Titanic

Slowly some of the Nazi film industry's work product is becoming available by video and by DVD. Not everything (except if you deal with extreme - right wing groups) but some of their material. TITANIC is one of the few acceptable films.

I think the reason it is acceptable is that we are aware of social inequalities in the disaster that were not officially noted in 1912. The treatment of steerage passengers for example (more first and second class men survived than third class women). The misappropriation of an entire lifeboat by Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon and their small party was another. So was the survival of the President of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay (not Sir Bruce Ismay - he was never knighted before 1912, and he was a social pariah after 1912). But that's just it - Ismay and the Duff Gordons were socially ruined by their survival and the attending circumstances. The British Inquiry of Lord Mersey was not too harsh on them, but the American Inquiry of Senator William Alden Smith certainly was. Ismay was all too happy to leave New York City after Smith got through with him.

So, yes, the story is truthfully full of social unfairness and bigotry and selfishness. But there is also heroism and self sacrifice, and the Goebbels' "Ministry of Information and Propaganda" overlooked that part. Molly Brown, Isidor and Ida Strauss, Benjamin Guggenheim, Thomas Andrews, Lightoller, Philips and Bride, are not mentioned - why should they be. Goebbels wanted to use the disaster as a weapon to poison German and Axis audiences against Britain, America, and Jews. Why honor Americans like Brown, Britains like Andrews, Lightoller, Philips and Bride, and Jews like the Strausses and Guggenheim? So he jettisoned them.

From a technical standpoint TITANIC was an amazing film for 1943 - in fact the British film A NIGHT TO REMEMBER supposedly used some of the scenes of the sinking liner from TITANIC. But the propaganda is always there.

Curiously, the British and Americans did not think of using the war to make a film called LUSITANIA. It might have been a sufficiently more honest answer to Goebbels lies and half-truths. The closest I have seen to that (aside from brief mentions of the Lusitania in FOR ME AND MY GAL, 'TIL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, and NIGHT AND DAY) was a sequence in the Mitchel Leisin film ARISE MY LOVE about the sinking of the steamer Athenia in September 1939 (when it was sunk by a U-boat without warning - Goebbels and Hitler caused an information freeze on that incident). Now, perhaps, we can do films about the Lancastria disaster (bombing and strafing fleeing refugees from Dunkirk with glee - and costing 3,000 - 4,000 lives) or the Cap Ancona massacre of concentration camp victims (about 6,000 lives or more). They show, in my opinion, the selfishness, greed, and class distinctions practiced by Nazis.