Trivia / Westfront 1918

• Actor-Shared Background: Gustav Diessl was a soldier during World War I, and was prisoner of the Allies for one year.
• Banned in China: In its home country, the film and the book endured a similar fate to All Quiet on the Western Front with the rise of the Nazis, with screenings being disturbed by SA militants. From 1933 onwards it was banned from German theaters for its pacifism and denunciation of war, which propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called "cowardly defeatism".
• Dueling Works: The movie was released the same year (1930) as the Hollywood adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. Both are pacifist movies set in the trenches of the Western front (both even name it in their title) during the middle-to-late stages of World War I and focus on the German army's point of view, each telling how War Is Hell. Most likely thanks to being a Hollywoodian production and being based on a much more well known German book to begin with (not to mention the fact Westfront 1918 almost faded into oblivion due to being banned by the Nazis as well), All Quiet on the Western Front ended up the most famous of the two by a very large margin.
• Write What You Know: The author of the book, Ernst Johannsen, was a veteran of the battle of Verdun and saw how War Is Hell quite up close.

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