Campbell is imprisoned in an ancient Jerusalem jail, writing his memoirs while awaiting trial for Nazi war crimes.

American agent Frank Wirtanen approaches Campbell in Berlin and recruits him as a spy for the coming war.

Campbell and Helga form a loving partnership they call a nation of two, deliberately separate from the Nazi world around them.

Helga disappears while entertaining German troops in Crimea, leaving Campbell stateless and alone for the rest of the war.

American officer Bernard O'Hare arrests Campbell at the Ohrdruf concentration camp and a photographer captures their image together.

Wirtanen intercedes to prevent Campbell's war crimes prosecution, and Campbell is secretly smuggled out of Europe to New York.

Campbell carves chess pieces from a broom handle and visits his downstairs neighbor George Kraft, beginning a close friendship.

The White Christian Minuteman publishes Campbell's New York address, along with a threatening letter from O'Hare promising violent revenge.

Lionel Jones arrives at Campbell's attic apartment with associates and a woman he claims is Campbell's long-lost wife Helga.

The woman living as Helga reveals she is actually Resi Noth, Helga's younger sister, who impersonated her sister for years.

Wirtanen secretly meets Campbell outside Jones's building and reveals that both Kraft and Resi Noth are working as Russian agents.

FBI agents flood into Jones's cellar and arrest Campbell, Kraft, Resi, Jones, and the entire white supremacist group.

Resi places a cyanide capsule in her mouth and dies in Campbell's arms during the FBI arrest.

Campbell goes to neighbor Dr. Epstein's apartment and asks to be handed over to Israeli authorities as a war criminal.

Campbell receives Wirtanen's letter promising exoneration but decides to hang himself for the crimes he knows he committed.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. sits in an Israeli prison writing his memoirs, awaiting trial for the Nazi war crimes he committed as America's most effective wartime spy. Recruited before the war, Campbell broadcast virulent antisemitic propaganda while secretly encoding intelligence for the Americans, a double life that cost him his wife Helga and ultimately his sense of self. After the war, Wirtanen smuggled him to New York, where Campbell lived in hiding until a white supremacist newspaper exposed him and drew dangerous admirers to his door. When the woman Jones presents as Helga turns out to be her sister Resi, and when Wirtanen reveals that both Resi and Campbell's closest friend Kraft are Russian agents, the illusions sustaining Campbell's postwar life collapse entirely. The FBI raids the cellar where Campbell has been sheltered by white supremacists, and Resi dies by suicide in his arms rather than face deportation. With no one left and a letter from Wirtanen promising his legal freedom, Campbell chooses to punish himself for the crimes the world cannot seem to hold him to account for.

Howard Campbell's double life as a Nazi propagandist and American spy.

Guard Arnold Marx describes volunteering to join the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, escorting fellow prisoners to their deaths.

Campbell recalls meeting Rudolf Hoess at a Warsaw New Year's party, where Hoess proposes they collaborate on writing after the war.

Campbell writes a celebratory play about the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, titling it after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Campbell grows up in Berlin after his American father's job transfer moves the family from Schenectady, New York.

Campbell becomes a successful playwright in Berlin and marries Helga Noth, the daughter of the city's chief of police.

Germany invades Poland and Campbell's parents return to America, but Campbell and Helga choose to remain in Germany.

Campbell's parents die during the war, leaving him an inheritance that funds his solitary postwar life in New York.

On impulse, Campbell buys a wood carving kit and crafts chess pieces from a broom handle, seized by a need to show someone his work.

Krapptauer suffers a fatal heart attack while carrying Resi's luggage up the stairs to Campbell's attic apartment.

Campbell recalls his 1945 visit to Werner Noth, watching enslaved women pack wagons under Noth's armed supervision.

Young Resi hands her dog to Campbell to be shot, telling him flatly that nothing in the world means anything.

Resi presents Campbell with a trunk of his pre-war manuscripts she recovered from a theatre in Berlin.

A recording of Campbell's antisemitic radio broadcast is played at full volume during Krapptauer's memorial service in the cellar.

