As her photographs show, Vera von Schalburg was a strikingly beautiful woman. We only have partial information about her life. She was born in Russia in 1914 but the circumstances of her childhood and youth are murky or missing. She lived in Paris before WWII, was highly educated and fluent in many languages including English, French, German, Polish and Russian. She was the sister of Christian von Schalburg, a prominent Danish Nazi, who served in the Danish army, joined the Waffen SS in 1940 and was instrumental in the creation of a Danish SS unit. In her beginnings as a spy Vera may have been a Soviet agent. Shortly before the war she was recruited by the Abwehr, one of the Nazi intelligence agencies under the direction of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. For some time after France's defeat a German invasion of the British Isles seemed imminent, and she was sent to Scotland on a related mission. She was captured, switched sides and worked for the British services. Her life after the war and the circumstances of her death are somewhat murky as well.
Scriptwriter Annette Hess has taken what is known about von Schalburg and joined the dots with fictional (but highly plausible) material. The result is a coherent and powerful story. Acting is first rate all around with special mention for Valerie Niehaus playing the protagonist. Portuguese director Miguel Alexandre tells the tale at a brisk pace, and there are directorial touches here and there that make one feel he is hitting all the right notes, as in the masterful final scene. On the negative side, some details are sketchy (time constraints?). High production values: unobtrusive music and flawless reconstruction of time and place.
I also liked this movie as a unpretentious, unpreachy history lesson with relevance to the present, We are reminded, among other things of the Gleiwitz radio station false flag attack that was planned and used as a pretext by the Nazis to invade Poland and thus start WWII, and that the objectives of the German occupation of Poland were not only the murder of all Polish Jews but the decimation of all Polish intelligentsia: intellectuals, politicians, priests. We also witness the edgy, equivocal interaction between the Abwehr and Hitler's inner circle of sycophants. I suppose that these facts are known to German viewers but maybe no so much to us.
