Vienna, around 1910. Factory owner Peter Manders and his wife Julia have just dropped his secretary Merk at home after a nice night at the opera, when the secretary does something very bold: he asks Julia, in her husband's presence, whether she'd visit him later that night. Julia nods in agreement and her husband sits, quietly dejected. Later, while Julia's preparing for her date, Manders does not stop her from going. He grabs his gun, but rather than going after her, he writes a farewell letter to her, explaining his behavior. You see, before he met his current wife, he sat in jail for murdering his first one. It's a dark part of his past he's kept secret from Julia, but now, through a chain of unfortunate coincidences, his secretary Merk has discovered the unspoken past and is using it to blackmail Manders. Now, history seems to be repeating itself.

Originally produced in 1944, censors demanded that changes be made in the movie to pass their restrictions. The changes were made; the censors approved the film; then changed their minds ten days later. The film languished on the shelf throughout the last days of the War, when it finally found its premier in 1945 in East Berlin!