Joachim Gottschalk, who appears in this film, and who was a much beloved actor in Germany, married a Jewish woman, Meta Wolff, shortly before the Nazis came to power, and they had a half-Jewish son, Michael. The Gottschalks managed to avoid the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws and the rising tide of anti-Semitic violence in Nazi Germany, because of his immense popularity with the public. Then, in an extraordinarily unwise and tactless move, Gottschalk took his Jewish wife to a social function and introduced her to some of the prominent Nazis, who were present. Although the Nazis were charmed, propaganda chief Josef Goebbels learned about the incident and ordered Gottschalk to separate from his wife. When Gottschalk refused, Goebbels ordered the wife and child to be transported to Theresienstadt. Gottschalk insisted on accompanying them, which Goebbels tried to prevent by ordering him to report to duty in the Wehrmacht.

In November 1941, minutes before the expected arrival of the Gestapo, Gottschalk and his wife sedated their son and then committed suicide by opening the gas taps on their stove. Goebbels ordered that no mention of Gottschalk be made from that point on in the newspapers, but word got out anyway and millions of German women mourned his death. Because of Nazi censorship, most of his devoted fans never learned the circumstance of his death until after war's end.