Customer Reviews

In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine [VHS]

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"Nazi Medicine/The Cross and the Star" looks like one of those documentaries that the History Channel plays on a perpetual loop. You know the type: World War II era grainy black and white footage coupled with modern day scholars providing historical context and a few meager details to assist the narrative flow. I tend to avoid historical documentaries because they often target viewers accustomed to MTV/modern media editing techniques. The emphasis on the bombastic and dramatic dominates every frame of these documentaries, and all of the shows must rely on historical events after the invention of photography because viewers can't seem to maintain interest in anything that doesn't move across their television screens. Sure, you'll see a few documentaries about Roman history or the Middle Ages from time to time, but even then the producers have to punch up the program with reenactments or voiceovers to keep people tuned in. As far as I can tell, about the only benefit of these shows is getting people interested enough in the subject matter to read books for further information.

Having complained about history programs, I do have to say that "Nazi Medicine" is an immensely intriguing introduction into a topic little discussed in the broader context of the Nuremberg trials. Created by Professor John Michalcyzk of Boston College's Department of Film Studies, "Nazi Medicine" focuses a spotlight on the Nazi doctor's trial of 1946. Most of us know about the first Nuremberg trial where Herman Goering, Julius Streicher, and others faced an international tribunal for war crimes, but the doctor's trial apparently fell through the cracks. Considering that these were the monsters responsible for the deaths of millions in research laboratories and concentration camps, it is surprising more hasn't been made of their activities. "Nazi Medicine" explores the historical antecedents that made the grotesque experimentations of the German physicians possible, looking back to the early days of the twentieth century and the intense interest in eugenics. According to the documentary, the United States led the charge in investigating the potential of realizing the dreams of Social Darwinism through hard science. The American variant of eugenics was inherently racist, but the results on this side of the pond rarely went beyond pen and paper.

Europeans were not so lucky. German doctors picked up on the foundations laid by American scientists and put into practice experimentations on the human body so sickening as to defy description. Physicians set up pressure chambers to test the effects of extreme pressure on the human body, or messed around with germ and viral injections. What the doctors hoped to achieve were answers that would help the German war effort. Instead, the results of these experiments were inconclusive or downright nonexistent. What intrigued me most about "Nazi Medicine" was not the laundry list of atrocities (most of which we have heard about countless times before) but how the doctors moved from practitioners and guardians of the public health to conscienceless monsters who made distinctions between "superior" and "inferior" human beings. One of the modern scholars interviewed for the film does an excellent job of explaining how this irrational belief system took on a perverse logic. The doctors could experiment on certain human beings--Jews, but others as well including criminals and the mentally infirm--because they believed these people were either not human or inferior humans. After all, do we not use animals to better the human race? Is this logic sociopathic? Probably, but once the physicians made the distinction the door was wide open for all sorts of horrific projects. The trial ultimately led to a statement about medical ethics still recognized today.

"The Cross and the Star," regrettably, is on shakier factual and interpretative ground than "Nazi Medicine." This second documentary attempts to establish concrete links between the Catholic Church and the holocaust. The program looks back through two thousand years of history, citing the Gospels and other tracts that promoted anti-Semitic views. There can be no doubt that the Church did subscribe to anti-Semitism during various stages of its history, as did Protestant Christianity. The Crusades, for example, occasionally targeted Jews even as they tried to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim influence. Martin Luther wrote a short book about the threat he thought the Jews posed to every good Christian. The reasons the Church often attacked Jews were many, from the old "they killed Christ" standby to the perception that Jews acted as lenders of money at usurious interest rates in the Middle Ages. These examples are contained in historical records. But to accuse the modern Church of anti-Semitism is a risky proposition at best. Did the Pope overtly or covertly support the Nazi regime's campaign to eradicate the Jews? Or was the Pope essentially powerless to stop the rampages of a brutal regime led by an unstable madman? The answers to these questions are far from certain despite what this documentary claims. One wonders if the filmmaker has an ulterior motive for defaming the Church.

The DVD of "Nazi Medicine/The Cross and the Star" contains several extras. You get a couple of trailers for "Fighter" and "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," a photographic gallery called "Inside the Reich," a director's biography and filmography, and some information on the concentration camps. Michalcyzk's "Nazi Medicine" documentary is as informative as it is shocking. And yes, the first program on this disc has inspired me to read more about the subject. Unfortunately, the shoddy claims made about the Catholic Church diminish, if only slightly, the overall impact of the DVD.

