Colonel Stok, a Soviet intelligence officer responsible for security at the Berlin Wall, appears to want to defect but the evidence is contradictory. Stok wants the British to handle his defection and asks for one of their agents, Harry Palmer, to smuggle him out of East Germany.

After his wife's accidental death, the once successful pop singer Eric Kersten and his son Peter retired to Lake Maggiore. He spends his time painting pictures that he sells to tourists. One day he meets the pretty Eva, who looks very much like his late wife. He falls in love with her without knowing that his producer sent her to bring him back to music.

Based on a one act play in five scenes by Wolfgang Borchert, "Draußen vor der Tür" depicts the return of a former German soldier from the Eastern Front, to post-WWII Germany and the sobering realities of de-nazification and "peacetime."