While he develops new types of rocket fuel and a gas which he believes to be a pesticide, his corporate superiors support Adolf Hitler in his quest to dominate Germany, and subsequently, the whole of Europe.
Director General Mauch and his fellow managers, who jokingly call themselves 'the council of the gods', are cleverly using the Second World War to earn a fortune, by supplying the Third Reich and - through their cartel with Standard Oil - the Western Allies.
After the war ends, the Americans acquit most of the directors from charges of crimes against humanity and secretly use their experience to produce chemical weapons for potential deployment against the Soviet Union.
[4] The characters in Wolf's story were modeled on the real directors of IG Farben, and even their names sounded much alike: the film's arch-villain, privy councillor Mauch, was based on Carl Krauch.
In 1949, the Socialist Unity Party's Politburo established a DEFA Commission to directly oversee all films produced in East Germany, after it found those made during 1946-7 as "lacking in statements on the matters of society".
Although DEFA director-general Sepp Schwab demanded that the film be in Socialist Realist style, only one common worker - Uncle Karl, played by Albert Grabe - was featured in the picture.
"[17] The Federal Republic's Catholic Film Service cited it as "noteworthy political drama made by DEFA, the finale of which culminates in a scene worthy of the peace movement à la Moscow.
"[19] At 1961, American critics Scott MacDonald and Amos Vogel cited it as a "hard-hitting propaganda film", but also as "the most important East German picture made up to date.
[21] Daniela Berghahn shared this view, writing that the film asserted that the capitalist economical structures brought about World War II, and that they remained intact both in the United States and in West Germany.
[22] Bernd Stöver claimed that the film was part of a propaganda campaign run by the East German government in the early stages of the Cold War, the message of which was not only that capitalism was aggressive by nature, but also that the post-Nazi magnates of the Federal Republic were planning to resume "Hitler's great crusade against socialism" in the immediate future, with the aid of their Western allies.
She also wrote that the film was the last to depict the horrors of the Second World War from the viewpoint of passive victims; henceforth, East German cinema turned to concentrate on the active resistance of the anti-fascists.