George Zucco and Henry Daniell both play villains in the film. Zucco earlier played Professor Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Daniell later played Moriarty in The Woman in Green.
The dubbed German version released in 1959 removed all Nazi references from the dialogue. The story of this edited version is about gangsters trying to get hold of a secret medicine formula that could be dangerous if in the wrong hands.
The fifth of fourteen films based on Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson.
This was the third Sherlock Holmes feature produced at Universal. It was the second to be directed by Roy William Neill, and the first film in which he took over as the series producer.
Uniquely, Holmes and Watson do not appear until the second reel of the film.