5. Joseph Goebbels Retells The Sinking As German Propaganda
The Titanic was going too fast; thats an accepted fact. Its also popular opinion that Bruce Ismay was a key driving force behind the move to break the record to cross the Atlantic. That he was solely motivated in a move to double dip the stocks is borderline conspiracy. And that a German First Officer was the only good man on the ship trying to get his greedy superiors to slow down is a flat out lie. Yet all these elements are melded together in a World War II propaganda film commissioned by Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels that presents the disaster as a folly of British capitalism. Placing all the well meaning Germans in steerage and painting Brits as devious corpse-climbers, it takes so many liberties with the story (there were no German officers on the boat) you wonder why it wasn't simply decided to retell the whole thing as the famous hoax gone wrong myth. Never shown in Germany due to a high loss of German life feeling unsuitable during continued Allied bombings and only receiving a limited release elsewhere, Goebbels eventually hoped it would fade into the same obscurity that welcomed Saved From The Titanic. No such luck; prints somehow survived and it eventually received an uncut release on DVD in 2005. The whole saga is chronicled in the History Channel documentary; Nazi Titanic.