Pho to cou rtesy o f US I-IMM- Pho to Archives
At the Nuremberg Trials, German physicians are charged
with conducting experiments on human `gr .uinea pigs."
`Healing By Killing'
Israeli filmmaker 1VItzan Aviram documents how
German doctors paved the way for the Holocaust.
S
ome years ago a German
physician complained that
after the so-called Doctors'
Trials at Nuremberg in 1947,
most Germans believed that only a few
physicians had been involved in the
Holocaust and had been tried and
punished.
Since then, after Robert Lifton's
remarkable book The Nazi Doctors
(1988) and numerous other works, the
culpability of the German medical pro-
fession has been exposed.
The German Medical Association
was among the earliest professional
organizations to accept Nazism, and
doctors made up the largest percentage
of professionals to belong to the Nazi
Party. The medical association even
founded a journal called Der Erbarzt
("The Genetic Doctor"), which includ-
ed regular descriptions of the latest
sterilization techniques.
Now, the Israeli director/producer/
writer Nitzan Aviram has added an
important documentary film to the list
of works that chronicle the history of
the medical profession during the
Third Reich. Based on Lifton's book, it
is an impressive and carefully con-
structed film that details an alarming
and compelling account of a "psychi-
atric death industry."
Aviram charts the evolution of a
medical idea that grew into the
Holocaust. The origins and foundation
of that idea, not in the film, emerged
in a German theoretical work of 1920,
The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy
ofLifi, co-authored by a psychiatry
professor and a jurist. The partnership
of those two professions—medicine and
law—would pave the road to the "death
industry" It would end in the death
camps.
Using interviews with survivors,
Aviram uncovers a gruesome and
appalling history. His survivors, howev-
er, are not Jews. The roots of genocide
lay in the Nazi legislated program of
sterilization, begun as early as 1933,
which led to the euthanasia program in
1939. Thus, these survivors were vic-
tims or near-victims of either steriliza-
tion or "mercy killing."
The program first assaulted children
born or suffering from a variety of dis-
eases, especially mental disorders, and
then adults in the same categories. The
result was an estimated 400,000 vic-
tims sterilized.
By 1939, Hitler himself ordered the
beginning of a euthanasia program,
later known as the T-4 Program (for
Tiergartenstrasse-4, the address of the
headquarters in Berlin). "No psychi-
atric death industry ... no Treblinka
or Auschwitz," says the narrator.
No viewer of this film should
miss the irony of a Jewish, Israeli
director interviewing survivors of
what we might consider the proto-
Holocaust.
As anti-euthanasia protests grew
in Germany, Hitler was forced to
postpone the project. It had already
produced efficient, streamlined
HEALING
on page 84
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Detroit Jewish News
83