For a long time, this little farce about mistaken identities, Staudte’s fiction debut, was missing from his official filmographies. This could be considered symbolic. Staudte’s first decade as a director, during which he learned the craft of filmmaking by working on a few documentaries and doing commercials galore, is rarely looked at seriously. That is a mistake, of course, as there’s a lot of Staudte in these efforts – his own documentary Zwischen Sahara und Nürburgring (1936) as well as his work on Ulrich Bigalke’s Deutsche Siege in drei Erdteilen (1938) and Richard Scheinpflug’s Schnelle Straßen (1937) testify to his life-long passion for fast cars, while the plot moves of Ein jeder hat mal Glück reappear in different variations, especially in his early features which often centre on stolen, hidden or ambiguous identities. Instead, critics focus on Staudte’s work as an actor in film and radio during these years, as his bit-player stints in some of the more notorious examples of Nazi cinema (Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß, 1940; Arthur Maria Rabenalt’s Riding for Germany, 1941) can be mined for virtue signalling… As if the auteur behind Die Mörder sind unter uns which was born from Staudte’s feeling of guilt over these acts of collaboration, needed someone to remind him of his weaknesses! As an artist, he would never be a coward again.

Olaf Möller