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 bef ...