[2] He originally studied pharmacy and philosophy, but began a career in film after the first World War.
[2] Trotz's 1932 film Rasputin, Demon with Women was certified as "artistically valuable"; however, in 1933, Joseph Goebbels banned the film throughout Germany and ordered all prints and advertising materials to be destroyed.
Trotz smuggled both the original pictorial and soundtrack negatives to a farmhouse in Austria.
[3] At one point in 1933, he was part of the wave of German émigrés who fled to Paris.
[4] In 1936, Goebbels banned his 1933 film Ways to a Good Marriage, which depicted the path to happiness as advice based on the sexology research done by Magnus Hirschfeld, and Trotz fled to Spain in 1936.