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It's kind of scorched into my mind; it was 4 October, 2004 and I met Jonathan Young [producer] and Peter Fincham in London. It was their idea, but I fell in love with the story. They sent me a few books and I became fascinated by the central character of Hartenstein. We all grow up with classic clichés about the Germans and about the Nazis and clichés are often clichés because they happen to be true. But in this case what I saw was the most remarkable and wonderful act of generosity.

I've never spent so long and worked in such detail on a piece like this: you can see it in the scale of the production. I must have read, and I'm not exaggerating, 30-35 books that have come out. What was fascinating was that none of them had that Nazi philosophy that we all knew and suffered from, throughout them. Some of the German production teams thought that, for example, I was too kind to figures like Admiral Doenitz, who they only know as war criminals, but the books stand it up.

Inevitably, because it is drama you try to bring it down to the essence, particularly when you're trying to tell a story this complex and this big. And the essence is Hartenstein. I was always completely in love with the character of Hartenstein. What he represented was what we all believe and hope that humanity might be.

As is fairly obvious I come from Liverpool and an awful lot of the merchant seamen were from Merseyside. I've lived in Liverpool all my life, yet the Laconia incident was not anything that I really knew about. When people heard I was going to write about it, then occasionally you'd get someone who'd say, "Oh yeah my uncle was on that," but it was never talked about. Why? My suspicion is that the Germans didn't want, in their Nazi pride and their brutality and violence, to suggest to the Allies that any German sailor might be a man of generosity and spirit. I also think that on the Allied side there were monumental mistakes made – the Italians, for example, know of the Laconia incident as a war crime. Hundreds of their PoWs were shot as the ship went down – and so the Allies didn't want this to be revealed as a mess-up. I think that's one of the reasons why I didn’t know about this story until 4 October 2004. But when I heard about it I just thought that I would do almost anything to write this.