PERSECUTED, KIDNAPPED, ANNIHILATED

DOCUMENTARY / A 2009 / DIGI BETA / 45 & 52 MINUTES
A film by Tom Matzek

SYNOPSIS

HITLER’S WAR AGAINST “SUBHUMANS”

Amalia Finker from Graz was a patient in the Feldhof psychiatric clinic suffering from depression. She was gassed in 1941 – because the Nazis considered her subhuman. Shlomo Venezia was carried off in 1944 to the death camp in Auschwitz. As a Jew he was considered “subhuman” by the Nazis. The Polish woman Stanislawa Bafia in 1942 was turned into a human guinea pig in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was subjected to the cruellest medical experiments because the Nazis considered her “subhuman”.

200,000 psychiatric patients, 6,000,000 Jews, 3 million Russian prisoners of war were considered subhuman and persecuted, carried off, destroyed. “They were not humans, merely life carriers”, that is how interrogated (and seldom convicted) mass murderers unanimously justified their responsibility.

“Euthanasia”, holocaust, experiments on humans – aside from the war against nations the Nazi regime fought a war against “subhumans” – “subhuman” was a propagandistic creation of an image of an enemy which permitted all scruples to be pushed aside toward humans who were in such a manner stigmatized and convicted.
Master race against subhumans, this was the real declaration of war behind the offensives of the Third Reich. Subhumans: this was all those who did not meet the German “master race” ideal: psychiatric patients and Jews, Roma and Sinti, Poles and Russians. The master race: perpetrators with the feeling of the superiority of the German master race. A higher-than-average number were Austrians. In the war of annihilation: Franz Böhme; in euthanasia: Maximinian de Crinis, Rudolf Lonauer; in the holocaust: Franz Stangl, Irmfried Eberl, Odilo Globocnik.

This film tells the exemplary stories of people who as subhumans were the victims of racial fanaticism; it reconstructs the path from the fictitious image of an enemy up to the actual mass murder; it shows the link between waging war and the machinery of annihilation.

FILMSTILLS

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