Screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, Lubitsch's collaborator on such screenplays as The Merry Widow (1934) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940), declined to write for this project. He later explained that "I didn't have it in me to make gags about the Nazis in 1941."

In a scene where Polish gravestones are destroyed by German bombing, one of the stones bears the name of "Benjamin Kubelsky," which was Jack Benny's birth name.

When Benny's father went to see the film, he was outraged to see his son in a Nazi uniform and stormed out of the theater. When Benny explained that it was satire and coaxed him back in to see the rest of the film, he loved it and ended up seeing it 46 times!

Benny agreed to let Carole Lombard have top billing after she pointed out to him that, after all, "You already have all the lines."

Lombard was delighted to be working with handsome young leading man Robert Stack, who had been a friend from the time he was an awkward adolescent.

Sig Ruman - who plays Ehrhardt and is constantly calling for his adjutant, Sergeant Schultz - plays a character called Sgt. Schultz in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953).

Benny later said that in his entire film career he had liked only three of his movies - and had "loved" only one: To Be or Not to Be.

Quotes from To Be or Not to Be:

Bronski (playing Hitler): "Heil myself!"

Col. Ehrhardt: "I saw him on the stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war... What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland."

Maria: "Think of me being flogged in the darkness, screaming; suddenly the lights go on and the audience discovers me on the floor in this gorgeous dress!"

Siletsky: "It's nothing alarming. It's only Shakespeare!"

Maria: "Lieutenant, this is the first time I've ever met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes."

Siletsky: "They call you Concentration Camp Ehrhardt."
Joseph (disguised as Col. Ehrhardt): " Ha ha. Yes, yes...we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping."

Maria: "It's becoming ridiculous the way you grab attention. Whenever I start to tell a story, you finish it. If I go on a diet, you lose the weight. If I have a cold, you cough. And if we should ever have a baby, I'm not so sure I'd be the mother."

Joseph: "Wait a minute. I'll decide with whom my wife is going to have dinner and whom she's going to kill."

Siletsky: "Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?"
Maria: "I prefer a slow encirclement."

Col. Ehrhardt: "They named a brandy after Napoleon, they made a herring out of Bismarck, and the Fuhrer is going to end up as a piece of cheese!"

Joseph: "Well, Colonel, all I can say is... you can't have your cake and shoot it, too."

Maria: "You're the greatest actor in the world. Everybody knows that, including you."

Compiled by Roger Fristoe