THEATRICAL PREMIERE
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE, Film Forum, NYC
Press Kit (PDF)
“Lifton’s elegantly reasoned, 87-minute response to events that were famously declared to have put an end to poetry brings us closer to the truth of what happened than gruesome images ever could.” –Village Voice
“Galvanizing documentary….With its contemplative pauses and subtle angle changes, the picture provides a full appreciation of Lifton's analysis and the impact that this study personally had on the man, himself a physician.” –Variety
“Excellent new documentary.” –Jewish Week
An intense and illuminating conversationalist, world renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton discusses the processes by which ordinary doctors became murders, issues at the heart of his groundbreaking 1986 book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize & National Jewish Book Award). Dr. Lifton, a prolific author, founding member of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985) and a pioneer in the field of psychohistory, interviewed dozens of Holocaust perpetrators, including 40 former Nazi physicians.
In Nazi Doctors we meet Lifton at his home on Cape Cod, where he engages in a lively discussion with Veteran German filmmakers Wolfgang Richter and Hannes Karnick about the doctors who served in Auschwitz (“doctors were at the heart of it”), the circumstances under which they were currently living (financially affluent, some still practicing), and their attitude toward him (nervous, “unctuous”). With carefully calibrated analysis and a surprising amount of humor, Lifton leads us through the “acculturation to killing” that the camps fostered, the process of “splitting” or “doubling” which allowed doctors to strike a Faustian bargain, and his belief that “any one of us might find ourselves in service to evil.”
“This is a fascinating, compelling, profoundly disturbing movie that miraculously leaves one agreeing with Lifton that ‘there is room for hope.’”
– Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum
http://www.wenn-aerzte-toeten.de/
Huffington Post: Nazi Doctors, Hiroshima and Today
NPR: A Century of Atrocities, Through a Psychiatrist's Eyes
Home Use DVD:
$29.95Does not include Classroom or Library Use Rights or Public Performance Rights. More Information
Classroom/Library Use DVD: $195
Does not include Public Performance Rights. More Information
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