The Good German

In June 1945, Jacob "Jake" Geismer, an American war correspondent for The New Republic, returns to Berlin during the Potsdam negotiations between the Allied powers after World War II is over in Europe but before hostilities end in Asia. Jacob witnesses his murdered driver, a black marketeering American soldier named Tully, being fished from a river, suspiciously adjacent to the Potsdam conference grounds. The corpse is discovered to be in possession of 50,000 reichsmarks — which are later revealed to have been printed by the U.S. occupying forces.

Geismer 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 Jew married to Emil. Geismer had been in a relationship with Lena during his first stint as a journalist in pre-war Berlin. She has survived the Holocaust by doing "what she had to" to stay alive — early in the film this is assumed to be prostitution, but Lena (based loosely on the Jewish collaborator Stella Goldschlag^[2][3]) is later revealed to be secretly complicit in the deportation of her fellow Jews.

Emil Brandt is a former SS officer who had been the secretary of Franz Bettmann, Chief Production Engineer of the V-2 rocket at concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora/Mittelwerk. (Bettmann is only a minor character in the film; he appears to be based on the real Arthur Rudolph.) The Soviets, the Americans, and the British all try to get hold of Emil Brandt, for different reasons. The Americans have already detained Bettmann in a safehouse and intend to transport him to the U.S. as part of their Operation Overcast/Paperclip to have him work on their own rocket program (cf. Wernher von Braun). They are fully aware of Bettmann's role at Camp Dora and know about the slave labor used in the V-2 program, but want to cover up his involvement (because they could not lawfully employ a known war criminal), which includes eliminating Emil Brandt, whose testimony or written notes could prevent the cover-up.

Geismer, in his attempts to get Lena out of Berlin, becomes more and more involved in the search for Emil Brandt. At one point, Lena gives Emil's notes on Camp Dora to Geismer. When Lena and Geismer try to hand Emil Brandt over to the American prosecutor charged with handling war crimes cases, they are intercepted by the American authorities who want to protect Bettmann, and Brandt is murdered. Geismer still has Brandt's notebooks, however, which he trades to the war crimes investigators of the U.S. Army (who have turned out to be in league with the other American authorities — the ones who want to keep the evidence confidential to whitewash Bettmann) in exchange for a Persilschein (a denazification document) and a visa for Lena, so that she can leave Germany.

• George Clooney as Captain Jacob "Jake" Geismer
• Cate Blanchett as Lena Brandt
• Tobey Maguire as Corporal Patrick Tully
• Beau Bridges as Colonel Muller
• Tony Curran as Danny
• Leland Orser as Captain Bernie Teitel
• Jack Thompson as Congressman Breimer
• Robin Weigert as Hannelore
• Ravil Isyanov as General Sikorski
• Dave Power as Lieutenant Hasso Schaeffer
• Christian Oliver as Emil Brandt
• Don Pugsley as Gunther
• Dominic Comperatore as Levi

The film imitates the appearance of films from Classical Hollywood studio-era. Most of the scenes were shot on soundstages and on Universal Studios' backlot, and were then edited with archival Russian footage and archived film from Corbis. Although the finished film is in black and white, it was shot in color because this allowed the use of faster film than available black-and-white film stocks, and afforded the ability to use 'green screen' techniques. The color was then reduced in post-production through the use of a digital intermediate to a grainier black and white, in order to blend with the carefully restored archival material.^{[4][unreliable source?]}

Unlike modern films that are shot with significant "coverage" and mostly with close-ups or two shots, The Good German was shot with 1940s era wide angle lenses, such as a 32 mm, with deep focus, "strongly accented camera angles" and entire scenes staged. Director Steven Soderbergh said:

that kind of staging is a lost art, which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them ... That's not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.^[1]

The set lighting was entirely incandescent and the audio was recorded on a boom mike instead of the more modern body mikes or automated dialogue replacement (ADR). These decisions, combined with the limited coverage, allowed the rough cut to be produced in two days after wrapping up filming.^[1]

"Good Germans" is a term referring to German citizens during and after World War II who claimed not to have supported the Nazi regime, but remained silent and did not resist in a meaningful way. In addition, the title is an allusion to the phrase common among soldiers of the Allied Powers during the invasion of Europe after D-Day, that "The only good German is a dead German" — and the consequences of this death are seed for all that follows in the story of the film. Thematically, the film centers on guilt, and whether it is possible to survive the atrocities while being unaware of and not complicit in them.