This DVD consists of a documentary double-feature, "Nazi Medicine" and "The Cross and the Star". Of the two, I preferred "Nazi Medicine" and felt it was well-made and provided lots of insights into the psychology of the Third Reich. In this documentary, directed by John Michalczyk, viewers get to understand how a country which was renowned and respected for its medical breakthroughs became polluted with the twisted thinking of the National Socialist Party and eventually led to monstrous acts being committed by physicians against fellow humans, all in the name of serving the German people and the Third Reich. It was interesting to note that almost 50% of Germany's doctors were also members of the Nazi Party during the Second World War, which partly explains how easily the doctrines of Hitler and the Nazis came to be enforced upon the hapless - the mentally and physically disabled (euthanasia, or the T4 program), the Jews, and others considered subhuman by the Nazis.

The documentary is well-narrated and reveals some startling information such as how the Nazi doctors' obsession with eugenics was not confined to Germany alone, but had also been promoted in the United States, and other parts of the world. Throughout, the narration is complemented by visual footage of film during the period, archival photographs of victims of Nazi experimentation, and interspersed with interviews with survivors (a twin who had been subjected to Mengele's inhuman experiments), and also archival film footage of the Nuremberg Trials where after the war, a handful (I say handful because many others evaded capture) of Nazi doctors were put on trial and received different degrees of punishment (death, extended prison terms, and some were acquitted). It was chilling to see these 'monsters' who had taken an oath to safeguard the sanctity of human life, yet had chosen to align themselves with the racial cleaning policies of the Third Reich. Most did not indicate repentance for their actions, believing they truly were helping Germany become stronger with the propagation of a pure Aryan race, and by helping destroy the 'subhumans' (Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables).

The compelling documentation makes this a credible documentary with well-established facts backing it up, and the well-woven narrative only enhances this production.

"The Cross and the Star" focuses mainly on the role (or rather lack of much action) of the Catholic Church in Rome in preventing the tragedy of the Holocaust. The documentary appears rambling and though the case is a compelling one, is not presented convincingly, and seems disjointed and disorganized. Viewers do get to see Martin Luther being revealed as being anti-Semitic, and there's a lot of historical background on the anti-Semitic teachings of the Church. I would recommend this DVD if only because of the well-made "Nazi Medicine". As for extras, there's a short feature called "A Window into the Camps", a photo gallery about the Third Reich, etc.

"In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine" is a 60-minute documentary by Professor John J. Michalczyk, Director of Film Studies at Boston College, made in 1997, which was the 50th anniversary of the Nuremberg Physicians Trial, which was held from December 1946 to August 1947. Michalczyk went to the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps to interview both survivors of the Nazi experimentations and leader scholars who studied the practices of Nazi medicine such as Dr. Michael Grodin, Dr. Charles Roland, and Professor Michael Kater. There is also an interview done at Auschwitz in 1995 with Hans Munch, a former S.S. doctor in this video, which is narrated by Donald Winning.

The film begins by examining how not only Germany but also the United States were interested at the start of the 20th century in eugenics as an example of a scientific Social Darwinism. In the U.S. eugenic studies were being funded by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockerfeller and over half the states had sterilization laws on the books at one point. However, it was the Nazis in the 1930s who then put the theoretical work done by American scientist into practice in the Third Reich, beginning with the Nuremberg Laws excluded Jews from various professions, including the practice of medicine. It was doctors in Nazi Germany who pushed for the state-sponsored program of "racial hygiene," which meant the forced euthanasia of almost a half-million citizens with mental and physical defects. In the death camps these physicians engaged in many experiments with questionable scientific merit and clearly no moral accountability. This included studies of how much gas would be needed to kill a certain number of prisoners as quickly as possible and high-altitude testing that ruined the lungs of the "subjects."

"Nazi Medicine" chronicles the path of these scientists, who began providing justification for the Nuremberg sterilization laws, the practice of euthanasia, and eventually to genocide. What is both fascinating and horrifying about this documentary is that what the Nazis did was not simply follow orders from Hitler and his bureaucrats. These physicians were integrally involved in all of these decisions, from developing the Nazi race laws to the unethical experiments conducted in the death camps. Michalczyk also makes the point that after the Nuremberg Trial of those Nazi doctors, 10 international tenets of acceptable experimentation were established, including, most importantly, the informed consent of the subject.

