 Churchill wrote to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in May, asking about the veracity of the Berlin underground flooding by Hitler, and the latter replied it was "mythologizing" history.After the Foreign Office concluded the picture was "too one-sided to serve as an effective communist propaganda", it was released without cuts, with a long disclaimer that stressed "the advantages of living in the free British society" and that the Soviet screenwriters completely ignored the Western Allies' role in the war.The film became the most successful Soviet or foreign picture about World War II screened in the UK during the 1940s and 1950s.