Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: The History of Medical Research and Teaching Films of the Reich Office for Educational Films/Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933-1945 (review)

In 1993, children swimming in Lake Stösensee in the Berlin district of Spandau discovered fragments of 35 mm film in the muddy bottom of the lake. One hundred sixty-one reels of film from the Hitler period were subsequently recovered by scuba divers. The films were identified as having been produced by the Reich Office for Educational Film (Reichsstelle für den Unterrichtsfilm—RfdU) and its successor institution (Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht—RWU). Among the historians and archivists who viewed the surviving images, few had sufficient knowledge to understand their origins or significance. One of these few was the author, Ulf Schmidt, whose historical analysis of the films' origins and historical and ethical implications form the basis of this volume. Similar films had been discovered and examined previously. What makes Schmidt's work unique is his detailed examination of the production of the films, including the bureaucracy of German educational film making before 1933, during the Hitler regime, and after 1945.

Given Germany's role in the development of photography and cinema, it is not surprising that educators understood the potential of photography and "moving" pictures. Whereas the cinematic propagandist Leni Reifenstahl used light and shadow to promote the Aryan ideal of the athlete and soldier, physician cinematographers of the Third Reich used the same techniques to emphasize the incapacity and frailty of the disabled to promote the acceptance of their destruction. Cinema was also used to teach the techniques for eugenic sterilization. Patients were subjected to cruel exposure of their naked bodies and were physically and emotionally provoked to emphasize their impairment and vulnerability. The subjects who were filmed to illustrate incapacity were in many cases subsequently murdered as part of the euthanasia campaign. In some instances, film crews rushed to an institution to ensure their arrival before the subjects to be filmed were scheduled to be killed.

The author gives a detailed account of the bureaucracy of German medical educational films and its transformation during the Hitler period. The biographies and roles of key figures are described along with a detailed description of two major centers in the production of such films, namely the neuropsychiatry departments of the University of Frankfurt and the Charité Hospital in Berlin.

Schmidt provides specific examples of patients who were used as subjects for films. One poignant account is of a young woman filmed in Frankfurt and subsequently sent to a rural institution where it was anticipated that she would become another euthanasia subject, her brain a specimen for study. Schmidt quotes from letters from the young woman whose condition improved to the point where she could send cogent missives to the doctors who had expected her to die. Her dissected brain would then have accompanied the cinematic/photographic record of her clinical state. Instead, she survived.

A contrasting example is the pathetic story of Valentina Z., whose smiling face illustrates the cover of the volume. A patient in the Charité Hospital, Valentina, was painfully exploited by the medical cinematographers to illustrate her impaired neurological state resulting from microcephaly. Instead of being given comfort or care, Valentina was painfully provoked to elicit the desired reactions of being startled or screaming and crying in pain and fear—for educational purposes. Valentina's life came to an end in an institution where she was probably murdered. Valentina's brain is believed to have become part of the collection of the Institute of Brain Research of the University of Tübingen.

The...