It’s 1943 but delicious Christmas goodies are still on sale at the Wilms Bakery – gingerbread men, cream cakes, spiced biscuits, printen, ginger nuts, cakes, marzipan and eclairs … In one short storyline, Piefke the apprentice falls asleep and dreams that the brownies are nibbling at the gingerbread house. Towards the end, we see the presents on the gift table. In the films Der Weihnachtsbäcker (The Christmas Baker) and Pumpernickel, prisoner-of-war Pierre Lelong had a dual function: he was the actor and indeed an assistant baker in the Wilms’s business. During the Allied Occupation, he managed to save Elisabeth Wilms’s camera from confiscation during a house search by hiding it under the floorboards. Apprentice Piefke died during the Volkssturm defence – the German national militia formed in the last days of the Second World War.