Goofs

A grenade is placed in the tread of the tank to immobilize it at 1.15.35. When Paul is running away from the flamethrowers at 1.16.50, the tread appears undamaged.

A German soldier/officer walks through water and a lot of mud to enter a barracks at night full of sleeping soldiers. He walks in and tells the soldiers to pack their bags & bedding, preparing the regiment to advance to the front firing position. However, his boots are apparently dry with no mud on them as he walks through the barracks.

The piece of the poster with the actress doesn't deteriorate when seen the second time, despite the humid weather. Moreover, the creases have disappeared and it's shown dry and smooth hanging from the nail in the trench.

As the tanks approach, Paul and comrades hurry along a trench lined on the rear-side with troops standing on a shelf and pointing their rifles. In the next shot, all these troops are gone.

After surviving a bunker collapsing during artillery, Paul is uncovered from the rubble and directly to his right is face-down Ludwig (who had been sitting to Paul's right prior to the collapse). Beside the corpse is a pair of glasses, the same Ludwig wore.

A few moments later, Paul is walking down the trench, far from the collapsed bunker, and finds Ludwig's body in the mud, different from the corpse under the rubble.

By November 1918, the war had evolved into movement over terrain that had not been fought over for years. It was called the Foxhole War by then instead of the trench war. The German army was in retreat over open ground, not in carefully prepared trench positions. Therefore the battle scenes during the Armistice meeting are set in a completely wrong type of landscape. The landscape is that of the later battle of the Somme in 1916, or of Third Ypres in 1917. On top of that, as seems usual with WWI movies, the trenches are too wide.

The St. Chamond tanks have wrong road wheels, obviously belonging to more modern, WWII era tanks.

At the end of the shell-crater scene, swifts are heard calling. It's November - and all swifts will have left northern Europe 3 months ago.

The film depicts German soldiers being surprised and killed by flamethrowers but it was the Germans who introduced the flamethrower to WW1. The Kleinflammenwerfer was created and developed by German scientist Richard Fiedler in 1910 alongside the Grossflammenwerfer, which was a larger flamethrower. However, these soldiers may not have seen flamethrowers, or even know that they existed.

At the beginning of the movie when the camera pans down from a shot of the bodies on the ground, and machine gun/rifle shots are heard and then seen exploding around the bodies, the shots don't seem to mysteriously hit the bodies and also the white smoke from the craters reveals the explosives use to simulate them, as no such white smoke would come from a real rifle/machine gun shot as the explosive is in the cartridge, not in the bullet.

The rifles at several moments in the film have no recoil.

When Paul goes to roll Ludvig over, he begins to roll over without Paul actually moving him. (It is most evident in his head, neck, and shoulders.)

In the final attack at the end of the film, when Paul takes cover behind a dead horse, the soldier behind him obviously has a plastic bayonet.

By the end, Germany's delegation to Rethondes appears indignant as the terms and conditions of armistice are quoted by Mathias Erzberger, namely forfeiting submarines, planes, weapons and so on; what is read there was not in the November 11, 1918 capitulation act but was imposed upon Germany next year in the Treaty of Versailles.

Many of the tree trunks used in the construction of the trenches show marks left by the feed rollers of a single grip forest harvester - a piece of forestry machinery not introduced until the 1980s. This is particularly visible when Baumer is collecting the ID tags of fallen soldiers.

Katczinsky is seen in the beginning of the film holding a M16 Stahlhelm with camouflage paint, which was part of German Army Order II, No 91 366 in 1918.