While in post-war Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference, an American military journalist is drawn into a murder investigation which involves his former mistress and his driver.

Lena Brandt: An affair has more rules than a marriage.
Patrick Tully: [threatening a Jewish double amputee] Don't you jew me over the price!
Lena Brandt: You can never really get out of Berlin.
Bernie Teitel: They want me to decide who the ardent Nazis were. Truth is, it was the whole country. Nobody's hands are clean.
Hannelore: It's easy now to say Hitler was wrong about the Jews. Let me tell you something. Nobody said he was wrong at the time.
Patrick Tully: You can say what you want about the war... but, the war was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because when you have money, then, for the first time in your life, you underSTAND it, what money does for you. Where before all you understood was NOT having it? Money allows you to be who you truly are.
Bernie Teitel: This guy? Drove one of the gas vans. They'd load the Jews in back, run the exhaust inside.
Bernie Teitel: [inhales] By the time they got where they were going, they were already dead. Very efficient. Driving to work, he killed more people than Al Capone in all his years in Chicago. But if you asked him, he isn't a murderer, he's a truck driver. And he still thinks that.
Bernie Teitel: Nothing better for a prosecutor than a criminal with a sense of history. Everything got written down. Who they killed, and what it cost. Meticulous record-keepers.
Danny: [on Tully] A little bit of a cunt.