Die Flucht

[PART 2] The Mahlenberg folk flee the estate as the eastern front breaks down, soon breaking up into a German group led by countess Lena with mostly children and women, another of POW under Francois Beauvais, who finds her 8-year-old daughter Vicky hiding in a shed, hence wants to return her. Searching each other, they must fear both plundering Soviet invaders and vindictive retreating Nazi troops who spare deserters nor 'collaborators, such as Francois's men'. Shortly after they find each other during the Russian sack of count Rudiger von Gernstorff's estate, his son and heir Heinrich von Gernstorff arrives with his Wehrmacht unit survivors and assumes the command, claiming his fiancee Lean, who disappoints him by lack of Nazi loyalty and 'tolerance' to impish Francois, whom she must tell to leave after estate-born Hitlerjugend knave Fritz helped in the perilous crossing of the frozen sea. Spring 1945 the refugees reach Bavaria, where the locals only take them in on account of aristocratic ties, but conflicting loyalties clash. Heinrich looses Lena by executing deserters just before the capitulation rather then seeking a realistic future. Francois finds them, now an allied troops counselor on Nurnberg trials and building a new West Germany.