See How They Run

In early November 1979, three elderly Holocaust survivors gather at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Benjamin Rabinowitz and Michael Ben-Iban, leaders of a secret Jewish defense brotherhood formed after World War II, meet with Elena Cohen Strauss, a wealthy American contributor. The brotherhood exists to remember the Holocaust, hunt those responsible, and guard against another genocide. Rabinowitz warns that the Fourth Reich is rising and requests hundreds of thousands of dollars to execute a final plan. Elena refuses, believing the proposed action would reduce them to the Nazis' level, and threatens to expose the group to the FBI. Just 174 days later, a plot called Dachau Two begins on four continents.

On April 24, 1980, operatives using World War II code names, including Housewife, Soldier, and Führer, hold a final planning meeting in the suburb of Scarsdale, New York. The next evening, Dr. David Strauss, a 37-year-old obstetrician at Mount Sinai Hospital, drives with his wife, Heather, to the Strauss family mansion for a party. The gathering is ostensibly to watch David's brother Nick Strauss, a filmmaker, appear at the Academy Awards. Heather, who is Christian, has felt like an outsider in the prominent Jewish family, but the extended clan embraces her that evening. Upstairs, David and Heather visit his 82-year-old grandmother, Elena, who controls the family's fortune. Too ill to join the party, Elena warns David about the dangers facing Jewish people.

That same evening, another operative calling himself Vulkan phones the New York Daily News and dictates a manifesto announcing that "measures are being taken against the powerful Jews." At the Academy Awards in Hollywood, Nick and his wife, Beri, accept the Oscar for best documentary for The Fourth Commandment, a film about 1940s Germany. A gunman storms the stage, declares he carries a message from Dachau Two, and kills Nick and Beri before shooting himself. As David watches the murders on television, Elena begins having a stroke. Intruders wearing swastika armbands burst through the doors downstairs. David is knocked unconscious. Upstairs, the Soldier shoots Heather as she shields Elena; both women die. The family is marched outside, and a swastika is burned on the lawn.

The surviving Strausses retreat to Cherrywoods Mountain House, the family's resort in the Shawangunk Mountains, under FBI protection led by agent Harry Callaghan. Consumed by grief, David throws himself into physical training and research on Nazi organizations, tracking networks such as Die Spinne and ODESSA that helped war criminals escape prosecution. He repeatedly tries to contact Ben-Iban but cannot reach him.

Alix Rothschild, a famous actress and Holocaust survivor, is also drawn into the crisis. Born Alix Rothman, she survived Dachau as a three-year-old; her mother was executed by an SS officer, and her father died at Buchenwald. Raised by relatives in America, Alix has been haunted by death-camp nightmares her entire life. After the Strauss attack, she travels to Cherrywoods, where David, her distant cousin and former sweetheart, is staying. The two reconnect and begin a romantic relationship.

Callaghan arranges for David to meet Rabinowitz, who has spent decades as a New Jersey postal worker while secretly uncovering how the U.S. government protected former Nazis. In a bar in Wallkill, New York, Rabinowitz suggests someone in the Strauss family seriously threatened the conspiracy. As they leave, Rabinowitz is shot in the head. David believes he is dead.

Events escalate. The Storm Troop, the group of operatives behind the attacks, forces a Nazi propaganda film onto network television, instructing viewers to honk their car horns at noon the next day. Across American cities, horns blare in a display of latent anti-Semitism. In Washington, the Führer reveals the full Dachau Two plan to the Warrior, a senior member of the Council, the brotherhood's governing body. The Warrior opposes the plan, but the other members have already approved it. His limousine explodes on a bridge, and the Führer orders the operation to begin. On a Pennsylvania farm, the Engineer tests the group's most devastating weapon: a device that compounds microwaves and channels them through building systems, turning enclosed structures into crematoriums.

David and Alix travel to London and then Frankfurt to retrace Nick's filmmaking steps. At the Ludwigsburg Center for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, they research suspects for the Storm Troop's leadership. They visit the Dachau memorial, where Alix finds the grave containing her mother's ashes. In Frankfurt, FBI agent J.B. Burns reveals to Callaghan that the Storm Troop is not neo-Nazi at all but a Jewish terrorist organization, an offshoot of DIN, a 1940s Jewish avenger group. It masquerades as Nazi to maximize public panic. Burns is subsequently killed by a Storm Troop operative.

Without David's knowledge, Alix secretly meets Ben-Iban, who is also Vulkan, at a Frankfurt restaurant. He tells her the Moscow operation is on schedule and lies about who killed Elena and Nick, blaming the Reich. Police surround the restaurant. In the chaos, Alix escapes, and David chases Ben-Iban through alleyways. Ben-Iban attacks David, choking him with a wire; David shoots and kills him. Alix vanishes from Germany.

Government officials inform David that the brotherhood itself killed Elena and Nick because they had broken the vow of secrecy. Dachau Two is assessed as a massive strike at the Moscow Olympics, and officials recruit David to assist with potential negotiations. He flies to Moscow with Callaghan.

As the Olympics open, the 29-member commando team converges on Moscow. They seize dormitory sections and capture hundreds of athletes as hostages. Alix delivers a televised address detailing unpunished Nazi crimes and Russian persecution of Jews. The demands call for execution of named war criminals living freely in Germany and Austria, payments from American corporations that followed the Arab boycott of Israel, and the release of Jewish political prisoners from Soviet labor camps. A 12-hour deadline is set.

David spots Colonel Ben Essmann, the legendary Israeli commando known as the Soldier, near Olympic Village and chases him into underground tunnels. Essmann overpowers David but brings him inside the hostage dormitory to meet the Führer, who is revealed to be Rabinowitz, alive after faking his death. Alix tells David she fears Rabinowitz and Essmann have shifted from justice to revenge. She explains that microwave generators built into the dormitory kitchens can kill everyone inside within minutes. David reveals to Alix that the group killed Elena, Nick, and Heather. She is devastated; she was never told.

As the deadline expires, Russian snipers open fire. Inside, Essmann activates the generators; the dormitory glows with eerie white light as athletes begin dying on live television. David finds Rabinowitz and shoots him. He and Alix enter the pitch-dark kitchen where Essmann operates the device. David kills Essmann with a white phosphorus grenade, then reverses the switches and shuts the system down.

In the aftermath, 24 athletes and 29 security personnel and bystanders die, far fewer than feared. In one dormitory section, a member of the group refused to activate the device. David and Alix vanish after the crisis; rumors place them in Israel, in a Soviet labor camp, or living separately, but nothing is confirmed. Nick and Beri's documentary The Fourth Commandment airs to an enormous audience. In December, Jewish avengers inspired by the Dachau Two demands hunt down and execute former Nazi war criminals in Brazil, Vienna, and the United States.