In Southern California in 1984, 16-year-old high school student Todd Bowden discovers that his elderly neighbor, Arthur Denker, is in reality Kurt Dussander — a former Sturmbannführer in the SS who is now a fugitive war crime hiding from justice. Todd blackmails Dussander by threatening to turn him in to the police. However, the teenager is fascinated with Nazi atrocities perpetrated during World War II, and forces Dussander to share disturbing stories of what it was like working at Nazi extermination camps, and how it felt to participate in genocide.