During the Great Depression, a rich businessman named Brinkmann decides to sink his ship, Anna Susanna, in order to collect on the insurance.

During 1952, as the government control over DEFA tightened, the studio produced only six films, all of them influenced by the Cold War and dedicated to the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism.

[1] Although the film had a plot suiting the government's policy, the DEFA Board was very reluctant to allow Richard Nicolas, for whom the picture was his debut as a director, to make Anna Susanna.

[2] The film was also noted for being one of the first DEFA pictures to employ primitive special effects, such as building a miniature ship model that was wrecked in an aquarium.

[3] Heinz Kersten quoted an East German official who told that "the times in which pictures like Anna Susanna, that damaged the image of DEFA in the eyes of the people... should not return.