Jacob "Jake" Geismar, an American war correspondent, returns to Berlin during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers after World War II.
Jacob witnesses his murdered driver, a black-marketeering American soldier named Tully, being fished from a river eddy, suspiciously adjacent to the Potsdam conference grounds. The corpse is discovered to be in possession of 100,000 German reichsmarks — which are later revealed to have been printed by the U.S occupying forces.
Geismar becomes entwined in both the mystery of his murdered driver and the clandestine search by both Soviet and American forces for the missing German Emil Brandt. He becomes more involved in both mysteries as his investigation intersects with his search for Lena Brandt, a German Jew — and Emil's wife — with whom Geismar had been in a relationship prior to the war.
Lena has survived the Holocaust by doing "what she had to" to stay alive — early in the film this is assumed to be just prostitution, but Lena, in reality, holds a darker secret of complicity and guilt.