The Nazis produced powerful propaganda. Among their many propaganda products was “Dasein ohne Leben,” which is German for “Existence without Life.” The original film and its copies were lost at the end of World War II.

 What follows is the transcript of a ten-minute (actually 9:56) reconstruction of the original film and of a Moderator’s critical comments which run throughout the film. (See “Prof. Dr. Kampfer, ‘Existence without life 1941,’ AI enhanced video”.) In what follows, I insert notes that might help the non-viewer to appreciate more fully the power of this film. (PTS)

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The film begins with music blaring. An attractive, college-age couple looks at a wall poster, presumably in a university building, advertising Professor Doctor Kampfer’s lecture entitled “Existence without Life.” The Moderator repeats the title in German and then in English. (All the characters’ speaking parts that follow are in German with English subtitles; only the Moderator speaks in English.)

The young man asks his friend: “Why don’t you come too?”

She replies honestly: “What would I do in a medical lecture?”

He persuades: “This subject doesn’t just concern doctors.”

She responds: “‘Existence without Life’? It sounds a bit ideological.”

He answers: “It is a human question that concerns us all,” and they walk toward the lecture hall.

Moderator: “The film, which again uses the professor figure to add spurious, scientific respectability, vanished in early 1945. But we have recreated it from the original director’s script, which had been filed away in the Federal German Archives.”

The young couple enters the lecture hall and finds seating. The camera pans the audience of mostly young, well groomed, intelligent-looking Germans. The lecturer is Prof. Dr. Kampfer [hereafter Professor]. He addresses his audience: “The nation state is not only a coming together of people who share the same race and history. It is also rooted in the eternal laws of nature. Mental illness is a hereditary evil…one of the greatest dangers to the health of the nation.”

While images of the mentally ill appear, the Moderator speaks: “The script demands that demonically mad faces arise like a specter out of the sea. The faces seen here were those used in the original film. They come from the documentary footage we discovered in Potsdam. This unedited film shows the techniques used — such as sharp, underneath lighting to make the patients appear grotesque. The parts of the film never to be shown to the audience reveal the trick. The Professor continues with his demeaning diatribe.”

With the startling images appearing, the Professor speaks: “Those who suffer are burdened with the heaviest fate.”

Then the handsome, scholarly Professor returns to the screen and solemnly names “the heaviest fate:” “An existence without life.”

As the Professor and his students are featured, the Moderator says: “The script describes the Professor as a man close to life’s experiences. His students as a powerful image of today’s strong, racially pure, and healthy youth. His lecture, scripted by psychiatrists working for T4 [a Nazi euthanasia program], first claims that care for the sick has become indiscriminate and too costly.”

As images of the ill, the countryside, and the lecture hall appear, the Professor speaks: “Private and state asylums were established in the midst of Germany’s beautiful countryside. New, ever larger, asylums were built…which met all the requirements of modern medicine. And so arose the immense number of state and private asylums in Germany, which today house almost 400,000 mental patients…idiots and feeble-minded…who are tended by over 2,000 doctors and over 40,000 nurses, attendants, and ancillary staff.”

The Moderator returns: “The film then turns to the central question of the fate of those, it was claimed, who could not be cured.”

The Professor contends: “But these purely economic questions don’t belong here.”

The young woman says to her friend, “This Goy [Gentile] really exaggerated things!  That’s nothing compared with reality.” A wall picture of medical-institutional chaos appears.

Then comes footage of such chaos. The Professor speaks, “Despite all the efforts of our psychiatry, a large percentage of our mental patients remain incurable. One can tell at once the extent of their decline from a conversation with these wretched people, insofar as they are capable of talking.”

As video of the mentally ill continues, the Moderator breaks in: “Using the new and then unusual technique of recorded interviews, patients are shown talking nonsense — to suggest an inner madness. [For example, an ill woman is shown speaking:] ‘He showed me a murdered head, so that I could see it. Then he showed me my murdered head, and then the taste of a murdered head.’”

The Professor continues, and the video illustrates his points: “What a contrast! On the one hand, a hellish display while in the ward for apathetic cases, and unnatural silence like the grave. Women who are dull, empty, indifferent. Burned out! Often these helpless cases need force feeding. [On the screen is a boy having a feeding tube pushed into a nostril.] And attention to their bodily needs. What greatness of spirit it requires, to put aside one’s natural claims to life and happiness, in order to bury oneself alive in such a house of pain. But it is unnatural and intolerable, in terms of a higher morality, that whole generations of healthy young people [shown in the lecture hall] should grow old caring for the incurably idiotic and mad. All their sacrifices merely help to maintain and prolong an existence without life.”

As residents of an asylum are pictured leaving their building, the Moderator cuts in: “Evermore contemptuous of disabled people, this film completely writes off their lives, denying them even their humanity.”

A disabled man trots down a sidewalk, and the Professor speaks: “It is a mistake to think that such patients feel happy or that they cling on to life. They have no consciousness of existence. They cling on because they are devoid of critical faculties and are accustomed to their situation. All possibilities of medical treatment, or even improvement, are excluded. What shall become of these innocent victims?”

With video of people with disabilities, the Moderator speaks: “The Professor then appropriates the religious language of mercy and salvation to call for the killing of disabled people. The asylums’ administrators have been instructed to choose what they called ‘hopeless cases,’ many of whom were given a temporary reprieve from the gas chambers, to be filmed.”

The Professor proceeds, and video reinforces his points: “We call upon a merciful destiny to liberate these regrettable creatures from their existence without life. How cruel it is to keep the spiritually dead as living corpses until they reach old age. Day in, day out, in the night of madness. Always the same mad ideas, always the same idiotic behavior. Years, decades, a lifetime long. Permanently on a level which we only find deep down in the animal kingdom.”

Moderator: “Arriving at the crux of the argument, the film switches to a deeply emotional and personal tone to confuse the issue of the state coldly carrying out mass murder.”

The Professor speaks sincerely: “Allow me to close with a few purely human and personal remarks and so to extend the framework of this lecture. If I knew that I, and this could happen to anyone, would be struck down by the disaster of some incurable mental illness, and that such an existence without life would lie before me, I would do anything for this not to happen. I would rather die. I’m convinced all healthy people think like this. [Healthy young people in the audience appear on the screen.] But I am also convinced that every incurable mental patient or idiot — if he could recognize his position — would prefer an end to such an existence. [Ill and disabled people appear.]  No sensible human being could deny him the right to die. [The original couple appears, with the young man nodding in agreement with the Professor.] Is it not the duty of those who care for the incapable — and that means total idiots and the incurable mental patients — to help them exercise their rights? Is that not a sacred demand of charity? Deliver those you cannot heal! [Music begins to play softly in the background and gradually builds.] The director of a large mental institution put this question to the parents of all his incurable charges. Seventy-three percent answered ‘yes.’ One mother wrote: ‘Don’t ask, do it!’”

All members of the audience then demonstrate enthusiastic approval of the Professor’s speech by knocking loudly on their desktops. The film ends.

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The Church’s response to this lecture should be one word. No! 

Thanks to Dr. Carl R. Trueman — of Grove City College (Grove City, PA) and of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (Washington, DC) — for linking to “Dasein ohne Leben” in his article “Save the Fox, Kill the Fetus” (February 5, 2026, https://firstthings.com/save-the-fox-kill-the-fetus/).