It is 1956 and Bernie Gunther has a new name (Christoph Ganz), a clean passport, a chip on his shoulder, and a menial low-paying job in Munich. And then an old friend arrives to repay a debt. He encourages Bernie to take a job as a claims adjuster in a major German insurance company. When Bernie tries to confront Siegfried Witzel, a brutish former Wehrmacht soldier who served in Greece during the war, he finds that somebody else has gotten to him first.