The Beautiful Spy
2013 film directed by Miguel Alexandre
The Beautiful Spy (German: Die Spionin) is a 2013 historical-thriller television film set in Nazi Germany shortly before the outbreak of World War II inspired by the few facts known about Vera von Schalburg.
Plot
Vera von Schalburg (portrayed by Valerie Niehaus) is a German prostitute working in Nazi Germany. In 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, Schalburg is arrested by the Berlin police. She is offered to work as a spy for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, instead of facing jail time. Completely unaware of the secret war preparations being conducted by her government, and unwilling to leave her teenage son who later joins the Hitler Youth, she accepts the offer.
She quickly meets and befriends Wilhelm Canaris (portrayed by Peter Prager), chief of the Abwehr, and is selected for a top-secret mission to Great Britain. When Schalburg learns of innocent Polish civilians being killed on mass in German-occupied Poland, she wants to leave. To prevent this, Abwehr agents led by Walther Luthmann (portrayed by Jochen Nickel) kidnaps her son, but Schalburg manages to track him down and go into hiding with him.
Realizing that Germany has lost the war, Schalburg moves to farm far away from the fighting with a male friend who becomes a sort of foster father for her son. Even though the war is long over by now, Luthmann, after confronting Schalburg at the farm, kills her for betraying the Abwehr during the war while in disguise as a common civilian.
“The Beautiful Spy” enters the record as 2013 film directed by Miguel Alexandre. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beautiful, film and directed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“The Beautiful Spy” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Beautiful, film and directed provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20649627. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Beautiful Spy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.