History is the favorite subject of American schoolboy Todd Bowden. He is a gifted student, the school’s hope. With fear and awe, he flips through the chronicles of a bloody past, studying the faces of nameless victims.
Suddenly the boy discovers that his neighbor is a ruthless Nazi criminal who managed to escape justice. In exchange for his silence, the teenager demands that the old man reveal to him the sinister secrets of the darkest page in human history. While his classmates study physics and mathematics, Todd studies the terrible science they don’t teach at school—the science of evil. His neighbor turns out to be a good teacher. In the quiet, frightened old man, the bloodthirsty guard of a concentration camp wakes again—Kurt Dussander. And for the gifted student, the time for the decisive exam has come…