In Lang’s seminal two-part film, the criminal mastermind Mabuse, a pure product of his time, takes advantage of the unrest of the era, wreaking havoc on the stock market and gambling tables with equal abandon. Targeting the decadence and depravity that marked the postwar period, Mabuse perpetrates crimes in a quest to be in ultimate control of the city, allowing Lang to clearly demarcate the ways in which institutional chaos can lead to tyranny. In Lang’s vision, even the police are viewed as a gang, when, in the justly famous finale, they storm Mabuse’s lair in a manner reminiscent of the postwar street clashes in which war minister Gustav Noske’s Freikorps, forerunners of the Nazi storm troops, put down the communist Spartacus uprising by murdering its leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.