This is a graphic documentary, and even those who have seen footage of the Holocaust are going to find this video upsetting. But, as the quote from Allan A. Ryan, Director, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations points out on the front cover: "The horror of Nazi eugenics and experimentation" make this documentary "a work of truth and timeliness."

At first you think from the title or summary Nazi Medicine is just another history channel type hour of half familiar film clips. But like some other reviewers are commenting, it's really quite gripping and thought provoking.

This is a story that needs to be told. Unfortunately in the movie the statistics are slim, photographs are foggy (an having been to Dachau and Auschwitz I know there are better pictures. Anyone with a heart will know what was done was totally inhuman, but the movies hinted and quoted the doctors who felt it "WAS NECESSARY WORK". I was also surprised that the movie pointed out that "we in the USA and some 22 states were the inspiration" for both the sterilization and even some euthanasia back in the 20's and up to the 40's. This story needs to be done BIG BUDGET and showing the actual but horrible picture of the atrocities. THE MOVIE FELL SHORT showing only a few of the medical "experiments" and only talked about a few others understating what was actually done.

It is beyond all comprehension that many, many physicians, in one of the most highly educated countries in Europe, could ever have participated and collaborated in the Nazi horrors. A country which gave the world Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Einstein, etc. also produced Nazi "doctors;" this seems like a bad nightmare, something the world dreamed, but sadly, it wasn't.

This video is a two-part production concerning two related aspects of the Holocaust. The first is the part that the medical doctors of Germany played in the Holocaust and the second is about the measure of guilt that the church is responsible for.
The first part is titled: Nazi Medicine. I really enjoyed learning about this topic. The video conveys the slippery slope of morals that eugenics and euthanasia played in the degradation of human life. The video makes some interesting connections between social Darwinism and Nazi theology.
The second part is focused on the guilt of the church in not standing up to the Nazis in the 1930's and 40's. I did not enjoy this part of the video as much. Although there are some valid points made here the general spirit behind this is anti-Christian. I say this not to defend those who were apathetic to the Nazis, but to counter the humanistic rhetoric that is promoted as being responsible for the survival of Jews as well as the reason for why people helped Jews; not to mention that most studies of Holocaust survivors state that faith was the number on common denominator between those who survived.
All in all, I recomend the first video but not the second.

'The Cross and the Star' (1992) takes a look into how nearly 2,000 of Christian anti-Semitism led to the Shoah. This is a very important topic, one that a lot of people simply feel too uncomfortable to confront and come to terms with. A horrific event like the Shoah didn't take place overnight or happen in a vacuum; it's just incomprehensible how many people still believe that it was some kind of historical aberration, didn't have the roots planted and continuously girded for centuries. For every brave person who risked (and sometimes lost) his or her life protecting Jews, and for every brave priest, reverend, nun, monk, or pastor who dared to speak out against the Nazi menace, such as Pastors Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhöffer, there were countless more who did nothing, who collaborated either silently or who took active part in these crimes. The churches in Europe were major powerful institutions, yet their almost total silence spoke volumes. They could have done so much to rescue so many people or to stop these things altogether, yet they chose to be silent, either through fear or because they genuinely believed in the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Nazis. Christian anti-Semitism was alive and well literally since the religion's inception (just see the anti-Semitic libels in the Gospels, a completely false portrayal of first-century Jewry [even today most people don't know that the Pharisees were the good guys and the reformers, for example!]; the countless pogroms in the Russian Empire; the Crusades; Martin Luther's anti-Semitic writings; forced ghettoisation; mandatory identifying clothing and badges in the Middle Ages; the writings of the early Church Fathers; and countless other examples for the proof!). And as this documentary explores, this is something that modern forward-thinking Christians have had to come to terms with, and to their credit the majority of modern-day Christians do not think or believe the way the average Christian of even 40 or 50 years ago did. It's a difficult issue survivors and conscientious modern Christians have the hard task of dealing with, although thankfully great strides have been made in recent decades towards not only interfaith dialogue but also in trying to heal the huge wounds of the past. However, I do agree that this documentary wasn't as strong as it could have been; although it is very informative and thought-provoking, there wasn't a huge amount of information here that I wasn't already quite familiar with (although I didn't know that many details about the various prominent priests and pastors who spoke out and were imprisoned in Dachau, nor about the Danish pastor who was taken away and murdered for having constantly expressed his anti-Nazi and pro-Jewish beliefs to his congregation). I just felt there weren't enough fresh new insights into the subject, or revolutionary new information or research presented. And since it was made in 1992, it does seem somewhat dated; for example, Edith Stein has already been canonised in the years since, and the late Pope John Paul II did a lot more in interfaith dialogue and mutual healing between 1992 and his death. (And check out those classic early Nineties haircuts and gigantic glasses a lot of the commentators have!)

