Erbkrank

Erbkrank (English: The Hereditary Defective) is a 1936 Nazi propaganda film.

This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary disease costs the People's community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."

Directed by Herbert Gerdes, it was one of six propagandistic movies produced by the "NSDAP, Reichsleitung, Rassenpolitisches Amt" or the Office of Racial Policy, 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 the works. This film, as the others, was made with actual 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 Opfer der Vergangenheit: Die Sünde wider Blut und Rasse (English: Victims of the Past: The Sin against Blood and Race). In 1937, Erbkrank was reportedly showing in nearly all Berlin film theaters.

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

See also

• Alles Leben ist Kampf
• Das Erbe
• Opfer der Vergangenheit
• euthanasia
• List of German films 1933–1945
• Nazism and cinema

External links

• Erbkrank via cine-holocaust
• Erbkrank at the Internet Movie Database