A German student, Stefan, now finished with his studies, hitchhikes to Paris. There he meets a free-spirited American girl, Estelle, who he follows to Ibiza. The two begin a sad and dark path into heroin addiction.

A serial killer named The Shark is terrorizing London by killing his victims with a speargun and then, dressed in a scruba-diver's wetsuit, using the city's sewer tunnels to make his getaway.

The daughter of a notorious smuggler is raised as a boy by her foster mother.

Four young German naval cadets begin their military service in 1940; only one of them will survive.

Bank director Ernst Rose, owner of the Hamburg bank Traven & Co., is asked to go to the airport earlier than expected to pick up his daughter Silvia. When he arrives, he realizes too late that he has walked into a trap. He is overpowered by kidnappers and abducted. The gang around Alexander Ford and his men want to rob three and a half million from the bank vault at the weekend. But it can only be opened with four keys, which are in the hands of four so-called key holders. Under the direction of criminal Ford, all those involved become puppets in a game of life and death.

The action is relocated to occupied Athens after the Peloponnesian War (404 BC), where Mr. S. (= Socrates, played by Paul Hörbiger) proposes double marriage for men to the Athenian parliament and the four occupying powers for hidden personal reasons. Outwardly, he is concerned with providing for the many war widows. His deeper intention is to free the beautiful slave Euritrite as a concubine alongside the quarrelsome Xanthippe. The four occupying powers of the Macedonians (= US Americans), Persians (= Russians), Cretans (= English) and Corinthians (= French) are gently teased. On Socrates' advice, the law is adopted with an anonymous dissenting vote so that everyone at home can claim that it was him. Socrates can marry Euritrite. Xanthippe, however, favors the mutual infatuation of Euritrite and Socrates' student Plato (who had already invented Platonic love out of sheer desperation), and the other women also know how to spoil their husbands' pleasure in the new law.