Film and Felt

An example of Darwinism at its most sadistic, Nazi Medicine is the gripping story of the cold methods taken by heartless doctors during the Holocaust, the systematic weeding out of *lesser* individuals. By this, I mean such *worthless* entities as Jews, Slavs, Africans, Epileptics, and others – humans that weren’t really human in the eyes of these vicious dictators. Essentially, this was a sterilization of the supposed unfit, a dreadful example of the survival of the fittest concept. Racial superiority, eugenics (human experimentation – lovely), and the gory (figuratively speaking) details of this little-known, horrid agenda are all tackled by filmmaker John Michalczyk, who uses real footage in a similar manner to Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. Nazi Medicine is as surgical as its subject matter, meticulously carving through its topic step-by-step, so unlike Night and Fog, it reaches the brain but not the heart. At just 54 minutes, it doesn’t spend enough time with people who were directly involved in these horrible cases, preferring to document the incidents and focus on details and study in a talky, lecture format. While this works just fine for informative purposes, it doesn’t give us much to chew on emotionally, as it often feels like we could have read all of this in a textbook.

Unlike Michalczyk’s The Cross and the Star, which rarely says anything all that interesting to those of us not schooled in religious history and ideals, Nazi Medicine does probe fairly deeply into an obscure and often fascinating topic matter. While I would have liked Michalczyk to inject more feeling into Nazi Medicine (though there’s certainly more present here than The Cross and the Star), it’s hard to ignore the impressively researched presentation of such an important item. At a time when most Holocaust documentaries appear to run together in terms of their messages and methods, Nazi Medicine is refreshing in its educational value, even for those who may consider themselves learned about the time period. Nazi Medicine is critical viewing for anyone interested in history or medicine, and is worthwhile for everyone else as well. If this review seems a bit skimpy, it’s because cinematically, it takes such a meat-and-potatoes approach that there’s very little to critique beyond what I already have, unless you guys want a word-by-word breakdown. Just rent the movie, though I’d advise against buying it – one viewing is plenty, and not because it’ll haunt your nights like Night and Fog or Schindler’s List. It’s just compact enough to accomplish its goal in one take.

© Gabe Leibowitz, 2004