Robert Siodmak's film is based on the true story of a postman who, deploring the killing of youth in the late stages of World War II, wrote a letter to his former schoolmate Hermann Göring asking him to bring the war to an end. The film, cowritten by popular novelist Johannes Mario Simmel, is the tale of a simple man who survives his open-minded and honest but disastrous letter only because Göring declares him medically insane. What saves the hero in wartime damns him afterwards, as he is forbidden from returning to his job. The film offers ironic insight into the mechanisms of German bureaucracy, during the war and after-alas, not such a big difference. The postman is played by Heinz Rühmann, one of the most popular German screen actors of the fifties, the embodiment of the average, ordinary man on whom a pitiless destiny plays nasty tricks.