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Jewish Groups and Nazi hunters have slammed a German medical association’s decision
to honor a 92-year-old doctor suspected of participating
in Hitler’s euthanasia program.
A spokesman for Germany's Central Council of Jews called the decision by the
Professional Association of German Internists to honor
Nazi doctor Hans-Joachim Sewering “a scandal.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Jerusalem has also protested the move.
On Saturday, May 24, Sewering
was honored with the top award of the German internists
group, known as the BDI.
The award was presented for
having “perfomed unequalled services in the cause of
freedom of the practice and the independence of the medical
profession, and to the nation's health system," according to a BDI press statement.
But Stephen Kramer from the
Central Council of Jews said Sewering's Nazi past was
well known. In 1993 he was publicly pressured to decline
the presidency of the World Medical Association because
of his alleged Nazi activities.
The BDI, which has some 25,000
members, defended its decision, saying Sewering had been
investigated by German prosecutors and was never charged.
Magazine: evidence of euthanasia
experiments
On Wednesday, May 28, the
head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Efraim
Zuroff, asked the group to retract the honor, and to
take back the Guenther Budelmann medal Sewering was awarded.
“It is bad enough that Sewering did not have to stand trial for his involvement
in the National Socialist mass murders,“ Zuroff told
DPA news service. “It is even worse to honor an SS-man
and a liar who has so far avoided justice, despite having
taken part in euthanasia experiments.”
Since 1978, German news magazine Der Spiegel has published documents testifying
that Sewering, while a doctor at tuberculosis clinic
at Schoebrunn near Munich, sent a 14-year-old girl to
die at a euthanasia center.
Sewering denies knowledge
of euthanasia
Sewering has admitted to being
a member of the SS, an elite Nazi formation, but has
always denied being responsible for euthanasia.
For years, the Wiesenthal
Center has been trying to get the Bavarian justice system
to pay attention to what it says is proof of Sewering's
euthanasia activities.
Sewering is now 92 yers old.
In 1993 he was a member of the SS, and in 1934 he joined
the Nazi party. As a doctor in the tuberculosis clinic
in Schoenbrunn, near Dachau, in 1942 he is said to have
been involved in the euthanasia program, which targeted
handicapped children.
According to the Wiesenthal
center, Sewering directly signed over six to eight patients
to the death camp at Eglfing-Haar. Three of them were
killed there.
Earlier investigations ended
The investigations into Sewering's
activities stopped because he claimed ignorance about
the killings.
“This claim is false,” Wiesenthal
Center's Zuroff told dpa. “The nurses knew they were
killing sick people, and the SS doctor didn't? What a
joke.”
dw-world.de
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