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Killer Movies "Euthanasia" Films Reviewed by Mike Hertenstein
Healing By Killing
Robert Lifton, in his book 1986 The Nazi Doctors, showed that the Final
Solution developed within a medical context, led by some of the finest minds
of the German medical establishment, many of whom went on to use their
experience in organizing death camps. Healing By Killing is a
documentary on the German "euthanasia" program which utilizes Lifton's
approach and perspective to make the same point: that without this context of
medical justification for murder, the later genocides might not have
happened. It was not Adolf Hitler, but the physicians of Germany themselves,
who turned killing into a twisted form of "healing".
The filmed version of this history relies on interviews with survivors to
tell the story. These are people who, it must be recalled, were at some
point in their lives -- when they were children, obviously, in most cases
here -- were declared "unfit" by some Nazified "physician" (and maybe that's
another place the quote marks should go). Fifty years later, these "unfit"
people are very articulate about what happened to them, and between the lines
we pick up a sense of the fullness of their lives which would have been
snuffed out but for one lucky accident or another.
Elvira Hempel, an older lady in a pretty pink dress, stands in sunny green
garden describing day when, as a child, she got off
bus and walked into a killing center. She knew something was
wrong, she says, when she saw heaps of clothes and shoes, and was
ordered to undress in front of strangers. Paul Eggert, puttering
around on his farm, tells us that he was diagnosed as retarded at
age seven, and so was sterilized by the regime. As he surveys
the land his eyes are looking across time, not space, and your
heart goes out to him as he shares his regrets at not being able
to have had the experience of having children. "But I'm used to
it by now." Another survivor is a man who had had a nervous
breakdown while serving in the German Navy navy. He was feeling
depressed and discouraged, so he was discharged and sterilized.
Other interviews feature psychologists, historians of the
Holocaust, experts in medical ethics. One interviewee accuses
the German medical establishment and people of that nation of
still not fully facing the truth, lest facing that truth force
them to place the blame for the Holcaust -- again, not on a
single symbol for evil incarnate -- but "on a specific group of
people: the doctors." On the other hand, in his own interview,
the present head of the German Medical Association clearly
understands that it was his profession which paved this
particular road to Hell: "It was medical ideology and medical
megalomania which laid the groundwork for the Nazi holocaust."
There is a certain groundwork which was the ultimate foundation: the ideology
of a "pure" race. There are two ways of looking at a people, says one
interviewee: as individuals, or as a community -- or, in German terms, the
volk. After the devastation of World War I, many Germans were caught up in
the idea (and the medical metaphor) that an outside infection was responsible
for their suffering: a "parasite" or "cancer" which must be surgically
removed. The other side of this growing movement was the glorification of
health and the ideal human body, in museum exhibits and in propaganda --
including the popular cinema.
In this atmosphere, doctors moved through a crucial gateway when they began
the "mercy killing" of babies born with birth defects. The "slippery slope"
began to operate in its most textbook example: killing of seriously-deformed
children led to killing of less-deformed children. In late 1939, Hitler
signed the "Euthanasia Order" which authorized doctors to kill patients with
terminal conditions -- any "life unworthy of life", and "unworthy" became a
catagory capable of satanic flexibility.
Brandenburg, a former prison, was converted into the first killing center
equipped with gas chambers disguised as showers and crematoria for bodies.
The film makes note of some protest from the locals, but does not spend much
time on the point that public protest actually had the effect (perhaps not
one that mattered much in the long run) of temporarily shutting down the
program -- or at least sending it under deeper cover. There is no mention of
the famous 1941 sermon by Catholic Bishop Clemons von Galen denouncing the
"euthanasia" program as "plain murder," a sermon which sent a shockwave
through Nazi leadership and inspired the short-lived "White Rose" resistance
movement. On the other hand, in the interest of accurate presentation of
this story, one must necessarily skim mention of resistance to the Nazis,
since proportunately there was virtually no protest from either the people or
the religious organizations. There was even less protest from the German
psychiatric and medical community.
After the "euthanasia" program retooled and resurfaced, then, it was sleaker
and more horribly efficient than ever. It also had considerably stretched
that definition of "life unworthy of life": Communists, gypsies, homosexuals,
and, of course, Jews. Experienced "euthanasia" teams set up death camps,
where physicians were involved in the killing process from beginning to end:
the selection process, choosing false causes of death on certificates for
"euthanasia" patients, administrating lethal dosages of drugs and overseeing
the gas chambers themselves.
