner’s orders.

Staudte had a great deal of difficulty getting his film green-lighted because he wanted to shoot it in Berlin, which in 1946 was still being administered by an uneasy coalition between the victorious Allied powers – the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Part of the problem was the original ending of Staudte’s script: he wanted the film to end with Mertens actually killing Brückner and then standing trial, and the case would be submitted to the jury. The film would stop there, challenging the audience to decide whether Mertens killing Brückner was justifiable either legally or morally. But the American, British, and French authorities didn’t want that version filmed, not only because it appeared to condone vigilante justice but because Germany had not yet re-established a functioning judicial system. So Staudte went to the Soviets, who had established a film company called DEFA that took over the old UFA studios in Neubabelsberg because they happened to be located in East Berlin. Staudte shot the film for DEFA, but either the DEFA executives or their Soviet overlords demanded that he change the ending, so in the film as it stands Mertens is about to kill Brückner when Susanne discovers him and stops him. Then there’s an uncertain but powerfully shot sequence in which either Brückner is put on trial for war crimes or we’re just supposed to think that’s a possibility, and the film ends on a row of crosses meant to represent Brückner’s victims and all the innocent victims of Nazism in general. The ending is actually prefigured with a great sequence in which Mertens supposedly is taking Brückner nightclubbing (one of the most interesting parts of the film is the extent to which the pre-war German cabaret scene survived both Nazism and the loss of the war; unlike Donald Trump and his minions going after late-night TV comedians, Joseph Goebbels was savvy enough as a propagandist to realize that giving people harmless outlets to laugh was a great contributor to social stability) but really plans to kill him. Only he’s interrupted by a middle-aged woman (Elly Burgmer) who needs his professional help as a doctor to treat her sick child.

When The Murderers Are Among Us started I noticed the high-contrast chiaroscuro cinematography (by Freidl Ben-Grund and Eugen Klagemann) and felt that the film noir style had come home to the country that invented it. Film noir was largely the creation of expatriate German directors and cinematographers who realized that the conventions of German Expressionist filmmaking – dark shadows, oblique angles, high-contrast lighting and an overall use of chiaroscuro imagery to suggest menace – were an appropriate way to film the “hard–boiled” crime fiction of Black Mask writers like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Charles said early on in the film that he couldn’t recall us watching anything so relentlessly grim – and I said I could: 1920’s German films like G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street and Diary of a Lost Girl, which expressed the traumas Germany had gone through the last time it had lost a world war. At times during The Murderers Are Among Us it seems as if Germany itself was going through a nationwide case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s amazing to think that within a few years Germany – West Germany, anyway – would not only have become a functioning democracy (belying the widely held theory of people in the Allied countries that Germans were naturally authoritarian and would always gravitate to tyrannical rulers) but have so completely rebuilt its economy, in what the Germans called the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”), that when The Beatles went from the largely still war-ruined Liverpool to the restored Hamburg (Liverpool and Hamburg had been major bombing targets during the war because they were both major ports), they kept asking themselves, “Isn’t this the country that lost the war?” I also wondered if Wolfgang Staudte had chosen his title deliberately because Murderers Among Us had also been Fritz Lang’s working title for his 1931 masterpiece M – only his producer, Seymour Nebenzal, had made him change it because he thought it would be too much of an in-your-face challenge to the Nazis. (In 1931 the Nazis weren’t in power yet, but they were already known for organizing mobs to disrupt plays or movies they objected to ideologically.)

Despite the compromised ending – and I’m not sure whether I’d have liked the film better with Staudte’s original ending, which might have seemed too didactic and openly propagandistic (a danger the film flirts with but without going over) – The Murderers Are Among Us is a quite impressive film that deserves to be far better known. Staudte also cast it effectively; though he was sufficiently concerned about Wilhelm Borchert’s well-documented support of the Nazis when they were in power that he listed him just as “W. Borchert” and billed him eighth in the credits even though he’s the male lead, he went ahead and used him anyway. I’m guessing that Borchert used the part to express his own misgivings about his role during the Nazi years. Hildegard Knef is also a stunning on-screen presence, showing a strong face that reminded me of the young Garbo. By coincidence (or maybe not), Knef would go on to play a role created by Garbo in the 1954 Broadway musical Silk Stockings, based on Garbo’s 1939 film Ninotchka – she and Don Ameche played the roles later portrayed in the 1957 film version by Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire.