Beyond this point, the necessities of Hollywood war propaganda asserts itself, shifting the focus to German atrocities. Hellman's screenplay provides for a complex treatment only for the German aristocrat and surgeon Dr. Otto von Harden (Erich von Stroheim), who, though dragooned into service, rationalizes Nazi atrocities. Milestone presents him in the Gothic style of German expressionism. Russian doctor Dr. Pavel Grigorich Kurin (Walter Huston), Harden's moral opposite and nemesis, ultimately dispatches his Nazi prisoner. Biographer Joseph Millichap observed that "Single-minded hatred of Fascist evil countenanced action, shooting a prisoner [the Nazi Dr. Harden] or shooting a mindless melodrama..."