The film opens in July 1944 on the Battle of Tannenberg Line in Estonia, where a unit of 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) in the Waffen SS are fighting the advancing Red Army. A visit by a Nazi official, who hands out signed photographs of Hitler, attracts ridicule. The Soviet forces are superior in numbers of tanks and infantry and the German forces have to retreat through streams of civilian refugees. After a ferocious battle, the victors are a Red Army Estonian unit.