• Hungarian-born actor
Oscar Beregi Jr (SS Captain Lutze), whose father was Jewish, had many screen roles as villains and 'heavies', and would have been familiar to American TV audiences of the time for his work in the popular TV detective series
The Untouchables, where he had a recurring role as thuggish mobster Joe Kulak. This episode also marked Beregi's second appearance in
The Twilight Zone—his first was as the leader of the criminal gang in the Season 2 episode "
The Rip Van Winkle Caper". • Alfred Becker, Lutze's supernatural adversary and judge, was played by distinguished Austrian-born character actor
Joseph Schildkraut. He won the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Captain
Alfred Dreyfus in
The Life of Emile Zola (1937), although he would have been best known to contemporary audiences for his role as the father Otto Frank in both the Broadway stage version and the
1959 film version of
The Diary of Anne Frank. •
Kaaren Verne, who makes a brief appearance as the hotel receptionist in the episode's opening scene (credited as "Karen Verne"), had enjoyed a flourishing career in the Berlin State Theatre before she and her first husband were forced to flee Germany in 1938. She eventually settled in the US, where she soon became an outspoken opponent of the Nazi regime. In the mid-1940s, she was married for several years to renowned expatriate Hungarian-born Jewish actor
Peter Lorre. • Veteran British-born character actor
Ben Wright (The Doctor) trained at
RADA with
Ida Lupino and worked on stage and screen in the UK before emigrating to the US in 1946. After becoming established in Hollywood, Wright's much-admired facility with accents and dialects saw him play a wide range of character parts in radio and on screen, portraying English, German, French, Australian, and even Chinese characters. He was also in "
Judgment Night". Additionally, he played the Gauleiter of Austria Herr Zeller in
The Sound of Music. He was also a noted voice actor, and performed featured voice parts in Disney's
101 Dalmatians and
The Little Mermaid, which was his final screen credit before his death. • In an archival audio interview, attached as a special feature to the episode in the
Twilight Zone DVD boxed set, series producer
Buck Houghton recalled that for this episode, the production was able to shoot the episode's exterior scenes in a large frontier fort set that had recently been built for the pilot for an unnamed Western TV series. Because that series had not been picked up by any of the networks, this very expensive set—which, according to Houghton, had cost US$200,000 (around US$1.6 million in 2016)—was then sitting abandoned on the
MGM backlot, and only required minimal redressing to serve as the episode's setting, the
Dachau concentration camp. • Houghton recalled that episode director
Don Medford was mainly known as an "action" director, but that he was chosen both for his ability to create effective "shock" moments, and for his willingness to allow emotional scenes to play out as long as he felt necessary. According to Houghton, Medford was also known for his meticulous preparation, although Houghton also recalled that Medford could become flustered if events during production (such as the unexpected unavailability of an actor) forced him to deviate from his production plans. • Houghton also heaped praise on the work of British-born actor
Ben Wright (who appears briefly as The Doctor at the end of the episode), noting that Wright had the ability to master any kind of accent or dialect convincingly, and this allowed him to play a wide range of nationalities during his long screen career. • The story was later adapted for
The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas starring
H.M. Wynant in the Oscar Beregi role. ==Critical response==