Review – Grey Matter

One of the items on the Nazis’ long list of vile crimes was the murder of disabled and neurodiverse children. Hundreds of these kids were killed in Austria’s Spiegelgrund “clinic” under the supervision of Heinrich Gross, who added to his crimes by preserving the children’s brains and other body parts in jars. If your workplace gets a betting pool going about the year when the government finally acknowledged what happened and agreed to give the remains proper burial, be sure to put your money on 2002. That’s also the year that filmmaker Joe Berlinger made this movie about the situation and sought an interview with ancient-but-not-yet-dead Gross. Spoiler alert: I was relieved that they couldn’t track him down, as he would doubtless have simply claimed to be unable to remember what he’d done (a lie he’d told in court in the past). His victims deserved to be memorialized without granting their killer any screen time at all, so I’m sorry they even tried to find him. Beyond that this is a powerful documentary about an important subject. Worth seeing