Featured 15,000 to 20,000 actual German troops in the battle scenes, even as Germany's eastern and western fronts were collapsing. The director tried to make the shooting longer to save them from being sent to the front.
Under orders from Reichs-Propagandaminister Joseph Goebbels, Wolfgang Liebeneiner had to cut several very expensive battle scenes, without director Veit Harlan's consent. The deleted scenes had a budget of two million Reichsmark.
After the movie was completed, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had many scenes cut out, because they might be too brutal for the people during the war. This includes many deaths of the people of Kolberg and the death scene of the Prussian Prince Louis Ferdinand. However, the promotion ads were already printed and couldn't be reprinted again, which is why Jaspar von Oertzen, who played the prince, is still mentioned in the ads.
Kurt Meisel, who was playing the pacifistic character of Claus Werner, was 33 or 34 when the movie was shot. In an interview in 1992 he said that he was happy to be in this movie, because it meant he wouldn't be drafted into the army and sent to the front and because it would allow him to play a character into which he could inject his real hatred for the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. However, much of his performance was later cut by Nazi propaganda minister--and the film's unofficial executive producer--Joseph Goebbels.
Much of the concept for the film came from the 1865 play ''Kolberg'' by the German writer Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910. No mention of this was made, because Heyse was Jewish.