The former military surgeon Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) stumbles down the street, drunk.

An artist and Nazi concentration camp survivor, Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef), finds him living in her apartment as she returns home.

Brückner is now a successful businessman, producing pots out of old Stahlhelme, the German military steel helmet.

He leads Brückner away under the pretense of going to a bar and takes him along a purportedly shorter route, through the rubble and abandoned buildings of Berlin.

Mertens has a flashback, which reveals that Brückner had ordered the shooting of over a hundred civilians on Christmas Eve of 1942 in a Polish village on the Eastern Front.

Originally the film was supposed to be named Der Mann den ich töten werde (The Man I will kill) and Mertens was supposed to succeed in killing Brückner, but the script and the title were changed because the Soviets were afraid that viewers could interpret that as a call for vigilante justice.

The Murderers Among Us debuted on 15 October 1946 in the Admiralspalast, which was at the time the home of the Berlin State Opera, in the Soviet sector.

[2] Angel Wagenstein, a Bulgarian director, said, “For me [Staudte] was the first ambassador, who through his film renewed our faith in a nation capable of self-reflection, of looking into the mirror and acknowledging its own guilt, of making a confession that very few nations would be able to make.”[2] Ernst Wilhelm Borchert was removed from advertisements for the movie because he had been accused and arrested for lying on denazification paperwork,[3] but an article published in the Neue Zeit in 1947 later reported that he'd been exonerated by the Denazification Commission for Artists.

It serves the purpose of wanting to restore order through the character of Susanne and her attempt to establish a household for Hans, cure his precarious emotional state, and re-integrate him in society.

The melding of these film styles explains why despite being “an often overlooked cinematic legacy” The Murderers Are Among Us “tells us much about the politics of the past in early postwar German culture,”[6] namely the tension between establishing a new society and culture while also coming to terms with a Nazi past.

[7] Most of the reviews were positive, although some criticized the fact that the characters appeared in modern and trendy clothes, which did not reflect the reality of the living conditions of Berliners in the immediate post-war period.