Watching Erbkrank: A chilling look at propaganda

Is this worth watching?

Honestly? Only if you are a history buff or someone trying to understand how evil was packaged for the general public in the 1930s. It’s not a movie in any normal sense. It’s a pamphlet with a heartbeat. If you’re looking for entertainment, look away. If you’re looking for a dark lesson in how propaganda works, it’s… well, it’s chilling.

The film moves with this clinical, detached precision that makes my skin crawl. It’s not loud. It’s not screaming at you. It’s just showing you these faces and these charts, trying to convince you that human lives have price tags. It’s terrifying because of how calm it is.

Herbert Gerdes is the figurehead here, and the way he talks about "genetic defects" is so detached it feels like he’s talking about broken machinery. There’s no empathy. None at all. It’s a total void.

The pacing is agonizingly slow. It feels like a lecture you aren’t allowed to leave. There are these long sequences of medical records and grainy faces that the film clearly expects you to look at with disgust. I just found myself looking at the walls instead. It’s hard to stay focused when you know the intent behind every single frame is pure malice.

The context is everything

Watching this feels like a heavy weight. It reminds me a bit of the cold detachment in Loss of Feeling, though obviously for entirely different, much darker reasons. It lacks the humanity you’d find in a drama like Judge Priest, which feels like it’s from another planet compared to this.

The editing is manipulative. It wants you to agree. It wants you to nod along. It’s so insistent that it starts to feel desperate, which is maybe the only satisfying part of the whole experience. It’s trying so hard to be the "correct" scientific view that it accidentally reveals how hollow its core really is.

• The silence in some of the medical wards is deafening.
• The narrator’s voice is like ice water.
• I kept wanting to turn it off, but that’s the point, isn't it?

If you watch it, you’ll see the mechanics of how a regime convinces people that their neighbors are disposable. It’s a gut punch. It’s not a movie review, really. It’s a warning. Don't expect to feel good after this. I needed to go watch a comedy or something simple just to reset. Maybe something light like A Wet Knight or just staring at a blank screen for a while.

It stays with you, in the worst possible way. ⚠️