Herman Shumlin was a prolific Broadway theatrical director and theatrical producer, beginning in 1927 with the play Celebrity and continuing through 1974 with a short run of As You Like It, notably with an all-male cast. He also directed two movies, including Watch on the Rhine (1943), which he had first directed and produced on Broadway in 1941.

The Deputy, a Christian tragedy, also published in English as The Representative , is a controversial 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. The play's implicit censure of a venerable if controversial pope has led to numerous counterattacks, of which one of the latest is the 2007 allegation that Hochhuth was the dupe of a KGB disinformation campaign, later confirmed by both the Venona Project and Mitrokhin Files in declassification of the Soviet disinformation campaign Operation Seat 12. The Encyclopædia Britannica assesses the play as "a drama that presented a critical, unhistorical picture of Pius XII" and Hochhuth's depiction of the pope having been indifferent to the Nazi genocide as "lacking credible substantiation.". However, it has since been discovered that Pope Pius XII seems to have known about concentration camps.