Movie Review Fog In August

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Spoiler alerts – 2016 A very harrowing German movie about one of the less well known tragic aspects of the World War Two Holocaust, the involuntary Euthanasia program A Yenish Gypsy boy, Ernst Lossa finds himself sent to a Southern Germany mental institution in 1940, He naively takes along his ice skates thinking of it as a vacation, but the skates are confiscated on his arrival. He finds himself on a ward with many physically and mentally disabled children, who start to disappear around him over the days to follow. The medics have been shipping children deemed too ill and costly to care for to a Euthanasia camp, but the buses used for such transportations have drawn complaints and protests from the more caring civilian populations. It is decided that the medics at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre, one of six such real facilities, must euthanize the patients themselves on site instead of shipping them out. Reluctant medics were promised high bonuses per every patient killed, including children. Many were suddenly happy to participate in the murders. Unlike Concentration Camps, the centres had to produce death certificates for their registered patients. That meant that many patients were deliberately weakened and made more ill, to justify their executions, registered frequently as pneumonia. Early on, deaths were caused through a fruit drink laced with lethal doses of barbiturates, taken unwittingly by the children, but as they wised up to this, and no longer trusted the drinks, A new solution was found, The S-Diet; literally a starvation diet. The doctors discovered that vegetable soup could be overboiled to strip it of all nutritional value. You could eat three to four generous servings a day and still die of malnutrition. This was the only diet given to patients scheduled for execution in the name of racial purification, and elimination of the weak. The film looks also at the extent of Catholic Church collusion in the execution programme, with nuns and priests not challenging the system, but willing to offer some comfort to the doomed patients. The film is largely presented with the medics justifying their actions and still convincing themselves that they were good doctors. Some weep for the children they themselves are killing. The Ernst Lossa story becomes a sub-plot. From rebellion, he goes on to try to escape with a fellow patient, assisted by one of the few nuns willing to risk all by helping them, but the escape is defeated with cruel irony by a British air raid that leaves the nun dead. As a result of his increased angry defiance, Ernst is scheduled for execution despite still being healthy, a case that would help prove the guilt of the medics at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre after the war (they actually continued their eugenic involuntary euthanasia programme for four months after the allies liberated that region of Germany too. A very good but truly unsettling story of what happens when doctors forget the Hippocratic Oath in the sway of extreme racist ideology. Arthur Chappell