Fritz Lang's only collaboration with his friend and fellow German émigré, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, for whom it was the only Hollywood project he ever managed to carry out. Brecht who needed the job for financial reasons was not pleased about the result. His intention had been to present the story of a collective of resistence fighters and accused Lang of making excessive use action elements only to tell a story of bourgeois nationalists.

Hanns Eisler won an Academy Award for his musical score.

As information on the Heydrich-murder wer not easy to come by in 1942, some of the films details are histrically incorrect.
In the film the Germans threaten to execute 400 people if the assasins are not handed over to them. In fact, the SS shot all male residents aged over 15 of the village Lidice from where two of the gunmen had fled to Great Britain. The women were deported to concentration camps, the children send to children`s homes. The village was looted, then burn down, the remaining buildings blown up, the entire area later ploughed up. 483 people were killed.