As the news of the October Revolution sweep through the world, the German High Seas Fleet's command, wary of a mutiny, decides to send all its ships to a suicide mission in the English Channel.

The Sailor's Song was conceived in aftermath of the Socialist Unity Party's Conference on Cultural Affairs at October 1957, during which the East German establishment embraced a conservative line and ended the brief period of liberalization that begun after Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech.

[2] The script writers Paul Wiens and Karl Georg Egel were instructed to present the 1918 Revolution in accordance with the official Soviet interpretation of history; Walter Ulbricht told that it failed due to the "opportunistic" Social Democrats and to the lack of a Marxist–Leninist party that would have led the workers "in the smashing of the capitalistic economical apparatus."

Directors Kurt Maetzig and Günter Reisch worked separately; the former's crew was responsible for the scenes involving the officers and the admirals, while the latter filmed those with the sailors and the crowds.

[5] DEFA Studio's director Albert Wilkening wrote that no picture, except Ernst Thälmann, ever touched the people of East Germany as deeply as The Sailor's Song.