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(More customer reviews)"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.
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In the Shadow of the Reich: Nazi Medicine/The Cross and the Star (2003)This special two film DVD features NAZI MEDICINE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE REICH and THE CROSS AND THE STAR, two riveting documentaries by John Michalczyk that confront the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich. The DVD also includes the bonus short, A Window Into the Camps, a director biography and filmography, and the photo gallery Inside the Reich: A Photographic Tour.NAZI MEDICINE is considered "a work of truth and timeliness" (Allan A. Ryan, U.S. Department of Justice) that studies the step-by-step process that led the German medical profession down an unethical road to genocide. It graphically documents the racial theories and eugenics principles that set the stage for the doctors' participation in sterilization and euthanasia, the selections at the death camps, as well as inhuman and unethical human experimentation. It is "a chilling chronicle of the road traveled by the Nazi physicians from providing a medical justification for the 1933 Nuremberg sterilization laws to trying to justify their role in the holocaust as defendants in the 1946-7 Nuremberg Doctor s Trial." (George Annas, co-editor, 'The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code'). It also "obliges us to see how our tragic American history in eugenics theory helped to prepare the way for Nazi racial laws, especially sterilization legislation." (Robert F. Drinan, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center)THE CROSS AND THE STAR finds disheartening echoes of anti-Semitism in the otherwise profound, lyrical Gospel of St. John, the sermons of St. Augustine, the writings of Martin Luther and in the voices of the Crusaders and the Spanish Inquisitors - all of which may have helped sow the ideological seeds that developed into Nazism. The Cross and the Star has been called "not only a moving and graphic history, but also the most honest and penetrating analysis of Christianity's role in the Holocaust, for good and for ill, that I know of." (Rabbi Harold Kushner, 'When Bad Things Happen to Good People')
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