“Titanic cost Berlin an estimated 4 million Reichsmarks (roughly equal to $180 million today) making it one of the most expensive films of the 20th Century.”
FOR MORE THAN a century, the RMS Titanic has been the subject of almost interminable fascination. In fact, over the years the story of how the supposedly “unsinkable” ocean liner foundered in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage has been the focus of no fewer than a dozen feature films. But perhaps the unlikeliest of cinematic portrayals of history’s most notorious maritime disaster came out of Nazi Germany at the height of World War Two.
The 1943 film was the brainchild of Hitler’s own propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Of course Goebbels’ Titanic featured all the classic elements of the story: the ship putting to sea without enough lifeboats; the skipper, Edward J. Smith, ordering engines to full speed despite the warnings of icebergs; the officers and crew ushering the wealthiest passengers to safety leaving hundreds of steerage-class ticket-holders to perish. It’s all in there.
But the chief Nazi spin-doctor also saw the disaster as fertile ground upon which to fashion a narrative of British greed, hubris and folly.
The villains in the Third Reich’s rendition include everyone from crooked White Star Liner execs and incompetent officers who put thousands in peril by their desire to break speed records to haughty English first-class passengers who cravenly stampede for the lifeboats at the first sign of trouble.
Of course, the heroes and heroines of the film all just happen to be German — not the least of which is the fictional protagonist, a dashing first officer named Petersen who leaps into action when disaster strikes. Backing him up is an assortment of wholesome Volksdeutsche–type passengers who do their utmost during the crisis, while others scurry to save themselves.
Titanic cost Berlin an estimated 4 million Reichsmarks (roughly $180 million today) making it one of the most expensive films of the 20th Century. In fact, the movie’s final bill was proportionally greater than the price tag of the real life ship RMS Titanic, which would cost about $174 million in 2017 currency.
The movie also featured an all-star cast complete with hundreds of extras, including a number of officers and sailors of the actual Kriegsmarine. It was shot on location in the Baltic port of Gdynia, Poland using one of the largest ocean liners of Weimar Germany as the set: the SS Cap Arcona. Ironically, this stand-in ship was herself lost in the closing days of World War Two after being attacked by Allied warplanes. Tragically, the stricken vessel was carrying 5,000 concentration camp inmates and POWs.
Production of Titanic, which took place in the summer of 1942, was plagued with difficulties, not the least of which was Allied bombing raids on port facilities near the filming locations. And the problems didn’t end there. The German naval officers who acted as the movie’s technical advisors spent much of their time on set romancing the female cast members, something that drove the director, Herbert Selpin, to distraction.
During one heated blowout, the 38-year-old filmmaker launched into tirade blaming the project’s many problems on the military and even the Nazi regime itself. He was subsequently denounced by the movie’s screenwriter and arrested. After refusing to atone to for his outburst, Selpin was later found hanging in his cell by his own suspenders in an apparent suicide. It was widely rumoured in the German film community that Gestapo agents, acting on Goebbels’ personal orders, strangled Selpin and then strung up his corpse. A new director was assigned to the project and the film was completed and ready for release in November, 1943.
Amazingly, the Nazi Titanic would never be seen by German audiences, at least not in wartime. After a premiere in Paris, Berlin suddenly had second thoughts about the film and banned it before it went into general release. Third Reich officials felt the dark visuals of civilians dying by the hundreds in the darkness might upset German audiences, many of whom faced the nightly horrors of Allied bombings. Instead, Nazi filmmakers spent the rest of the war shooting more uplifting tales to rally flagging spirits on the home front.
Titanic would only find mass audiences as a bizarre propaganda artifact of World War Two. The movie was screened as such in the Communist Bloc throughout the 1950s. Later, British filmmakers recycled some of its footage for the landmark 1958 epic A Night To Remember, supposedly the definitive movie on the sinking until James Cameron’s 1997 epic. The Nazi Titanic would reappear in its entirety as a home video release in Germany in 1992 and then as a remastered DVD in 2005.
Ironically, the picture made its biggest splash in 2012 for the 100th anniversary of the actual sinking when the British Film Institute organized a screening in London as part of a larger festival of Titanic movies.
To see the the Nazi Titanic for yourself (complete with English subtitles), click here:
(Originally published on Jan 4, 2017)
