Plot

During World War II, a peaceful French surgeon decides to ruthlessly exterminate an SS squad because of the atrocities they'd just committed in his countryside home and childhood village.

In Montauban in 1944, Julien Dandieu is a surgeon in the local hospital. Frightened by the German army entering Montauban, he asks his friend Francois to drive his wife and his daughter to the back country village where Julien has an old castle. One week later, Julien decided to meet them for the weekend, but the Germans are already occupying the village.—Jean-Yves Simon <simon@wotangate.micro.ti.com>

In World War 2, a doctor is weary of the German army in his village and works to fulfill his duties as a doctor to help wounded resistance fighters despite the threat of retribution. As things get worse, he sends his wife and child out to his property, a remote castle, with intentions to follow shortly after and join them.

The next act is where Noiret's character arrives in the village nearby his estate and finds the population missing with evidence of something wrong had happened. He soon encounters a German soldier and narrowly avoids death or capture. Suspecting the worst, he finds that his wife and daughter had been murdered by a small Nazi group who are holed up in his castle, while waiting for orders to return the the front. They are brutal as evidenced on how they killed Noiret's family. As he grieves of his loss, he finds that the Nazis are relaxing as much as they can while they wait to return to war, using his home furnishings and belongings to add to their comfort.

The rest of the movie is pure vengeance, mixed with flashbacks of his loss, while he methodically takes down each soldier one by one, using hidden passages, secret rooms to hide in and, at one point, uses his old rifle. The Nazis ruthlessly pursue him only to be foiled at a disadvantage of not knowing their surroundings.

The war in that area is ending soon, and as Noiret's character finally finishes off the last of the Nazis, the French resistance arrives to find the slaughter that had gone one.

Alternate title: Vengeance, One by One.