up the German General Staff—eliminate all German industry used for military production--bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment—wipe out the Nazi Party and Nazi laws from the life of the German people—Germany must never again disturb the peace of the world." This appears to be a paraphrase of the statement made after the February 1945 Yalta Conference. Film critic Michael Atkinson observes: “...for most of the world in early 1945 the concentration camps were still just a rumor, but here characters talk in ominous terms about Dachau and Birkenau, whose gas chambers could kill "6,000 people in 24 hours!", in a movie that hit theaters one month before Auschwitz and Dachau were liberated and exposed to the world.” According to a press release, Andrea King and Faye Emerson were coached in their German accents by Trude Berliner, a refugee who had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Technical advisor Roger Neury was identified as the maître d'hotel at the Mocambo nightclub in West Hollywood, California, and former maître d' at Berlin's famous Adlon Hotel before the war. Elliott Roosevelt, son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, married Faye Emerson during filming, on December 3, 1944. According to Robert Osborne, this resulted in Emerson receiving top billing, switching places with King. Reception Variety gave the film its highest praise, succinctly describing it as “socko.” On the other hand, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther chastised the picture's creators for presenting sympathetic German characters, in both his March 3, 1945, review of the film and in a March 11, 1945, article headlined “EIN VOLK IN FILM”, in which he takes the makers of Lifeboat, The Seventh Cross, Tomorrow the World and this film to task for “giving our very real enemies...a sizeable break.” Writing for TCM, film critic Michael Atkinson talks about the film's departure from Hollywood's rigidly anti-German approach at the time. “(Baum) apparently felt no need for broad-brush stereotypes, and neither does Hotel Berlin – remarkably, here we have one of the very few Hollywood films made and set during WWII in which every single character, sympathetic, villainous or caught somewhere in the middle, is German... making its case that the German people in general (should be) regarded as victims as well... Hotel Berlin gives extraordinary depth and empathy to every German on its docket.. Still, the centerpiece of Hotel Berlin might belong to Lorre, who has an