One day, Greek Sephardic Jews reach the small town, where they are kept as prisoners in a nearby concentration camp until they can be transported to Auschwitz.
A little later, Walter appears again in the camp with a doctor, who was able to help the exhausted woman bring a child into the world.
This “doctor,” who treats the partisan soldiers in the woods, needs medication, which Petko in turn hopes to get by bribing Walter.
Blashe and Walter do not tell on each other, but Kurt has the Jews of the camp searched for medicine and punishes them when he finds parts of the stolen goods with them.
Petko also confesses to him that the partisan soldiers actually wanted to steal weapons when they broke into the motor vehicle workshop.
When the escape plan is finally in place, Walter wants to use a ruse to get Ruth out of the camp, but the Jews have already been deported by that time.
The final shot shows Ruth in the cattle car, as the song “It Burns (Es brennt)” plays.
However, he was against it, having already made Jewish fates in Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten) and Girls in Gingham (Die Buntkarieten) and not wanting to be tied down to the same theme.
In this version, the final part, in which Walter and Petko agree on supplying the partisan soldiers with weapons, was missing.
A narrator, who apparently lived in the village at the time, looks back on that past and explains that the sergeant was never known by name to the inhabitants, so he calls him Walter for the sake of simplicity.
He paints the forbidden love of the two characters in long shots on which people wander about as if lost in the endless night, and there are perspectives, tracking shots, dissolves, lighting effects, and other formal elements used to translate this soul-deep situation into the film-optical with dramaturgical necessity and without externalization.” ~ Film-Dienst, 1960Frank Stern found in retrospect that the film “had a virtually revolutionary visual language for 1959.
For Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the film helped “to bring complete knowledge of what had happened [in the persecution of the Jews] and its corrupt nature,” and thus cause “a complete overcoming [of hostility towards Jews] in the innermost depths.” In 1960, Film-Dienst also wrote that Stars “is one of those rare works [that] one would like to think could make people better.” In 1977, Dieter Krusche called Stars “a moving and honest examination of the past that is particularly captivating in its portrayal of the characters.” According to Frank Stern’s assessment, made in 2002, the film’s imagery made it possible to create “a historical legitimacy in the discussion of the Holocaust; the policy of extermination became more conceivable, more explainable, than textbooks, with their often exaggerated economic justification of fascism, were able to do.” The Film-Dienst wrote: “A film full of poetry, emotion, and human attitude, with an outstanding performance by Sascha Kruscharka.
Der Spiegel, a popular news magazine from Hamburg, then wrote: “It seems [...] certain that the interests of DEFA were more strongly represented during the decisive jury deliberations than those of the West German film industry,” and described Stars as “a concealed GDR film” with which DEFA had “smuggled” itself into the competition and won through “the lobbyists… of the Eastern Bloc countries” on the jury.
In 1959, Stars was awarded a gold medal at the World Fiesta in Vienna and received a certificate of recognition in Edinburgh.