Oscar-winning director Stefan Ruzowitzky asks why ordinary people become mass murderers. The particular focus is on Nazi soldiers in Eastern Europe who murdered Jewish civilians with pistols and rifles in the period between 1941 and 1943. The film is based on quotations from the perpetrators and features interviews with psychiatrists, historians, and genocide experts as well as Benjamin Ferencz, one of the chief prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. Its conclusion is very bleak – there was nothing unique abou the Nazi killers; we might all have done the same in their place.