In some senses Incident at Vichy was a companion piece to After the Fall, though this time without the personal dimension and focusing on an aspect of the Holocaust, a subject in Miller's mind because of his visit to Mauthausen and his attendance at the war-crimes trial in Frankfurt. Nor was he the only playwright to have been stirred by those trials in that the German dramatist Peter Weiss, whose Marat/Sade was one of the most striking productions of 1964, went on to write The Investigation, an essentially documentary play concerned primarily with detailing the guilt of the accused rather than, as in Miller's case, exploring the psychology of those chosen as victims.

In contrast to After the Fall, the concentration camp does not appear in Incident at Vichy. It is an immanent fact, a product of peripheral vision. Its existence creates the logic that determines the action which we observe and the surreal procedures which transform a man into a victim and his companions into collaborators. For, as Miller remarked, in a newspaper article written after his visit to Frankfurt, ‘the question in the Frankfurt courtroom spreads out beyond the defendants and spirals around the world and into the hearts of everyman. It is his own complicity with murder, even the murders he did not commit with his own hands. The murders, however, from which he profited if only by having survived.’ And there is the bridge between After the Fall and Incident at Vichy.