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 The Longest Day (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.
Erwin Rommel was gaining his attack information from an American liaison at the British Embassy in Cairo whose messages the German secret service had decoded. He used the data from the liaison's messages to plan his attacks on the Allied troops, and in fact Adolf Hitler openly praised the fellow for giving the Germans information through his badly coded messages.