Germany's answer to the American spectacular, Gone with the Wind, this film took over two years to make. No expense was spared in the attempt to make this movie as much an historical blockbuster as its American counterpart: thousands of troops, tons of explosives, and whole artillery units were filmed as extras in this drama, in which even 100 railway wagons of salt were imported to be used as snowflakes during the winter scenes. The film tells the story of a Pomeranian town subjected to the brutal attack of Napoleon's troops in his bid to conquer all of Prussia. (The movie was filmed on location in Kolberg)

Filmed over late 1943 and 1944, Kolberg drew upon the historical resistance of East Prussian townsmen against Napoleon in 1807 in arguing its case for total war against the Allies. Its bone-jarring climax, showing Kolberg bombarded into rubble and flames by French artillery fire, unmistakably evokes Allied bombing raids across Germany at the time. Even as the National Socialist rule was entering its last phases, it devoted lavish resources to staging Kolberg's spectacular battle scenes, detonating tons of explosives and diverting thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers from the front. Released amidst the chaos of early 1945, Kolberg was shown in a handful of Germany's still intact movie houses; today this apotheosis of the Aryan cinema survives as National Socialism's final statement to posterity. This version features painstaking restoration of the original Agfacolor in all its temperamental glory.