Comments: DGE 124

Summary: 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')