Vollmann makes use of many historical figures as characters including composer Dmitri Shostakovich, artist Käthe Kollwitz, film director Roman Karmen, poet Anna Akhmatova, SS officer Kurt Gerstein, as well as German general Friedrich Paulus and Soviet general Andrey Vlasov.
When World War I began, Paulus's regiment was part of the thrust into France, and he saw action in the Vosges and around Arras in the autumn of 1914.
In the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates about Stalingrad, he played the part of General (later Field Marshal) Friedrich Paulus.
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Historians have traditionally maintained that he was captured by the Germans in 1941 and died at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1943 after Stalin declined to exchange him for the captured German general Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus.
General Friedrich Paulus' 6th Army, and part of the 4th Panzer Army under General Hermann Hoth, was to advance across the Don river towards the city of Stalingrad on the Western bend of the Volga river.
Along with Bamler, Müller is known to have attended special training in Krasnogorsk late in 1944, and is believed to have been recruited by the Soviet secret services to spy on fellow NKFD members, such as Friedrich Paulus.