'Nazi Medicine: In the Shadow of the Reich' (1997) is the stronger of the two documentaries. It's absolutely chilling and should be required viewing for everyone. It goes without saying that there are some graphic images, but nothing that's worse than what one is used to seeing in documentaries about the Shoah. (None of the images were as unsettling to me as the scenes of the decapitated heads with faces frozen in horrific expressions in 'Night and Fog,' which is my own personal barometer in how graphic something is in a film of this nature.) This short documentary (a bit under an hour) provides a compelling and detailed history of eugenics, forced sterilisation and euthanasia, Nazi views and ultimately barbaric treatment of people it viewed as racially and genetically inferior (the mentally and physically disabled, Jews, Gypsies, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavs, Communists, et al), the types of horrific experiments carried out against them, the trial of the doctors at Nuremberg, and the lessons this tragic part of history can teach us today. It's utterly incomprehensible to the modern person how socially acceptable eugenics was considered in the early decades of the 20th century, in America as well as Germany. It seems like a gross violation of civil liberties in addition to the obvious violation of human rights to forcibly sterilise someone just because s/he's retarded, blind, Deaf, or comes from a family that is viewed as "delinquent" or not as upstanding and physically robust as people are supposed to be. How could civilised people have ever thought that conducting experiments on human beings was scientifically, medically, socially, and morally acceptable and normal? (And yet somehow it's still considered acceptable to conduct experiments on animals, experiments that no one since the Nazis has dared to conduct on human beings because of how inhumane they are, like pouring bleach into the eyes, being kept in freezing salt water for hours, and being put into a chamber simulating the conditions of very high altitudes.)

The extras are a brief overview of First Run Films, a biography and filmography of director John Michalczyk, 'Inside the Reich: A Photographic Tour,' two trailers for other documentaries put out by this company ('Fighter' and 'The Trials of Henry Kissinger'), and 'A Window into the Camps,' brief video footage and information about some of the major Nazi camps.

Overall, this two documentaries are a valuable addition to the library of anyone interested in this historical era. Instead of telling stories that people are already well familiar with, they present two often-overlooked areas of research, and since they're both only a bit under an hour long, they might inspire the viewer to seek out much more information on these two topics, to go even more in-depth and to hear stories covering these topics from a wide variety of survivors and historians.

I just watched this entire video--the first part deals with Nazi Medicine, starting with turn of the century German medicine and its high acclaim. By the 1930's the field of eugenics had taken hold in many countries, including the USA. This generated sterilizations of the 'undesirables' and was the law in 27 states in America. But, Germany, already under the Nazi Regime in 1933 began with mass sterilizations--50,000 per year for seven years--and took it a step further. From mass sterilizations and then euthanasia of its own German population--Hitler decreed the incorporation of Nazi party doctors to participate in the killing machine of eradicating Jews, plus the human experimentations of Josef Mengele on 1500 sets of Jewish twins, dwarfs, etc. Most were gassed after the experiments either failed or resulted in eyewitnesses.

The 1946 Doctors' Trial in Nuremburg took place and resulted in hangings, prison sentences and acquittals. Most were free by 1967.

The second film 'The Cross and the Star' is about Christian antisemitism that pre-existed the Holocaust for 2000 years and stemmed directly from the Book of John and Matthew with those antisemitic first-century accounts. Taught for centuries by St. Augustine to Martin Luther, etc. ..the Holocaust was the inevitable result of Christian antisemitism.

The film depicts the agonizing after the Holocaust by Christian scholars and notables as well as every-day Christians, tormented by the failure of the Church to intervene and by the Vatican's silence, under Pius XII.

The 1965 Vatican II conference resulted in Nostra Astate--In Our Time--decision to come to grips with and accept Judaism as an equally valid faith and to cease the endless teachings of antisemitism.

Interfaith relations are of the utmost importance and now still in their infancy, which I think is a positive but very long battle upwards. This is the point of the second film.

ITS JUST ANOTHER CRIME COMMITED AGAINST HISTORY BY THOSE

FEEBLE MINDED PEOPLE WHO ONLY WANT TO SEE ONE SIDE OF HISTORY.

ITS A CRIME BECAUSE THEY MISS REPRESENT HISTORY.