 In banning the film, Goebbels stated that the film "showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence", and that the film posed a threat to public health and safety.Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, whereas his wife and screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the NSDAP in 1940.They soon divorced.