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First days of spring 1945. Soviets stand on Oder river - the river of German fate, Americans celebrate victorious battles in Pacific. --- After many years of separation, operating in the heart of Nazi Germany, Stierlitz was relaxing in his favourite Berlin saloon, while his NKVD colleagues prepared for him an „appointment“ with his wife. --- SS-Standartenführer Max Otto von Stierlitz, officer of Amt 6 (6th Department, foreign counterintelligence) of Nazist Germany Security Service and direct subordinate of Walter Schellenberg, is actually a Soviet NKVD secret agent, Colonel Maksim Maksimovich Isaev, who has been operating under deep cover in Paris and Shanghai before his infiltration of the SS security service. --- The plot is driven by Stirlitz's (ultimately successful) attempts at thwarting negotiations between SS General Karl Wolff, representing Walter Schellenberg and Heinrich Himmler, and American intelligence operative Allen Dulles in Bern, Switzerland during the final months of the Second World War. The Dulles portrayed in the show, acting without the authorization of the President, is interested in reaching a peace agreement with Nazi Germany that would leave many Nazi institutions in place in order to prevent the rise of “Bolshevism“ in Germany and Northern Italy. The negotiations are conducted in secret and behind the back of Hitler and, more importantly for Stirlitz, the USSR. --- Historical background: The negotiations between Dulles and Wolff did take place in reality on March 8, 1945, codenamed both Operation Sunrise and Operation Crossword (“Sunrise Crossword“ in the film) and Soviet agents supplied information on them to the USSR. One of them was Kim Philby. Another agent of the Soviet Military Intelligence, dubbed as “a fantastic source, who received the first-class information from Germany“ by Allen Dulles, was Rudolph Rassler, working in Switzerland during secret negotiations. Inventing the image of Isaev-Stirlitz, Yulian Semyonov worked with the biographies of well-known Soviet intelligence officers: Lev Manevich, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Sandor Radó. But no one of them became a prototype of the film's main character. Stirlitz is the collective image, in which the author embodied all the best features of the intelligence officer.
