Black Book

In October 1956, Ronnie (Halina Reijn), a Dutch woman married to a Canadian minister of religion, is on a tourist package trip in Israel. On a kibbutz she bumps into a schoolteacher, Rachel Rosenthal, whom she realises she knew during the Second World War.

The film then flashes back to 1944, and begins the story of Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Dutch Jewish singer who had lived in Berlin before the war and is now living in hiding from the Nazi regime in the occupied Netherlands.

When the house that she has been hiding in is destroyed, Rachel manages to escape and visits a lawyer named Smaal (Dolf de Vries), who provides her with some of her father's money so that she can flee, helped by a member of the resistance named Van Gein (Peter Blok). Rachel is reunited with her family and tries to flee by boat through the Biesbosch with other Jews from the Nazi-occupied part of the Netherlands to the liberated southern part of the country. However, in a trap they are ambushed on the river by members of the German SS, who kill them and loot the bodies. Rachel alone survives, but she does not manage to escape from occupied territory.

She becomes involved with a resistance group in The Hague, under the leadership of Gerben Kuipers (Derek de Lint), assumes the non-Jewish alias of Ellis de Vries, and dyes her hair blonde. Working closely with physician and fellow resistance member Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), she seduces local SD commander Hauptsturmführer Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) and obtains a job as a secretary at SD headquarters. There, Ellis recognizes Obersturmführer Günther Franken (Waldemar Kobus), Müntze's brutal deputy, as the SS officer who oversaw the massacre of her fleeing refugee party, and manages to plant a bug in his office. She falls in love with Müntze, who, in contrast to Franken, is not abusive or sadistic. He works out that she is a Jew, but does not care. She also becomes friends with her Dutch colleague Ronnie, who collaborates with the Germans, working for them, being sexually available to them (particularly Franken), and accepting stolen gifts from them.

Having worked out that it was Van Gein who betrayed Ellis, her family and the other Jews to the SS in return for a cut of the profits, some members of Ellis' resistance cell decide to abduct him in order to expose a suspected traitor in their midst. The plot goes wrong when Akkermans's chloroform fails to work, Van Gein fights back and is killed. Franken responds by planning to kill forty hostages, including most of the plotters, but Müntze, who realises the war is lost and has been negotiating with the resistance, cancels the order.

Müntze confronts Ellis as being a member of the resistance. She persuades him to search Franken's safe, which Ronnie had claimed contained the money, gold and jewels stolen from fleeing Jews (against SS regulations, since Franken is keeping the profits for himself). When a search of the safe by the commanding officer, Obergruppenführer Käutner (Christian Berkel), reveals nothing, the apparently angry and embarrassed Franken reveals that Müntze has been negotiating with Dutch resistance "terrorists" for a truce. Müntze is condemned to death and imprisoned, along with members of the resistance group who are to be shot as a reprisal for the killing of Van Gein. Ellis agrees to participate in a rescue attempt for the resistance prisoners only on the condition that they free Müntze too, and reluctantly the others agree. However, the attempt fails because their plan has been betrayed by the unknown insider, and all of the prisoners and rescuers, except Akkermans and another resister, are killed.

Ellis is subsequently arrested and jailed by the SD. It emerges that Franken has known about her and the bug all the time. He uses it to make the resistance group believe she is the Nazi collaborator, framing her for the catastrophic failure of the rescue operation. However, with Ronnie's help, she and Müntze escape and the two of them hide in the countryside.

When the country is liberated by the Allies, Franken attempts to escape by boat, but is killed by Akkermans. Ronnie, instead of being imprisoned and publicly shamed as a collaborator, latches on to the Canadian captain she subsequently marries. Suspecting Smaal is the traitor, Müntze and Ellis confront him, but he shows her the titular black book in which he had detailed all his dealings with the Jews he helped. He and his wife are then murdered by an unknown man. Müntze is arrested by the Canadians and Ellis is seized by the Dutch, who recognise her as a "collaborator", but not before she grabs the book. Müntze's former commanding officer, Käutner, now working with the Allies against the communists, convinces a Canadian colonel that an Allied occupation agreement allows the German military to discipline its own soldiers and Müntze is executed on the death warrant issued prior to the surrender as punishment for his negotiations with Ellis's resistance cell.

Ellis is held in a temporary "prison" for collaborators, but is rescued from public humiliation by Akkermans, now a colonel in the Dutch Army, who then tries to kill her with an overdose of insulin. She survives by eating a bar of chocolate to counteract the drug. It then emerges that Akkermans is the traitor responsible for the brutal death of her family at the hands of Franken and his Nazis. He has also murdered Smaal and Franken, taking all the money, gold and jewels stolen from the Jews.

Ellis proves her innocence to British intelligence and to the former resistance leader Gerben Kuipers by means of the black book, which shows that many Jews were brought to Akkermans for medical help just prior to their murders. Together, Ellis and Kuipers intercept the fleeing Akkermans, who is hiding in a coffin in a hearse which he has filled with stolen money, gold and jewels. Ellis seals the coffin's air vents using the edges of her family necklace, suffocating him.

The film then flashes forwards again to Israel and shows Rachel meeting her husband and two children and entering Kibbutz Stein, which a sign reveals was funded from recovered money stolen from Jews killed during the war. As the film ends, Israeli soldiers arrive to protect the kibbutz as the Suez Crisis begins.