(Welcome in Vienna) Part 3

This film shows an aspectof World War II that has never been explored on the screen before: the story of Austrian and German Jewish refugees who hav emigrated to America and are now returning to their home countries as American Soldiers. The film opens on Christmas eve 1944, on the snowy battlefields of Alsace. Freddy Wolff, originally from Vienna, and Adler, a communist intellectual from Berlin, belong to a team of prisioner interrogators. The head of this team is Lieutenant Binder, an old time German American and something of anti-semite. During an attack, the team captures a German deserter, Treschensky, whom Freddy immediatally recognizes as an old nazi acquaintance from Vienna, his former school janitor. It is his first inkling of what´s in store for him. And now it is may 1945, and we are in Salzburg on the last day of the war. A pretty Austrian girl, Claudia, turns up with the message. Her father, a coronel in the 'Abwehr' (counter-intelligence) is ready to surrender with all his papers, but only if he is received with full honors by the American general. Claudia is a talented young actress and Freddy falls in love with her. But she has to go back to Vienna. By fall 1945, verybody is reunited in Vienna, a half destroyed city divided into four zones including a Russian one. The Austrians consider themselves the first innocent victims of Nazi aggression. They create an atmosphere of self-indulgence and self-deception to which everyone adjusts except for Freddy Wolff, who ends in tragic and absurd insolation, the eternal outsider...