Healing By Killing is not as deep in probing the psychology of these
medical professionals as Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors. Liften makes
an appearance as an interviewee, reiterating several of the points from his
own work: mass killing was made possible by various means of "bureaucratic
distancing" -- one doctor did examination and selection, a different one
pressed the syringe. Doctors under the Nazi regime worked in an environment
"as if" what they were doing was connected to some therapeutic process.
The film presents an interview with an actual Nazi doctor, one Hans Munch,
who worked under the most notorious Nazi "physician", Dr. Mengele, and made
selections at Auschwitz -- though he later asked to be transferred. Transfer
or not, it's still difficult to listen to any moralizing about Nazis from Dr.
Munch. There is also an interview with Mengele's personal photographer, who
delivers his version of the old rationale, "just following orders".
From the interviews and photos, one catches a whiff of serious science and
academia, and you begin to sense the halls of the research institutes
attached to Auschwitz were not filled with raving madmen, but ordinary
scientists immersed in their work, excited about breakthroughs -- and
seemingly unhampered by the obvious fact of the human sources of their data
and the inhuman means used to pry this exciting new data from the subjects.
"When you become totally immoral you believe two plus two equals six," says
one commentator; though one has to wonder if one need be "completely"
immoral, or even a Nazi, to rationalize one's deeds into some kind of myth
that your evil choices are noble.
Despite the subject matter, Healing By Killing is not as gory as
photos and footage of this material displayed elsewhere, for example in the
videos at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Indeed, this film is
stripped down, letting the interviews speak for themselves with little
commentary. In this way, the film is an important supplement to Steven
Spielberg's "Survivors of the Shoah" visual history project (although
interviews with Nazi "euthanasia" victims are also among the histories that
project aims ultimately to include in its archival material.)
Any connections between past history and contemporary debates over
"euthanasia" -- in or out of quotes -- is approached only in the most ginger
fashion. There is an interview of a director of a European study center for
euthanasia who seems as world-weary as one who heads such a center could be:
of renewed talk of killing deformed babies, he shakes his head and notes that
people who do so "think they're so enlightened...". Benno Muller-Hill of the
Institute for Genetics, Cologne University is more directly urgent: "It can
happen again..." The author of the 1984 Murderous Science: Elimination by
Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, Germany, 1933-1945,
Muller-Hill says the issue will become more pressing within the next few
years after the genes associated with specific conditions and diseases have
been identfied. "What's going to happen then?" he asks, and one has to
wonder.
Still, the film's director, Nitzan Aviram, a NYU film school graduate, keeps
the discussion of the "euthanasia" of the Holocaust from being too glibly
identified with contemporary debates over "mercy killing" and "death with
dignity". Mention of the Holocaust as an illustration to be used for one
side or another in contemporary social and political debates would seem to
demand the most careful consideration and sensitivity. And this film was
funded by various Israeli film and television agencies and the US theatrical
release was co-sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Still, the
director seems to have an interest in the issues here beyond his own
Jewishness and the special tragedy Nazi "euthanasia" meant for his people.
Among Aviram's previous works is the 1997 Ben (Son), about a 65-year-old
poet, Arik Ben Adon, who upon his wife's death was left to care for a
17-year-old son, Adam, who has Down's Syndrome.
And after watching Healing By Killing, one hopes sensitivity to the
special nature of the Holocaust won't keep people from drawing obvious
comparisons and speaking out against the movement toward putting quote marks
around "murder" -- that is, by acquiescing again to the "medicalization" of
killing people. Mike Hertenstein
In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi
Medicine
While not exactly "sensational", however, this film ratchets up the intensity
level in the general tone and with a freer use of shocking footage of
"freaks", dead bodies, and Nazi experiments. The only survivor interview is
with a woman who was forced as a child to take part in Doctor Mengele's
infamous twin experiments.
The broad-scope approach continues in following the story beyond the war
through the "Doctors' Trial" at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
And the intriguing reticence toward any comparisons between the Nazi movement
toward medicalizing murder is also seen here, quite literally, as an
interview with one expert fades to black -- just a little too quickly for me
-- just as he himself is drawing the comparison between Nazi "euthanasia" and
contemporary discussion of that topic under any name.
Nevertheless, Nazi Medicine, like Healing By Killing, deserves
as wide an audience as possible -- if there is to be any hope of keeping this
sort of "medicine" confined to the Nazis and to an unthinkable, unrepeatable past.
M.H.
