Erbkrank

1936 Nazi propaganda film

1937 (1937)

Running time

21 minutes, 19 secondsCountryNazi GermanyLanguageGerman

Erbkrank (English: Hereditary Disease) is a 1936 Nazi propaganda film directed by Herbert Gerdes.

Erbkrank was one of six propagandistic movies produced by the NS-Rasse und Politisches Amt (National Socialist Racial and Political Office), from 1935 to 1937 to demonize people in Germany diagnosed with mental illness and mental retardation. The goal was to gain public support for the T-4 Euthanasia Program then in preparation. This film, as the others, featured footage of patients in German psychiatric hospitals.

Adolf Hitler reportedly liked the film so much that he encouraged the production of the full-length film Victims of the Past: The Sin against Blood and Race. In 1937, Erbkrank was reportedly showing in nearly all Berlin film theaters.^[1]

Prior to World War II, the film was distributed in America through the Pioneer Fund.^[2]

Notes and references

^ Proctor, Robert N. (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. p. 358. ISBN 978-0-674-74578-0.
^ Saini, Angela (2019). Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press. p. 64. ISBN 9780807076910.