Posted on 03/05/2012 12:23:31 PM PST by nickcarraway
The 'Nazi Titanic', a 1943 German wartime propaganda film commissioned by Joseph Goebbels about the famous sinking, is the subject of a new Channel 5 documentary
Footage from a film known as "the Nazi Titanic", a 1943 German wartime film commissioned by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that portrays the sinking of the Titanic, will be shown on British television for the first time in a new Channel 5 documentary airing tomorrow.
The film, called simply Titanic, features a fictional German hero in the role of the ship's first officer, and was according to Channel 5 "one of the most expensive and amibitious movies ever made" at the time. The film used real German marines as extras despite the ongoing war with Britain.
The movie is described in the documentary as a crude attack on British society. It depicts the sinking as a result of profit-seeking greed by the ship's owner Joseph Bruce Ismay and other wealthy passengers on board the Titanic.
Fittingly, the film itself proved to be a disaster, and was eventually banned entirely by Goebbels after a brief theatrical run as it was decided that the tragic images could be demoralising to the under-fire German population. Its original director, Herbert Selpin, was arrested - and later found hanged in prison - after speaking out against the Nazi regime.
The passenger ship used in the filming of Titanic, the SS Cap Arcona, itself sank just three years after filming on May 3 1945, though its sinking in the Baltic Sea was due not to an iceberg but the Royal Air Force.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Did it win an Oscar or an Adolf?
The sinking of the Cap Arcona is one of the great tragedies of the Second World War, sunk on the last full day of the war.
5,000 people died, including American/British POW’s and 4,200 concentration camp political prisoners that had been put aboard just days before, as the camps were over-run.
The prisoners were from 28 different nationalities: American, Belarussian, Belgian, Canadian, Czechoslovakian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourger, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swiss, Ukrainian, Yugoslavian and others.
Goebbel’s color epic, COLBURG [p/s ?] used thousands of German soldiers as extras. In 1943-44.
What??!?? The Nazis didn’t blame the sinking on the Jews??!?!?
I mean Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg....what’s the difference?
Found this when I googled Cap Arcona, interesting read.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n4p-2_Weber.html
I have to warn you, the Institute of Historical Review is an extremely suspect source, to say the least.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff
Then there was the Nazi cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff that on Jan 30, 1945 was sunk by a Soviet sub while evacing refugees from the then cutoff East Prussia. About 10,000 died.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff
Then there was the Nazi cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff that on Jan 30, 1945 was sunk by a Soviet sub while evacing refugees from the then cutoff East Prussia. About 10,000 died.
Gosh, they are still around? IIRC they were vehement Holocaust deniers. And I think that was their more "pleasant" side.
Der Krautzenazifahrterstahrtergebauhmenblastzen Institut Fur Propagandiezen ist kaput. So why worry about them?
Kolberg was filmed in the winter of 1944-45, when the thousands of extras would have been better used trying to stem the Soviet steamroller that rolled across Poland.
The real German Titanic was the “Wilhelm Gustloff,” a liner overloaded with thousands of refugees and wounded soldiers. In the final months of the war, she was torpedoed on a stormy frigid January night in the Baltic just a few hours after leaving Danzig. Nobody knows exactly how many lives were lost because no records were kept of how many were on board.
We laugh at “Pride of the Nation” and the other Goebbels’ movies now, but that stuff is still out there.
A few years ago, I browsed a bootleg DVD store in Chinatown in Toronto, and they had a bunch of Chinese war movies in a bin. I thought it might be cool to check one out...and then realized who the “bad guys” were.
I once read that SS men stood on the beach, machine gunning survivors who swam ashore, then turned around and surrendered to the British troops arriving on the scene.
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