Launched in Hamburg in 1927 with a full-size tennis court behind its third funnel, the Cap Arcona was the flagship of the Hamburg South America Line and a symbol of Weimar Germany’s recovery. This episode traces the biography of a single ship: requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine in 1940, repainted in White Star Line colors to play the Titanic in a 1942 Goebbels propaganda film whose director died in a Gestapo cell, and pressed into Operation Hannibal in 1945 to carry 26,000 refugees across a Baltic Sea where the Wilhelm Gustloff and General von Steuben had just been torpedoed.

With her turbines burned out and her captain dead by suicide, the Cap Arcona was towed to Neustadt Bay and packed with thousands of concentration camp prisoners from Neuengamme as Hamburg’s elite scrambled to hide the evidence of slave labor. On May 3, 1945, one day before the regional German surrender, RAF Typhoons briefed to stop fleeing SS officers bombed and strafed the ships. Around 5,000 people died on the Cap Arcona alone, and only about 350 of her prisoners survived.

• Eight steam turbines, 20 knots, and the 15-day Hamburg to Buenos Aires run
• Director Herbert Selpin’s arrest after criticizing Kriegsmarine sailors on the Titanic set
• Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann and the industrialists behind the prison flotilla
• The Red Cross warning that never reached the RAF airfields
• Bodies washing ashore on Baltic beaches until 1971 and the hulk scrapped in 1949