Hitler and the Nazis, Includes four films on 3 DVDs: The Architecture of Doom, Nazi Medicine and The Cross and The Star, The Eye of Vichy — THE ARCHITECTURE OF DOOM — Featuring never-before-seen film footage of Adolf Hitler ... more »and the Nazi regime, The Architecture of Doom captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. Hitler worshipped ancient Rome and Greece, and dreamed of a new Golden Age of classical art and monumental architecture, populated by beautiful, patriotic Aryans. Degenerated artists and inferior races had no place in his lurid fantasy. As this riveting film shows, the Nazis went from banning the art of modernists like Picasso to forced euthanasia of the retarded and sick, and finally to the persecution of homosexuals and the extermination of the Jews.
NAZI MEDICINE and THE CROSS AND THE STAR
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')
EYE OF VICHY
French New Wave founder Claude Chabrol (Merci Pour Le Chocolat, La Cérémonie) creates a masterful look at the Nazis' media manipulation, which is as engrossing as any of his thrillers. Chabrol assembles a brilliant compilation of long forgotten film footage and newsreels produced by the Nazis and French collaborators during World War Two. The Eye of Vichy focuses on the small town of the same name in central France where Field Marshall Petain's puppet government worked with their Nazi overlords to create pro-Nazi propaganda. Seeking to turn the tide of public emotion against both the Allied Forces and the Jews, these collaborators skillfully produced a strange alternative history of the war years that is both shocking and grimly fascinating.« less
Anthony V. Salvatore | new britain conn | 07/25/2006
(2 out of 5 stars)
"Not that interesting the three videos are somewhat boring. The cross and star sucked badly and the Eye of Vichy, you had to read the whole movie because in was in French, it was decent except for the fact of langauge. The Archticture of Doom was alright but I already owen it. Mostly stock war footage, that I have seen before. The title is somewhat deceiving, but its my own fault for not reveiwing the biography."
