An all-girl Catholic boarding school near Vienna for the wealthy Austrian elite and their children. The school is thriving, but faith is declining and the upper floors are deserted. The head of the institution, a young energetic nun, fights with ardor against this decline. Martha, 12, one of the nun’s favorite pupils, is a devoted girl who wishes to expiate the sins of the world. Encouraged by the nun, she is given a penance belt and taken to the abandoned upper floor.
When Ella, the rich daughter of a corrupt banker, escapes from her arranged wedding and hides in the trunk of a Bentley,she meets Richie, a small town crook who has just stolen the Bentley. Together they stage her disappearance as a kidnappingin order to get as much money as possible from her parents.
According to the Swiss documentary filmmaker Richard Dindo (1944), the media want to make us believe that Swiss non-alignment during World War II was only a thin veneer around Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitic feelings. This stirred his interest in the story of Paul Grüninger, a Swiss policeman who in the late thirties provided false travel documents to hundreds of Jews who had fled from Austria.
Horst receives the monthly pension from his grandmother. The only problem is, that she is dead. As a local politician wants to congratulate the grandmother to her birthday Horst "borrows" an old lady from a hospital nearby, not recognizing that he just kidnapped actress Elfriede Ott.
