This film is based on the true story of Pastor Martin Neimuller, who was sent to Dachau concentration camp for criticising the Nazi party. The small German village of Altdorf in the 1930's has to come to terms with Chancellor Hitler and the arrival of a platoon of Stormtroopers (preceded by a flock of sheep - subtle). The Stormtrooper go about teaching and enforcing 'The New Order' but Pastor Hall is a kind and gentle man who won't be cowed. Some villagers join the Nazi party avidly, some just go along with things, hoping for a quiet life but Pastor Hall takes his convictions to the pulpit.

The advent of Nazi rule brings many drastic changes to Pastor Hall's peaceful community of Altdorf, Germany. At first, the pastor tries to cooperate with the arriving storm troopers, who have been commissioned to train the village folk about Nazi policy. He first incurs the displeasure of commander Fritz Gerte by declining to supply the names of Jews, Catholics and other residents of the community sought for discipline, and later by protesting the wrecking of shops owned by a man whose grandmother was a Jew, and by conducting a burial service for a townsman executed as a traitor. Soon many of his friends, swayed by Nazi propaganda, turn on the pastor and his daughter Christie. The commander restrains his men from taking action against the pastor, but tells Christine about the evidence against her father and promises to spare him if she will yield to him. She refuses, and the pastor is sent to a concentration camp, where he suffers lashings and beatings until the storm trooper, to whom Christine has promised to submit herself in exchange for her father's release, comes to tell him he is free to go if he will sign a pledge to preach no more against the regime. The pastor refuses and tries to rally the prisoners to resistance by his eloquence. For his efforts, he is sentenced to twenty-five lashes every morning. The pastor's escape is finally arranged by Christine and a friendly guard, after which Christine tries to persuade him to leave for America. The pastor returns instead to his pulpit to preach a final sermon while the troopers wait outside with guns ready to kill him.