He filmed on locations in Berlin and intended to convey the reality in Germany the year after its near total destruction in World War II.

"[3] Twelve-year-old Edmund Köhler lives in devastated, Allied-occupied Berlin with his ailing, bedridden father and his adult siblings, Eva and Karl-Heinz.

Afterward, Edmund tags along as the young man Jo steals 40 marks from a woman by pretending to sell her a bar of soap.

Jo gives Edmund some of his stolen potatoes and leaves the inexperienced boy with Christl, whom another member of their gang describes as a mattress that dispenses cigarettes.

After Mr. Köhler takes a turn for the worse, Henning tells Edmund that life is cruel and that the weak should be sacrificed so that the strong can survive.

He ascends the ruins of a bombed out building, and watches from a hole in the wall as they take his father's coffin away across the street.

[4] Rossellini then returned to Rome and secured funding for the film from the French company Union Générale Cinématographique and his friends Salvo D'Angelo and Alfredo Guarini.

Rossellini found Ernst Pittschau sitting on the front steps of a retirement home and discovered that he had been a silent film actor forty years earlier.

Other smaller parts were cast with such people as a former Wehrmacht general, an ex-wrestler, a literature and art history professor, a model and a group of children that were bored of living on the streets.

[10] When Rossellini went to Rome for a week in the middle of shooting to spend time with his then mistress Anna Magnani, Carlo Lizzani directed some scenes in his absence.

In mid-September location shooting in Berlin wrapped after 40 days and the production moved to Rome on 26 September 1947 to film the interior scenes.

By November the previously malnourished Germans had gained a noticeable amount of weight while in Rome and had to be put on crash diets so as to retain continuity with their earlier scenes.

After filming in Rome was complete most of the German actors didn't want to go back to Berlin and a few ran away to the Italian countryside.

Rossellini stated that he wanted to "tell a story of a child, of an innocent creature which a distorted 'utopian' education induced to commit murder in the belief that he was performing a heroic gesture.