The film was commissioned to build East German opposition to the United States and support for the Soviet Union during the early Cold War.

His joy on returning home is interrupted when the mayor announces that the U.S. Army intends to destroy the village and to build an airfield on its lands, in preparation for a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

[1] Writers Jeanne and Kurt Stern wrote the draft of the script in early 1951, after reading a newspaper report about a protest against American military presence that took place in the West German village of Hammelburg.

A positive figure of a cleric, the village priest, was included in the plot; DEFA director-general Sepp Schwab had decided that it would be unwise to portray the church in a wholly negative light.

[3] Director Martin Hellberg, writers Jeanne and Kurt Stern, cinematographer Karl Plintzner and actors Eduard von Winterstein and Albert Garbe all received the National Prize, 1st degree, on 6 October 1952.

[6] Authors Antonin and Miera Liehm regarded the film as "one of the pinnacles of the propaganda art of its time" that managed to "circumvent the complete artificiality" of the Soviet pictures based on similar themes.

[7] Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad cited it as one of the Cold War films that presented the American troops in West Germany as oppressors.

The film now inspired resistance to the evictions; in one settlement about to be leveled down, a man was sentenced to six years in prison after exhorting his neighbors to "act as the protesters in The Condemned Village had."