Despite his ancestry, Schünzel was allowed by the Nazis to continue making films for several years until he left in 1937 to live abroad.

Reinhold Schünzel (or Schuenzel) started his career as an actor in 1915 with a role in the film Werner Krafft.

He was influenced by filmmakers such as his mentor Richard Oswald and Ernst Lubitsch, for whom he worked as an actor in the film Madame Du Barry in 1919.

He found that the government, first under Kaiser Wilhelm II and later under Adolf Hitler, interfered with his film projects, compelling him to leave in 1937.

He acted in Temper the Wind in 1946, and both appeared in Montserrat and starred in the Clifford Odets Broadway play The Big Knife in 1949.