An old man is kidnapped and interrogated by his captors. In the process, the biography of a mass murderer is laid bare: the eighty-year-old man formerly held a high-level command post in the SS and was responsible for the murder of thousands in the USSR. Thomas Harlan, not content to merely reconstruct the story of this armchair murderer, goes on to trace developments from National Socialism up to the construction of the maximum security wing of the Stammheim prison.