Innsbruck, Austria, December 1944. The night is bitterly cold as a solitary black car moves silently through the snow-lined streets of the city. Behind the wheel is a Gestapo driver. In the back seat, two young boys huddle together. Brothers, aged four and two. Their destination: Wiesenhof, a Nazi orphanage. There they will be given new names, new identities, new lives. This ensures they will be almost impossible to trace.
Berlin, Germany, One month earlier. Urlich von Hassell, former ambassador to Italy and a key member of the German Resistance, is executed for his involvement in an assassination plot against Hitler. As he goes to the gallows, he thinks of his daughter, ensconced in the ancestral castle of her Italian husband, and her two young sons. It is only a matter of time before the Nazis get to her.