In every detail it is true insofar as decency will permit.Paramount Pictures production chief Buddy De Sylva was inspired to make The Hitler Gang after he saw the 1941 Nazi propaganda film, Ohm Krüger.

We're telling the true story about Hitler and six other leading German gangsters … We're not going to exaggerate; instead we're going to use understatement on the theory that it will make the picture more realistic still.

Robert Watson was an uncanny match for Hitler, and he was surrounded by superlative character actors—many of them immigrants who had fled Nazi Germany.

Many of the well-known historic episodes such as the Munich beer hall putsch, the burning of the Reichstag, and the blood purge of 1934 are dramatically shown.

"[8]: 78 "There is little point in considering The Hitler Gang as entertainment in the accepted cinema sense," wrote a contributor to The New York Times, which regarded the film as a work of propaganda.

"As the most complete pictorial documentation we have to date on the birth and growth of nazism, it has a place unique, resisting comparison or qualitative judgment.

"[9] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times cautioned that "the emphasis in this picture is so heavily upon the 'Hitler gang' and upon the inside intrigues by which it gained and held its power, that the impression conveyed is that these leaders are entirely responsible for the Nazi state.

It means that the grave responsibility of the German citizens for what they have allowed has been neatly tossed onto the shoulders of a few ruffians, Army officers and industrialists.