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25 years ago on Monday, the blockbuster “Titanic” premiered in the United States, kicking off a historic run that would go on to gross a record $1.85 billion worldwide and win 11 Oscars.
But 54 years earlier, in 1943, another film called Titanic was released. He made history in other ways—spreading Nazi propaganda, costing the director his life, and using a ship to film that itself sank, killing far more people than the actual Titanic disaster.
The story of the RMS Titanic has been told many times on screen, from Roy Ward Baker’s relatively accurate A Night to Remember (1958), made with input from surviving Titanic passengers and crew, to the animated octopus exploits of The Legend”. of the Titanic (1999) and the horror film Titanic 666 (2022).
The 1943 Titanic, built by the Nazis during the height of World War II to demonstrate the superior morale and cinematic prowess of the Germans, was actually the country’s third version against the disaster, following Night and Ice. (Shipwrecked into Icebergs). ‘ (1912) and ‘Atlantic’ (1929). With this latest retelling, the filmmakers attempted to portray the sinking of the ship as the fault of western imperialist arrogance.
The film doesn’t make this point subtly. Joseph Bruce Ismay, the English chairman of the White Star Line who owned the Titanic, is played with glee by EF Fürbringer, who looks like a villain from a western. At the ship’s banquet, all wealthy guests are announced with their fortunes. Ismay’s business friends watch, cackling about jewels, power, and profits.
It’s this single-minded obsession with the stock markets that sees the liner hurtling dangerously down Iceberg Alley as Ismay seeks to break records on the transatlantic crossing so his stake in the company will skyrocket in value.
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But it seems the Nazis were just as money-minded, as documented by Robert P. Watson in his 2016 book The Nazi Titanic: The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II. With a budget of 4 million Reichsmarks – the equivalent of around 180 million dollars today – the German “Titanic” was one of the most expensive films of the 20th century, but this is not reflected in the results on the screen. The ship, for example, is alternately tilted and level after the collision, and censorship by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who commissioned the film, might account for some of the awkward dialogue.
Filming began in May 1942 in a German-occupied Baltic Sea port and aboard the SS Cap Arcona, a former ocean liner seized by the German Navy. From the start there were signs of trouble. The film’s director, veteran Herbert Selpin, came into conflict with German naval officials by requesting more technically complex sets, a move seen as siphoning off funds from the war economy. Serving soldiers were removed from frontline combat to work as extras – and continued to harass the actresses.
Meanwhile, fog reduced visibility in the Baltic Sea; Goebbels ordered a central character to be rewritten; and German officials expressed concern that the heavily lit nighttime gunfire posed a bomb risk during Allied air raids.
The film took significant liberties with truth, notably by including a fictional German first officer, the heroic Petersen, played by Hans Nielsen. During the sinking, he and his German ex-mate Sigrid Olinsky (played by Sybille Schmitz) are the only passengers caught, with Olinsky calmly repelling English cads and Petersen rescuing several children, including a girl left to drown by her money-mad parents, who fled with suitcases full of cash.
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The film’s twisting of facts to suit the Nazi agenda led to major creative differences behind the scenes. Selpin, frustrated by the interference of military officials on set and the fact that the rushes had to be sent to Berlin for approval each day, was critical of the Nazi regime. He was denounced by the film’s screenwriter, arrested, interrogated by Goebbels and found hanged in his prison cell the next morning.
The film had to be completed by an uncredited director, Werner Klinger. The night before the scheduled premiere, the British Royal Air Force bombed the theater housing the film’s response copy.
Titanic finally made its public debut in November 1943. But his main critic – Goebbels – was decidedly unimpressed. He had seen the film in December 1942 and it was banned in Germany; it premiered in Prague instead.
The Minister of Propaganda believed the film’s panic, drowning, and death scenes would not sit well with audiences who endure regular bombing raids. He also feared that a film about a doomed ship run by incompetents might send the wrong message about the German war effort struggling in 1943. Goebbels’ compatriots also protested against Petersen’s ruthlessness, which contradicted the Nazis’ “Führer principle”.
Titanic was a commercial disaster, not to be released in Germany for almost 50 years, although its post-war anti-capitalist sentiment dubbed it into Russian and screened it in parts of the Eastern Bloc.
But the worst crisis came after the film was finished, and it had nothing to do with artistic decisions.
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After filming was completed, Titanic’s replacement boat, Cap Arcona, was briefly used to transport troops in the Baltic Sea before being reclassified as a prison ship and docked in Lübeck Bay.
On May 3, 1945, three days after Adolf Hitler’s suicide, it was reportedly holding 6,000 prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp, herded there by Nazis to hide their atrocities from the advancing Allies. (Some estimates put the number of prisoners at up to 7,000.)
Western intelligence had discovered that SS leaders were gathering in the German port city of Flensburg to plan a possible escape by sea to Norway. Believing the Cap Arcona was full of fleeing Nazi military elite, Britain’s Royal Air Force bombed the ship, which capsized and sank. Pilots then fired on survivors in the water.
The death toll on the ship, which was once masquerading as the Titanic, is estimated at between 4,500 and 7,000 people. The real Titanic claimed 1,517.
In a final twist worthy of James Cameron’s 1997 romanticized film, unhappy lovers were reunited at the height of tragedy. One of the 350 survivors of the Cap Arcona tragedy was German communist prisoner Willi Neurath. His wife, who was stationed nearby as a naval assistant at the Neustadt U-boat School, found her husband by sheer luck on the beach, exhausted but alive. Unable to swim, he survived by staying aboard the burning ship and was rescued by a British reconnaissance regiment after the Royal Air Force learned of the fatal error of their attack.