Naufragio

Why the Nazis chose to spend a lot of money to make a film about the Titanic during the middle of WWII I'll never know. You can see that the real story of the ship is twisted into a propaganda piece that both extols German decency and decries the evils of a Capitalist society. It does this by creating some Germans and making them all nice folks--particularly the First Officer that tries very hard to do what is right even though Captain Smith and the nefarious forces of Capitalistic greed are risking the lives of everyone aboard! In the National Socialist Germany, the importance of individual profit and gain was publicly forbidden and America and Britain were seen as dominated by selfish self-interest. So the "nice Germans" are always mindful of the ultimate good and the rich Americans and Brits are the worse stereotypes of Capitalism. And so time and again, the First Officer is good and dutiful and tries his best to protect the ship and passengers while industrialists/speculators Ismay and Astor do everything purely for self-interest. All this was meant to convince Germans of the rightness of their political system, though the ugly truth was that many rich German industrialists became immensely wealthy thanks to German re-armament.

Despite the obvious propaganda in the film, the movie itself was surprisingly well-made. While the shot of the Titanic (using a model) was incredibly sloppily done (with VERY fuzzy camera-work to try to hide that it was a model), the rest of the film looks pretty opulent and the acting was very convincing considering it was made in 1943-- as things were turning VERY bad for the Germans. Sadly, although the film is watchable and VERY interesting, it was not shown in Germany and was only recently discovered--it deserved a wider audience despite its shortcomings.