The Black Stork: Eugenics and the
Death of "Defective" Babies In American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since
1915
Pernick begins by sketching the social and cultural background in which such
films came to be made. In the early part of this century, as in the latter
part, there was growing public receptivity to letting deformed babies die.
Prominent people, including -- incredibly -- Helen Keller endorsed the idea
that only "life worthy of life" be allowed to live. Other people, including
Progressive activist Jane Addams, took the opposite position, insisting that
such decisions are not ours to make.
Not all Progressives were so inclined, believing as they did not just in the
power of Science to cure humanity's ills, but in the unanswerable
"objectivity" of Science to settle ethical debates.
The faith in science and rising oppenness to eugenics coincided with the
decline of faith in Christianity and the revolutionary new idea of Darwinism.
Throughout human history, nearly all societies have permitted a certain
amount of infanticide. The growing political power of Christianity, which
like Judaism, condemned such practices, made the issue (in the West, at
least) essentially a non-negotiable one for almost two thousand years. The
end of that cultural dominance came just as (or even because) the theory of
Evolution gained currency in both scientific and popular circles. Notions of
"survival of the fittest" took the support from the once central belief that
all individuals were sacred, made in the image of God, and gave that
allegience to the notion that quality or "fitness" of individuals for
survival was the bottom line. The years immediately following Darwin were
ones in which the possibility of actually taking control of human evolution,
of weeding out the "unfit", became an exciting dream.
This moment in time was the same one in which, in the US, there was growing
concern over the possible "pollution" of America's white European stock by
the immigration of "inferior" races.
Meanwhile, compulsory sterilization laws had been placed on the books in
dozens of states in an effort to stop at least one catagory of "unfit" -- the
mentally-ill -- from reproducing.
All these trends seemed to coalesce at once, and -- amazingly -- in one
place: Chicago, where a case, and a doctor, led to a film.
In 1915 the parents of a hydrocelphalic baby girl agreed to let their doctor
withhold treatment until the child died, catapulting the case into a cause
and the doctor into a national celebrity. Dr. Harry Haiseldon, a
"now-forgotten provocateur", was a master of one more converging stream --
the art of mass communications. In this way, Haiseldon was a
proto-Kervorkian, whose fervent publicizing of himself and his cause made
more enemies among his professional peers than his actual participation in
infanticide.
Like Kervorkian, Dr. Haiseldon had a knack for getting his name in the papers
he campaigned loud and long for withholding treatment from defective infants,
and -- as is the way of these things -- soon he was advocating mercy killing
for defective adults.
Haiseldon wrote articles, gave lectures and, in collaboration with a reporter
from the sensationalist Hearst newspapers, Jack Lait, wrote and starred in a
pro-eugenics film, The Black Stork. The plot of the movie is
propaganda of the most cardboard variety: Claude, who carries an unnamed
disease, marries Anne -- despite the warnings of their doctor (played by
Haiseldon). Anne soon gives birth to a severely-disabled baby who needs
immediate life-saving surgery, which the doctor refuses to perform. When the
the doctor insists the baby be allowed to die, the young mother agonizes --
until she has a vision of the child's "certain" future: suffering, crime,
madness. So the parents accept the doctor's advice. At the moment of death,
the baby is shown leaping into the arms of a waiting Christ. This unlikely
story was screened in theatres from its release in 1916 through various title
and edit changes until as late as 1942.
Despite his mastery of self-publicity, Haiselden, his movie, and popular
support of his cause faded after World War I and even more so as Nazi
advocacy of the eugenics cause was on the rise.
Though the link between Haiselden and Hitler is not as direct as, say, the
link between Hitler and the racist Henry Ford, there is no doubt that in
general, the American example had an effect. Progressive American ideas about
eugenics and sterlization laws were admired and imitated by those German
physicians who would were soon to become known to the world as "the Nazi
doctors". Popular cinema also played an important role in persuading the
German people under the Nazis to accept the idea of "euthanasia." Robert
Lifton mentions these films in The Nazi Doctors: typically urgent and
educational in tone, the approach often echoed The Black Stork in
contrasting healthy citizens with footage of mental patients and -- in the
case of the German films, Jews -- invoking "Science" and Darwinism to
demonstrate that the only moral choice for a healthy society is to eliminate
such "frightening transgressions" of the law of natural selection.
