Most of the adults are not given names in the film, instead being called Pastor, Baron, Steward, etc. This includes the narrator, who is only known as The School Teacher.
The children in the film are the generation of Germans who became Nazis. Michael Haneke has stated that while that is intentional, the ideas in the film are meant to apply not just to fascism but to any form of radicalism, including terrorism. For this reason, the film's subtitle, "Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte ("A German Children's Story"), is written in a unique German script and left untranslated, so that German audiences will regard the film as specifically about the roots of Nazism while audiences elsewhere can regard the themes as universal.
After it lost the Best Foreign Film Oscar®, a few articles were written exposing that the Academy voters for this category were not obligated to view all the films before voting.
The extras who played villagers were bused 1,000 miles from Romania, since no locals had the requisite weather-beaten faces of farmers of the period.
Michael Haneke wanted the environments to be very dark, so many indoor scenes used only practical light sources such as oil lamps and candles. In some of the darkest scenes, where the crew had been forced to add artificial lighting, extra shadows could be removed in the digital post-production, which allowed for extensive retouching.