The movie tells the story of Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes), a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial, stemming from her actions at a Nazi concentration camp after she takes a job at Siemens.
Preceding WW II, Siemens was involved in funding the rise of the Nazi Party. World War II, Siemens supported the Hitler regime and contributed to the war effort. Siemens had many factories in and around notorious concentration camps to build electric switches for military uses. Almost 100,000 men and women from Auschwitz worked in a Siemens factory inside the camp.
At the trial, Hanna explains how it was "just a job"...
