Gray Matter finds director Joe Berlinger, one of the most underrated of contemporary American filmmakers, traveling to Vienna, Austria, where he witnessed the burial of the brains of 700 childhood victims of Nazi medical experimentation. This brief, poignant documentary shines light on Austria's complicity with Hitler's regime through the prism of the Spiegelgrund mental hospital, where a doctor named Heinrich Gross conducted and supervised eugenic experiments during the war years. Gross, 89 and living in seclusion at the time and now deceased, spent his postwar career working for the Austrian government and carried on experimenting with the brain tissue removed from his victims throughout the 1950s and beyond. Indeed, the film has documentary proof that the brain tissue was utilized as late as 1998, raising important questions about contemporary medical ethics. This is a powerful and shocking film that proves there are still dark corners of the Third Reich's history ripe for exploration.
2 Reviews
Synopsis
vilanovafernando12 May 2009
In the spring of 2002, acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) traveled to Vienna to witness the burial of the preserved brains of over 700 handicapped children. The victims had been murdered in a "euthanasia" clinic as part of a Nazi eugenics program that many consider the opening act of the Holocaust.
GRAY MATTER chronicles the director's journey as he searches for Dr. Heinrich Gross (notoriously nicknamed "The Austrian Dr. Mengele"), who not only allegedly participated in these murders, but also continued to experiment on the children's remains for decades after the end of the war, while rising to prominence in Austrian society despite his past. Along the way, Berlinger meets clinic survivors and other remarkable voices who shed new light upon this shadowy legacy and the notion that now grapples with his own denial.
Why has it taken so long to bury these brains? Should science profit from knowledge gained from such immoral atrocities? If Dr. Gross is indeed responsible to these crimes, how has he evaded justice for so many years? The film also raises provocative questions about the nature of guilt, redemption ad denial, promoting the Village Voice to write: "As Berlinger walks among jarred brains one can't help musing on the enduring ability of the population to ignore atrocity, shift blame and spin convenient myth."
GRAY MATTER chronicles the director's journey as he searches for Dr. Heinrich Gross (notoriously nicknamed "The Austrian Dr. Mengele"), who not only allegedly participated in these murders, but also continued to experiment on the children's remains for decades after the end of the war, while rising to prominence in Austrian society despite his past. Along the way, Berlinger meets clinic survivors and other remarkable voices who shed new light upon this shadowy legacy and the notion that now grapples with his own denial.
Why has it taken so long to bury these brains? Should science profit from knowledge gained from such immoral atrocities? If Dr. Gross is indeed responsible to these crimes, how has he evaded justice for so many years? The film also raises provocative questions about the nature of guilt, redemption ad denial, promoting the Village Voice to write: "As Berlinger walks among jarred brains one can't help musing on the enduring ability of the population to ignore atrocity, shift blame and spin convenient myth."
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