According to the article "Hollywood's friends and foes" by Colin Shindler in the film history tome 'The Movie', this film " . . . though set largely inside a concentration camp . . . managed to avoid the mention of the words 'German' or 'Nazi' " throughout the whole movie.
Author Grace Zaring Stone used a pen name when her book was published to protect relatives living in Europe from Nazi retribution. Similarly, no composer credit was given in the film for the same reason, and some of the actors used fictional names. He forgot to mention that in this particular film there was the swastika, some people saying "Heil Hitler," fear, arrogant soldiers and a woman executed just because she said what was on her mind. This film was very anti-Nazi.
Several members of the cast of Escape (1940) were German natives who fled the country after Adolf Hitler came to power. Conrad Veidt, who starred in the silent German classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), went into exile in England with his Jewish wife in the early 1930s. He became a British citizen in 1939. He made his American film debut in Escape and soon after appeared in Casablanca (1942). Other cast members Felix Bressart and Albert Bassermann also fled Germany in 1933 and arrived in Hollywood by 1939.
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