Portrait of fighter pilot and nazi-icon Franz von Werra, who after being shot down over England in 1940, spend some time as POW in Canada, from where he escapes to the US who at the time were not yet involved in the war. Via South America he returns to Berlin where he becomes one of the stars of nazi propaganda. In autumn 1941 on a test flight he crashes into the sea - a mysteroius accident.
Director Schweizer tells Werra's story from its very beginning: Goebbel's acclaimed 'son of our people' was a born Suiss from Leuk in Wallis. His depleted parents give up him and his sister Emma for adoption in 1915. But soon their new German family faces financial trouble. This hardship welds together the two chldren. Their abundant correspondence is one of the film's main sources.
For young Franz becoming a fighter pilot is a way of personal advancement; a mixture of sport, war games, individualism and career. Only today we know that his heroic deeds which made him an admired and celebrated commander of a fighter aquadron, were at least in part fake.

In 1957, Werra's life is brought to the big screen under the title "The one that got away" (Roy Baker, GB, 1957). Hardy Krueger, a world travelar himself and filmicly connected to flying since having acted in Alfred Weidenamann's "Junge Adler" (Young Eagles, Germany 1944) plays the main character. Krueger plays a blond freedom-loving boy without any affinity to nazism at all. It will be his break through to Hollywood.

Director Schweizer confronts the biography of a young man who during the nazi period got ahead and became a pop-idol, with the biography of the actor who embodied him on screen in the post-war period and who because that role advanced his own career.

Schweizer uses historic fotage, scenes from "The one that got away" as well as interviews with Hardy Krüger und former fighter pilots without morally interpreting the events they report.