(Some Spoilers) When a Polish prostitute is found brutally murdered in German occupied Warsaw German intelligence officer Major Grau, Omar Sharif,becomes obsessed in solving her murder. It's that the murdered woman Maria Covyenska was working undercover for German intelligence in finding and identifying Polish and Jewish guerrilla fighter. What's far far worse, in Maj. Grau mind, is that the person who murdered Maria was positively identified by an eye witness In him having a red stripe down his military trousers which is only worn by member of the German General Staff!<br /><br />Maj. Grau narrows the killer down to three persons who, besides being German Army Generals stationed in Warsaw, can't explain their whereabouts on the night of December 12, 1942 which just happened to be the evening Miss. Covyenska was murdered! The three suspected generals are Gen. Tanz, Peter O'Tool, and Generals Kahenberg, Donald Plesence, and Von Seiditz-Gabler, Charles Gray.<br /><br />Even though it's supposed to be a surprise we get to know who the killer is just by his unsavory actions both on and off the battle field and with those he deals with, German as well as Poles and Russians. Maj. Grau runs into the killer some two years later in Paris who commits the very same kind of crime and has his aid Lance Cpl. Kurt Hartmann, Tom Courter, set up and framed for it.<br /><br />It's during that fateful summer of 1944 that Maj. Grau ends up getting involved with the other two suspected generals, guess who, in a plot to assassinate German Dictator Adolph Hitler! Maj.Grau also ends up making a fatal mistake, in him mistakenly feeling that the assassination was successful,in jumping the gun in trying to arrest the psycho killer German General. <br /><br />Now twenty two years after the war ended Maj. Grau's friend in the French Resistance the former Insp. Morand, Philipe Nolret, who now works for Interpol finds an important link to both the Warsaw and Paris killings in the brutal and recent murder of a German prostitute in Hamburg. There's just one hitch to Insp. Morand's uncovering just who the killer is! The only man who can identify him Lance Cpl. Hartmann who's been missing, or dead, since he was forced to desert his German Army unit back in 1944. That's when Hartmann was to face a firing squad for a murder that he didn't commit but was framed for it by the person who did! The man who Insp. Marand is curtain is responsible in the murders of not only three prostitutes but his good fiend the late Maj. Grau himself!<br /><br />Even though we in the audience already knew who the killer is well before he was discovered by both Maj. Grau and Insp. Morand it's still a big surprise when he's finally exposed at the end of the movie. Not in who the killer is but what he does when he sees that his act as a fine and upright German patriot and General, the youngest in the German Army at the time he committed his horrific crimes, is about to be exposed! Being outed as a mad dog killer to the many admiring German soldiers, in the elite Thor & Hammer Division, who served under him was the final straw that broke the camel's, or General's, back. That was far worse to him then facing a rampaging armored division of the Red Army!