Germany’s Dental Association held a special Holocaust remembrance ceremony acknowledging the atrocities committed by dentists during the Nazi era. The organization’s leaders admitted to “widespread systemic involvement in crimes against humanity during the Holocaust.”
The event, held at Humboldt University in Berlin, was the first Holocaust memorial ceremony organized by the German Dental Association. It aimed to confront the role that dentists played in medical experiments and the torture of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
During the ceremony, numerous horrific accounts were revealed of actions carried out by German dentists during World War II, particularly against Jewish inmates.
Martin Henges, chairman of the National Association of Dentists in Germany, stated: “As a profession, we have a responsibility to learn from history and to take a firm stand against all forms of antisemitism, exclusion, and contempt for humanity.”
The unprecedented ceremony followed a series of academic studies commissioned in recent years by the medical community, which uncovered the extent of dentists’ involvement in Nazi crimes.
Dominik Gross, director of the Institute for History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine at Aachen University - and a dentist himself - said during the ceremony: “More than 60 percent of dental lecturers and professors under the so-called ‘Third Reich’ joined the Nazi Party, including eight of the nine presidents of the German Dental Association. In addition, 55 percent of dentists in Germany were members - a far higher rate than among physicians or teachers. Over 300 dentists served in the Waffen-SS, and about 100 were responsible for stealing gold teeth in concentration camps, as well as for participating in deadly selections.”
Dentists serving under Hitler’s regime routinely forcibly extracted gold teeth from prisoners, later melting them down or using them for the benefit of German patients.