The Captain from Köpenick (1945 film)

The play was based on the true story of Wilhelm Voigt, a German ex-convict who masqueraded as a Prussian military officer in 1906 and became famous as the Captain of Köpenick.

In the intervening years Oswald had fled Nazi Germany for France, then the United States; this was his first American film.

When Voigt sees wanted posters offering a reward for the capture of the perpetrator of the Koepenick Caper, he goes to the chief of police, confesses, and returns all the money.

The police in the station all erupt in fits of laughter, offer him drinks, and congratulate him for the best practical joke they have ever heard of.

[1] The Charleston Daily Mail reported that The Captain Of Koepenick is in production a second time, but although "Oswald is attempting to make the film exactly as before ... now none of his German comics can open their mouths without uttering something with a political meaning.

As U.S. audiences had a hard time relating to themes of Prussian militarism, subservience and lack of democracy, the film went without a distributior for many years and only premiered at the beginning of 1945".

Alas, the story of a simple shoemaker [...] up against the Prussian mentality of authoritarian militarism and bureaucratic obedience, the desperation of the permitless worker rejected over and over, all these were foreign to pre-war America in 1941.