At the beginning of 1933, the Charité is a model for doctors from all over Europe, a mecca for patients from all over the world. When the Nazis take power, the world-famous surgeon
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At the beginning of 1933, the Charité is a model for doctors from all over Europe, a mecca for patients from all over the world. When the Nazis take power, the world-famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch calls on the young doctors to "accomplish the necessary new". The national-conservative attitude was the basic consensus in the medical profession. Like most doctors of the Charité, he welcomes the new regime. Only 12 years later he operates day and night war wounded in the narrow bunker under his clinic, while above him, in the ruins of the Charité, fights are carried out building to building.
But in those 12 years, something terrible has happened: Doctors, who have come by profession and vocation to save lives, have become leaders and performers of Nazi racial laws; Accomplices and patrons of a criminal medicine. None of the internationally respected professors such as Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Walter Stoeckel or Georg Bessau became members of the NSDAP. But they become the figureheads of National Socialism. On all occasions, the Nazi conspirators decorated themselves with their doctors. Of the 20 physicians who were indicted in the Nuremberg Doctors' Proceedings after the war, seven were university doctors from Berlin, including doctors from the Charité. How enmeshed are the researchers or reviewers - the physicians who, in their old positions, fulfill new functions in National Socialist health policy? The film goes in search of clues to the scenes of dramatic events. With rare archive footage, historical photos, expert interviews and quotations from previously unknown journals, the film reconstructs entanglement, but also the refusal of doctors of the Charité during National Socialism
