Die Zeit der Schuldlosen (1964)

The film is set in a country suffering under a dictatorship. A group of resistance fighters plans and carries out an assassination attempt on the dictator. However, the attempt fails, and one member of the group is arrested. The dictator’s henchmen know he cannot have acted alone, so they torture him. The pressure on the prisoner increases when the dictator has nine innocent men arrested and put in the same cell as him. They are told to do everything they can to force the names of his co-conspirators out of him; only then will they be released. The methods range from torture to soothing persuasion, but the prisoner keeps silent. Eventually, they kill him and are released from prison. Years later, the dictatorship has collapsed and the country is free again. But the resistance fighter’s murder has not been forgotten. The nine men stand trial. None admits to the murder; instead, they do everything they can to portray it as a joint act, offering moral justifications for it. The trial reaches a verdict only when the least intelligent man admits he is guilty of the crime. There is just one problem with the verdict: this man did not commit the murder at all.