It questions how a despot and a misguided ideology could try to remove the people DDA and others so ferociously advocate for. One wonders how in under 15 minutes the filmmakers could encapsulate such a broad and terrible part of human history. The short film is very well made, beautifully shot, and with an excellent score. Paul and his mother have prepared for this eventuality and the drama unfolds. It’s not long before soldiers come to the farm where Paul and his mother live as the round-up of those deemed ‘unfit’ begins. In a very simple and short amount of time, we understand the wider scope of how cruel the Nazi regime was and how many people blindly followed. She teaches a curriculum dictated by the Nazi regime and it’s quickly evident that the regime values money over human life. The film starts off where Paul, our hero, and his fellow students are at school and Paul’s mother is the teacher. They were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland, and what is now the Czech Republic. At first, it was believed between 70 and 80 thousand people were killed during Aktion T4, however, after more records came to light after the war that number ballooned to roughly 300,000. The killings took place from 1939 until the end of the war in 1945. The program targeted people with developmental or physical disabilities for extermination or what they called ‘mercy killing’, many were children. Aktion T4 was the use of eugenics to ‘get rid’ of people who were deemed ‘incurably sick’ or who were seen as a potential drain on society, thus preserving what the Nazis felt was racial purity and saving the government money. In just 14 minutes, it tells the story of a young boy with a limb disability in 1939 Nazi Germany and his mother’s struggles to protect him after Hitler imposed a horrific program called Aktion T4. This month, Netflix released a short film called Forgive Us Our Trespasses, written and directed by Ashley Eakin. “The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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