Decision Before Dawn is a 1951 American war film directed by Anatole Litvak, starring Richard Basehart, Oskar Werner, and Hans Christian Blech.

American Colonel Devlin (Gary Merrill) leads a military intelligence unit that enlists German POWs to cross back over and spy on their former comrades.

On buses and trains, in guest houses and taverns, he meets those who are still defiant, such as SS courier Scholtz (Wilfried Seyferth), and those who are now resigned to defeat, like Hilde (Hildegard Knef), a war widow turned hooker.

After their radio is knocked out, Happy, Tiger, and Rennick make their way to the banks of the Rhine, where they plan to swim across to American lines.

The film was adapted from the novel Call it Treason, which was based on the wartime experiences of the author George L. Howe, who served with the Office of Strategic Services unit attached to the Seventh Army during World War II.

[2] The citizens of the cities of Würzburg, Nürnberg, and Mannheim, where some of the picture's battle scenes were shot, were forewarned of their filming by newspaper and radio announcements.

"[5] In a 2006 review, Chicago Reader film critic J.R. Jones was less enthused, writing "By the time Fox released this 1952 feature, the patriotic orthodoxy of Hollywood war movies had softened enough to allow for a German hero, but not a very engaging one; the inherent drama of his divided loyalty is mostly bypassed in favor of a slack espionage plot.

"[6] In 2008 Emanuel Levy called Decision Before Dawn a "stirring drama ... And while not made as an explicitly agit-prop, it does convey its humanist anti-war message, without the usual sentimentality.