LOGLINE
In a high-stakes power struggle at an Arizona WWII POW camp, a disabled American officer orchestrates a lethal trap by exposing a German traitor to his former U-boat comrades during a violent desert monsoon.

SYNOPSIS
Inspired by true events at Papago Park near Phoenix, The German Execution is a psychological thriller set within the confines of a World War II prisoner-of-war camp.

The story unfolds during a single, claustrophobic night as a desert storm descends on the barracks. The tension begins when Major Silas Thorne, a Jewish-American officer, and his resentful subordinate, Lieutenant Tobias Bigly, deliver a heavily bandaged prisoner named “Fritz Mauser” to the German compound. The camp’s ranking German officer, Kapitän Jürgen Wattenberg, a disciplined and dangerous U-boat commander, immediately suspects the newcomer’s identity.

As Bigly uses the storm as a pretext to board up the barracks and trap the prisoners inside, the German officers convene a clandestine military tribunal in the shower room. They strip away the bandages of the newcomer to reveal Werner Drechsler, a machinist’s mate from U-118. Drechsler is charged with high treason for sabotaging his submarine, stealing a codebook, and causing the death of his captain—acts Drechsler defiantly confesses were vengeance for his father’s execution by the Nazi regime. Though Wattenberg finds Drechsler guilty and sentences him to death by hanging, he stops short of the execution, attempting to manipulate Drechsler into a “suicide” to avoid official suspicion of his crew.

However, the true architect of the night’s chaos is revealed to be Lieutenant Bigly. Consumed by bitterness over his brother’s wartime death and his own physical limitations, Bigly admits to planting the evidence that exposed Drechsler. His goal was never justice, but to goad the Germans into a murder so he could “catch them” and finally be hailed as a hero.

The play ends in storm-amplified chaos… who really hung the traitor Drechsler?

Written by John Eden Heather (USA)