Erwin Rommel's widow, Lucie Marie Rommel acted as a technical consultant and adviser to this movie. She was played by Jessica Tandy in the film itself. Mrs. Rommel lent the production some of her husband's personal artifacts and liaised with Nunnally Johnson, the film's producer and screenwriter. As Frau Lucie Maria Rommel, Mrs Rommel later also acted as a military consultant to the film Le Jour le plus long (1962) made by 20th Century-Fox, the same studio that produced this movie.
The extent to which Erwin Rommel actually supported Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology is still widely disputed.
The success of the film was instrumental in allowing the public rehabilitation of the Wehrmacht and West German rearmament during the Korean War.
Between 1941 and 1945, Karl Strölin was at least partly responsible for the deportation of more than 2,000 Jews from Stuttgart Nordbahnhof to the concentration camps. With few exceptions, all were killed in the Holocaust. Strölin remained unrepentant about his actions after the war, despite being subjected to denazification.
Despite what Karl Strölin says to Rommel, the decision not to attempt an invasion of the UK in 1940 was not a mistake, as it would have been impossible without aerial and naval superiority. In any case the Royal Navy would have continued the war from Canada. It is uncertain whether Hitler really intended to invade the UK, as by July 1940 the OKW was already preparing for Operation Barbarossa (under the code-name Operation Otto). In June 1940 the Soviets had overrun the Baltic States and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Since this put Ploesti - where nearly two-thirds of German oil came from - a two-day journey by tanks from the new border, Hitler started planning Barbarossa. Operation Sea Lion was designed for an invasion of the UK, but the OKW and Hitler himself had serious doubts as to its feasibility. Adolf Galland and Gerd von Rundstedt believed Sea Lion was a deliberate bluff to put pressure on the British government to accept Hitler's peace offers while the Axis prepared for Barbarossa.