In April 1945, during the final weeks of the war, Willi Herold, a young Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger (paratrooper) escapes the pursuit of a roving German military police commando who wishes to execute him for desertion.

While there, the group loots considerably from the local population, and sets up a makeshift command post in a hotel under the name Sonderkommando und Schnellgericht [summary court] Herold.

In the final scene, Herold is seen walking through a forest filled with skeletal remains, and the audience is informed that after the war he and several of his accomplices were sentenced to death and executed by the Allied forces.

The ending credits are accompanied by a sequence of Herold and his group driving through the streets of modern-day Görlitz in their Mercedes-Benz G3, eventually stopping to accost and harass local passersby on foot.

The website's critical consensus reads, "The Captain makes chillingly persuasive points about the dark side of human nature -- and underscores how little certain tendencies ever really change.