After being released by the FBI, Campbell stands completely motionless on the street outside, unable to make himself move.

Bernard O'Hare breaks into Campbell's wrecked apartment drunk, declaring it his personal destiny to destroy Campbell once and for all.

Before Campbell's present-day crisis, a lifetime of choices and encounters established who he became and what he lost. His childhood move to Berlin, his career as a Romantic playwright, and his marriage to the well-connected Helga Noth all preceded his recruitment into the machinery of Nazi propaganda. After the war, Campbell lived as a recluse in Greenwich Village, surrounded by war surplus and hidden from the world, until an impulsive act of artistic longing brought Kraft into his life and set his unraveling in motion. The people who surround Campbell throughout the story — the concentration camp survivors who guard him in Jerusalem, the aging American fascists who idolize him, the young Resi who loves him — each reflect a different facet of the harm his broadcasts enabled. From the playing of his own antisemitic radio recording at a white supremacist memorial to his paralysis on a New York street after everything falls apart, the secondary events of the novel build a portrait of a man who excelled at hiding until the world would no longer allow it. His final confrontation with a drunk and vengeful O'Hare, broken arm and all, captures the novel's bitter insistence that moral reckoning eventually arrives.

The backstory and supporting events that shaped Campbell's world.

Guard Arpad Kovacs reveals he is Jewish but joined the Hungarian SS, driven by contempt for Jews who did not resist.

Overnight guard Bernard Mengel tells Campbell he is the only person from the war who appears to carry a guilty conscience.

Campbell is nearly unmasked when Dr. Epstein's mother questions him about sharing the name of a famous Nazi propagandist.

Wirtanen argues that Campbell's idealistic Romantic plays prove he is the perfect man to impersonate a true-believing Nazi.

Campbell confides his true identity to Kraft, who reads his plays and enthusiastically urges him to start writing again.

Jones explains that his German subscriber network discovered Resi posing as Helga and paid to bring her to America for Campbell.

Robert Sterling Wilson, the Black Fuehrer of Harlem, privately tells Campbell he is using Jones's organization to organize his own uprising.

Campbell learns that the enslaved workers who overran Werner Noth's home hanged him simply because he appeared to be someone important.

Resi asks Campbell whether they can stay together if she continues pretending to be her sister Helga, and Campbell agrees.

In the Jerusalem prison, Campbell meets Adolf Eichmann, who cheerfully denies feeling any guilt for organizing the Holocaust.

Wirtanen reveals Russia's plan to bring Campbell to Moscow to publicly confess to prewar American and German collusion.

Wirtanen reveals that a Russian soldier found Campbell's manuscript trunk in Berlin and published the erotic novel under his own name.

Campbell returns to Jones's cellar and confronts Kraft and Resi directly, revealing he already knows they are both Russian agents.

Jones defends his close association with a defrocked Catholic priest and a Black man by insisting they all share the same essential belief.

Epstein's mother mispronounces Campbell's name as Kahm-Boo, which Campbell immediately recognizes as naming his hidden, undiluted evil self.

Mother Night is built on a series of discoveries and confrontations that slowly strip away the layers of illusion Campbell has constructed around himself. From his early conversations with the guards in Jerusalem — a Jewish man who joined the SS, a soldier who sees no guilt in Campbell's eyes — to Wirtanen's recruitment pitch and the near-exposure at Dr. Epstein's apartment, the novel establishes the fragile architecture of Campbell's hidden life from the very beginning. The arrival of Resi, the revelation of Kraft's treachery, and the unmasking of Russia's designs on Campbell compound his losses until he has nothing left to protect. Encounters with Eichmann in the Jerusalem prison and with Werner Noth's grim fate illuminate what Campbell has in common with those he considers lesser men, and what distinguishes him from them. The Jones circle's willful blindness, captured in Jones's casual defense of his ideological contradictions, gives Campbell a name for the evil he has spent his life embodying without admitting. It is only when Epstein's mother inadvertently names the hidden truth of his identity that Campbell finally stops hiding and chooses to face punishment on his own terms.

The key revelations and moral turning points in Campbell's journey toward self-reckoning.