The Adventures of Tartu (1943)

In 1940. Captain Terence Stevenson is with the British Army in the bomb disposal unit in London, his primary job is to defuse them. Despite having no experience as a spy, he is asked by his superiors, because of his academic background as a chemical engineer and being fluent in Romanian and German, to lead a spy mission deep in the Nazi occupied territory. The Nazis have near perfected a formula for a new poisonous gas to use in chemical warfare, Stevenson's mission is to infiltrate the gas plant near Pilsen in the occupied Czechoslovakia where it is being mass produced. He must steal the formula to bring back to Britain, and blow up the plant before the Nazis are able to distribute the gas for their war efforts. He is to assume the identity of chemical engineer Jan Tartu of the Romanian Iron Guard. The real Tartu has been killed but the Nazis are unaware of it. To carry out his mission, Stevenson will require the assistance of the Czech underground and is given the name of a contact through which he is to work. Stevenson needs to improvise, most specifically because his contact is arrested. In this light, he has to learn who he can and cannot trust, especially among those with whom he is assigned to live: Anna and Pavla Palacek, the owner of the house and her daughter who works at the ammunition plant; Otto Vogel, an inspector the Nazis have assigned to be his guide; and Marushka Lanova, a beautiful young woman who has a sense of entitlement and who uses her feminine wiles to get what she wants, most specifically from Nazi officers such as Vogel who is in love with her. Conversely, those secretly working for the Allied cause may have to figure out if "Tartu" is really on their side.