The movie is based on true events and is the first major motion picture to dramatize the post-World War II expulsion of 3 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.

Juraj Herz has made this statement in describing his film and his reasons for creating it: These events happened more than sixty years ago, but their effects can be felt even today.

[1]The script was created on the basis of a book by Josef Urban, based on the fate of the real Hubert Habermann, a miller from Bludov in North Moravia.

[2] Herz complained that in 1945, the volksdeutsche were all expelled into Germany as traitors to Czechoslovakia while the Hlinka Guardsmen who had deported him to Auschwitz simply changed their uniforms, joining the Czechoslovak security forces and the Communist Party.

Koslowski takes a bullying tone toward August, forcing him to sell flour from the mill to a local hospital/spa that treats wounded German soldiers at cost.

The film's epilogue states in reality the forester Karel Březina accused the mayor of leading the mob that lynched the real Hubert Habermann, the owner of a mill in the Sudetenland, but none were ever prosecuted for the crime.

[3] In a mixed review, the critic Roger Moore wrote: "Co-adapter and director Juraj Herz skips through history with this story, passing over the beginning of the war, popping us in 1940, ’43, ’44 and ’45.

The horrific dilemmas Habermann faces, the accidents and rash behavior of others that he cannot cover for in the eyes of the black-uniformed Germans with machine guns all seems engineered to paper over his moral ambiguity in all this.

[4] In a review, the critic Jesse Cataldo wrote that the film offers: "... a portrait of a town that never feels completely real, devoid of normality or everyday activity, a depiction which undercuts the eventual emotional escalation...The majority of these characters are concerned solely with themselves, desperate opportunists for whom other people are barriers or distractions.

In this context the resolutely moral Habermann comes off as nearly saint-like, but his ethical purity achieves absolutely nothing, a stand that leaves him stranded on the ash heap of history.

Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the Army of Shadows mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn’t attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.

[5] In a review in The New York Times, Mike Hale described the film as: "As directed by the Czech veteran Juraj Herz in prestige-television style, the bulk of the film is a classically proportioned and tasteful wartime soap opera...The depictions of cosmopolitan Germans and mostly avaricious, bestial Czechs are likely to stir strong emotions among some viewers, but over all Habermann is more potboiler than political or historical statement.

A subplot involving Habermann’s half-Jewish wife sits awkwardly athwart the central story, supplying pathos and dangerously facile analogies.