The news that American troops have already crossed the Rhine near Remagen on their eastward march spreads through the Buchenwald concentration camp like wildfire in spring 1945. Krämer, the camp elder, damps the hopes of the other prisoners: "Remagen is still a long way away". As the front line comes nearer, particularly in the west, the camp's political prisoners, members of a communist party, have set up a secret resistance organization and hidden arms with which to liberate themselves.
The men now unexpectedly see their plans in danger. A Polish prisoner arriving in Buchenwald from Auschwitz has smuggled a small child into the camp in a suitcase. While Bochow, the leader of the party organization, orders that the child be brought out of the camp, comrades Höfel and Pippig decide to hide the boy. One of the SS officers accidentally learns of their plans, but decides not to betray the child, more or less as reinsurance for his future as the Americans' approach brings the end of the war tangibly close. At the same time, however, he becomes more and more afraid of his superiors.
With the help of an anonymous letter, the officer triggers a furious search for the child. The search becomes more brutal as the camp commander becomes more convinced of the existence of an organized resistance group and hopes to find the group's leaders together with the child. The prisoners are able to free themselves when the SS flee before the advancing American soldiers, leaving only a sentry squad behind; the child is among those rescued.
NACKT UNTER WÖLFEN is the first German film to concentrate on life and death in a concentration camp. The novel on which the film is based was written by Bruno Apitz, who was interned in Buchenwald as a political prisoner from 1938 to 1945. What makes Frank Beyer's achievement all the more impressive is that the film is produced without pathos and without playing with the viewers' emotions. Moreover, it does not directly show the extreme physical torture suffered, but also does not wash over it or play it down. "In my opinion, it is usually speculative to show such things. There are innumerable films in which anti-fascism is merely a pretext for shoot-outs and wild chases or for presenting torture techniques with which to shock the general public ... Indirect narrative has always been a better means of presenting torture in a more natural manner." (Frank Beyer)
The motif of organized resistance among the prisoners is of much greater importance for the film. None of them would probably have been strong enough, taken by themselves, to withstand the mental pressure and physical torture and to conceal the identity of the group's members, as well as the child from the SS. Frank Beyer is not interested in casting a political veil on the resistance: he is more interested in defending solidarity and human dignity. The prisoners, and particularly the camp elder, are repeatedly faced with the painful question whether hundreds of lives can be risked and perhaps even sacrificed for the life of a single child. In this way, saving the boy's life also becomes a symbolic act with which the prisoners successfully defend their own moral values.
"The story of the child, its arrival in Buchenwald and how it was hidden from the SS is true ... It is not true that it was the only child ... It is also true that the political prisoners were responsible for running the camp ... and that an international armed resistance group was formed in Buchenwald. The liberation is somewhat exaggerated in both the novel and the film. I do not know whether thousands of prisoners actually moved towards the gates, but I was not particularly interested in whether or not it reflected reality. What I wanted was to show this enormous contrast: the euphoric masses with their feeling of liberation and the crying child cradled in the arms of the camp elder Krämer." (Frank Beyer)
The director seeks to portray the offenders and the victims objectively and with a clear desire for realism. "Beyer does not portray any devils in human form, there are no demonic caricatures. What he presents are fairly run-of-the-mill bureaucrats and ordinary people who only occasionally indulge in cynical postures. The horror is horrifically banal and that alone explains the absence of stylized elements in the film. The figure of Zweiling is particularly well-drawn: a petty character who shilly-shallies between the various fronts and whose own opportunism proves his undoing, he is really a pitiful victim rather than a bum-bailiff." (Hans C. Blumenberg)
The hangmen never appear as distorted psychopaths and the brutality lies in the frightfully everyday nature of the terror reigning in the concentration camp, even though fanaticism does rear its ugly head every now and again. The closer the end of the war comes, the greater the evidence of opportunism in the ranks of the SS becomes as they come closer to breaking up their own power structures. The offenders never face the conflict between discipline and conscience, politics and humanity, not even as they face their own demise.
