Euthanasia Programs

 

Forthcoming “Fog in August” movie addresses Nazi Euthanasia Program

By Dave Andrusko
It’s only a brief article by Martin Blaney that appeared at Screen Daily but it definitely caught my attention. Here’s the lead:

StudioCanal is to handle international sales on Kai Wessel’s Fog In August (“Nebel im August”), the first feature film to address the Nazis’ euthanasia programme.

Based on Robert Domes’ 2008 historical novel, Fog In August centres on the authentic life story of 13-year-old Ernst Lossa who was committed to a mental hospital in Sargau in 1942 because of his origins in a family of travelers [Roma—“Gypsies”].

I don’t have the expertise, but I’m sure this is hardly the first movie on the Nazis’ euthanasia program. However it may well be, and probably is, the first that tackles something very few people know. Independent of the horrific Holocaust of the Jews, the Nazis rounded up and slaughtered millions of “defectives” and others they considered “racially impure,” such as Gypsies.

Reading information found on the United State Holocaust Museum Memorial website, I learned the Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Roma in German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Serbia and untold thousands died in the killing centers such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some estimates are that up to a half-million Gypsies were murdered or worked to death or wasted away in ghastly camps and compounds.
As more news comes out about “Fog in August,” I will keep you updated.

Source: NRLC News