Geständnis unter vier Augen (1954)

Hilde Schaumburg-Garden was a young journalist in postwar Germany. One day, she meets Gregor Marmara, a suave, worldly businessman. When he gives her a necklace, all of Hilde’s alarm bells start ringing. The piece of jewelry had once belonged to a collection of valuables she had left behind in Romania in 1939 with her father, who has since disappeared. The necklace eventually became part of a famous theft case. Hilde wonders how Marmara, who seems so very self-controlled, could have come to possess it. Hilde’s father once owned a factory in the Balkans, and when Germany’s fortunes in the war began to wane in the 1940s, in 1944 he entrusted the necklace and other jewels to his authorized signatory, Jorga, to deliver to his daughter. But none of the jewelry ever reached Hilde. Marmara tells Hilde that he bought the necklace from a black marketeer shortly after the war ended. The person entrusted at the time with transporting the jewelry to Jorga is said to have tried to murder the authorized signatory in order to get the jewelry. Hilde has no idea that Marmara is that very person: driven by greed, he turned into a villain, taking the jewelry from Jorga in 1944 and murdering him after the war. Hilde’s journalistic instincts mean she wants to solve the case for more than just family reasons. Dr. Prigge, a representative of the criminal police, becomes an important ally. More and more clues point to Marmara, although Hilde, who has fallen in love with the charming, foreign-looking man, initially resists the conclusion. In the end, the evidence she uncovers leaves no other possible conclusion about who committed the crime. But Hilde still loves the crook and therefore handles him “with kid gloves,” destroying all the evidence. Magnanimously, Marmara then turns himself in to the police.