Gray Matter (DVD)
APPROX. 55 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2004 - MPA RATING: NR
" The Nazi eugenics program spanned several countries and led to the deaths of at least five thousand children.
Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.
In the spring of 2002, the city of Vienna conducted a funeral for seven hundred children who were killed by the Nazis in World War II; city officials were not burying seven hundred bodies but rather seven hundred brains. The children were all labeled by the Nazis as handicapped or otherwise "deformed" and were sterilized, experimented upon and eventually killed as part of the Third Reich´s eugenics program. "Gray Matter" (2002) tells their story.
Joe Berlinger has directed several high profile American documentaries, including "Brother´s Keeper" (1992), "Paradise Lost" (1996) and the recent hit "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" (2004) but "Gray Matter" is his first film set in another country. The Nazi eugenics program spanned several countries and led to the deaths of at least five thousand children. Berlinger focuses on the children killed at Spiegelgrund hospital in Vienna. A man named Dr. Heinrich Gross ran the children´s euthanasia ward at Spiegelgrund where he used the children´s remains to conduct experiments, mostly involving their brains. Berlinger briefly interviews a historian who discusses one of the "experiments" which involved pumping air into the brain; mercifully we move on quickly; there is no need to linger on such details.
The brains remain preserved to this day (or at least until the funeral), and in one of the most memorable scenes in "Gray Matter," Berlinger is left alone in the "brain room." Shelf after shelf is lined with tiny brains in jars, preserved in formaldehyde; the sight of this ghastly collection is a sobering testament to the horror enacted under Gross´ guidance.
As if the story wasn´t already shocking enough, we soon learn that Dr. Gross is still alive and was never charged with any crimes. Even more amazingly, he was allowed to continue his experiments on the childrens´ brains for decades, possibly even well into the 1990s. He published numerous articles in international journals based on his work with his alleged victims´ brains. As a final insult, Gross still receives a monthly pension from the Austrian government.
Berlinger becomes obsessed with finding Gross; several sequences in the film play very much like "Heinrich and Me" as Berlinger follows a series of rumors, each of which leads to a dead end. He is told Gross lives in a house but the neighbors say he lives down the street at the hotel; the hotel owners claim not to know anything about him. When Berlinger visits a town hall where Gross allegedly is housed, the mayor, himself accused of Nazi sympathies, feigns ignorance and rushes the film crew out the door.
"Gray Matter" examines several issues which stem from the atrocities committed at Spiegelgrund, chief among them the unwillingness of the Austrian government to fully admit its complicity with the Nazi regime. Even sixty years later, it remains a largely taboo subject and Berlinger runs into one stone wall after another as he tries to uncover the truth.
The horrors compound as Berlinger investigates deeper. He meets several survivors of Spiegelgrund and discovers that many so-called "disabled" children were consigned to the hospital simply because they exhibited "anti-social" behavior. Several of the survivors have gone on to lead successful lives but have never forgotten their time under Gross´ care. One woman describes being punished for saying she was hungry; she was violently force fed and then forced to eat her own vomit.
