August Kern only managed to shoot most of the action scenes of this drug smuggling adventure/melodrama. They involved a group of expert skiers known as "the white devils" - hence the title. It is estimated that Kern had about 5000 m. of footage in the can when the fatal accident that put an end to the project happened.
Incredibly, Kern and the co-producing companies clung to their project and tried to restart shooting only one month later, in March 1935, around Arosa, in another part of Kanton Graubünden. This time, they had to stop because of the lack of snow.
This Swiss-German co-production , with plans for a parallel French version, remained unfinished and thus unreleased. In February 1935, an avalanche near Pontresina in Kanton Graubünden, Switzerland, killed the actor Beni Führer and Maria Kern, wife of producer, screenwriter and 2d. unit director August Kern. The nominal directors Alfred Abel and Serge de Poligny, as well as most of the main actors, had not yet started to work and the project got shelved, despite desperate efforts by Kern to revive it until 1940.