In December 1941, just outside Moscow, Red Army Junior Lieutenant Nikolay Ivushkin (Alexander Petrov) is driving a ramshackle truck and trailer with a young private beside him. A German Panzer III tank appears over a hill and opens fire on them. Nikolay, who has been trained as an armor officer, maneuvers skillfully and they escape unscathed.T-34 2019
Nikolay is assigned to command a damaged T-34 tank whose commander was killed, with orders to delay the Germans’ advance with only the single tank and a small number of supporting infantry. Nikolay and his crew lay an ambush for a platoon of German panzers commanded by Klaus Jäger (Vinzenz Kiefer). Through a combination of guile and bravery, their T-34 destroys six panzers, but in a final duel with Jäger’s command panzer, both tanks are disabled, and half the Russian tank crew is killed, and Nikolay and driver Stepan Vasilyonok captured.
Three years later, in 1944, Jäger, now a Standartenführer, gains permission from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and General Heinz Guderian to recruit an experienced tank crew from Soviet POWs in a concentration camp to act as opponents for training the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Nikolay has been a prisoner for three years, and has refused to give his name, but Jäger recognizes his photograph from the camp records. Jäger proposes the idea to Nikolay through the camp’s interpreter, bilingual Russian prisoner Anya (Irina Starshenbaum). At first Nikolay refuses, but agrees after Jäger threatens to kill Anya.Nikolay picks out three other tankers from the POWs – driver Vasilyonok, loader Serafim Ionov, and gunner Demyan Volchok — to crew a T-34/85 that the Germans just captured. At first, the other tankers refuse to take part, but Nikolay says he has a plan to escape.