Haiselden, of course, would have insisted that his own eugenic philosophy was
free from ideological prejudice, being "objective." Yet the task of
identifying the "unfit," as Pernick shows, has never been as purely
"objective" as its advocates have insisted. Definitions of "fit" always
include "cultural, ethical, political, and aesthetic values". Notions of
hereditary fitness were sensitive to the "fluctuatations in the tide of
social prejudices." And the struggle over definitions showed clear
interaction between "scientific" and popular views: the supposedly
"objective" scientists were liable to start talking in terms within
conceptual frameworks they learned from the movies. Pernick also shows how
much of their "objective" diagnoses of fitness and the causes of defects were
based on what has been subsequently shown to be science as bad as diagnosing
witches.
To this murky mix add the subtle linkage of class, ethnicity and race to
"scientific" definitions of hereditary fitness. In the original version of
The Black Stork, Claude's condition is depicted as the result of his
grandfather's liason with a slave.
As Pernick makes clear, and as the postmodernists have been warning us of
late, such "objectivity" becomes simply a mask for the personal preferences
of whoever has the political power.
The Black Stork is an effort to save a nearly-forgotten and
critically-important story from vanishing into that cultural amnesia that
ends in repeating the tragedies of the past. The book is published on a
university press, by a professor of history, and reads a tad more academic in
tone than a non- academic like myself would have liked. I can appreciate the
need for a scholarly approach to cataloging historical documents. Yet I
wonder if a more pressing need is to tell this story in the most accessible
way. An author with more popular leanings would have been able to shape this
material in more compelling fashion. Nevertheless, this book deserves as wide
an audience as possible.
For the battle is still being waged on the popular front. At present --
luckily or not, according to your view -- the most popular advocate of mercy
killing is still Dr.
Kervorkian, who nobody will ever mistake for George Clooney. On the
other hand, Clooney's very popular character on ER recently went out
as a martyr when the hunky pediatrician's tenure at "County Hospital"
climaxed with a "heroic" mercy killing of a suffering child.
The story of The Black Stork would, indeed, make a great movie. But
whether or not Haiseldon is depicted as a hero or a villian would, of course,
depend on the views of whoever made the film.
Just as the history of this debate will be written by the victors - or "the
fittest", as they will surely declare themselves to be. M.H.
© 2000 Cornerstone Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. |
You've seen all this before -- you think. Too many
times. The interviews with survivors. Narration over photos of victims.
Footage of piles of clothing, gas chambers, crematoria. But this part is
something you haven't seen so much: these victims of the Nazi death-machine
are not Jews. They are victims of the the pilot project of the Holocaust, the
German "Euthanasia" program. Most people who have written about that program
put the word "euthanasia" in quotes, because it went very quickly from simply
(and while we're at it, let's put "simply" in quotes, too) killing
badly-deformed babies and terminally-ill patients -- which many people even
today would endorse -- to murdering masses of people because their "defect"
was their race. Before what we usually recognize as a Holocaust in the name
of racial purity was fully underway, mass killings began in the name of
medicine. Between 1939 and 1941, 70,000 to 100,000 patients -- mentally ill,
disabled, men, women, and children -- were killed by lethal injection or gas,
at the hands of doctors, who had pledged themselves to uphold the ancient and
sacred oath to "do no harm".
This documentary makes an excellent companion to
Healing By Killing: a couple of the same interviewees appear in both
films, but there is surprisingly little overlap of material. Instead,
Nazi Medicine provides valuable supplemental and background material
to tell the complete story. The title itself suggests a broader scope than
Healing By Killing: focussing less on individuals and more on the
context, and flow of events. Nazi Medicine begins by sketching the
background of the eugenics movment in Germany. This necessarily means
sketching the same movement in the United States. In the years just prior to
and immediately following World War I, it was the American example in
progressive attitudes toward sterilization of the "unfit", and "mercy
killing" for defective babies and the terminally ill which was a paricular
inspiration to German, soon to be Nazi, doctors. There is a brief excerpt
from the American pro-eugenics film, America's Children (see the review on
The Black Stork below for the crucial role of the cinema in the American
eugenics movement).
The silent screen,
says Martin Pernick, "was far from 'silent' about eugenics." Dozens of films
took one side or the other in a battle over ethics and definitions of eugenic
"fitness" which played itself out in popular culture. Most of those films --
like most silent films in general -- have since crumbled into dust. Luckily,
Pernick, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, decided to
investigate this very nearly-lost history at what seems the last possible
moment. He painstakingly searched through paper records -- medical, media,
and general periodicals -- often turning up little more than a film title and
synopsis. But in the course of his work, Pernick "rediscovered and preserved
the only vieweable print" of "the most explicit depiction of negative
eugenics to reach the silent screen," The Black Stork, a film which
provides the title for a larger history.