German Medical Association apologizes for Nazi-era experiments

Helen Rappaport, survivor of Auschwitz and the experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengele, lights a candle at a Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony at the Harold Washington Library April 21, 2005 in Chicago, Illinois.

/ Scott Olson/Getty Images

(CBS/AP) BERLIN - The German Medical Association has adopted a declaration apologizing for sadistic experiments and other actions of doctors under the Nazis, asking forgiveness of victims.

In the statement adopted earlier this week in Nuremberg, the association, called the Bundesarztekammer, said many doctors under the Nazis were "guilty, contrary to their mission to heal, of scores of human rights violations and we ask the forgiveness of their victims, living and deceased, and of their descendants."

In addition to performing pseudo-scientific experiments in concentration camps, German doctors also were key to the Nazi's program of forced sterilization or euthanasia of the mentally ill or others deemed "unworthy of life."

The medical association says "these crimes were not the actions of individual doctors but involved leading members of the medical community" including academic and renowned research institutions, and should be taken as a warning for the future.

"In the history of apologies for crimes and abuses carried out in the name of medicine this is the most important ever made," Dr. Art Caplan, professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an editorial on MSNBC. "It does nothing to soften the horror of the Holocaust but it both ascribes responsibility where it belongs and ends any further efforts to deny or obfuscate what actually happened.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has more on Nazi medical experiments.

[weareidiots]

"The medical association says "these crimes were not the actions of individual doctors but involved leading members of the medical community""

What kind of crappy apology is this? Take full responsibility for perpetrating, enabling, or for turning a blind eye to these atrocities instead of laying it on any "leading members". This is worse than saying nothing at all.

[MissNormaDesmond]

I think you're getting this backwards. What they're saying is that this wasn't a few stray individuals, that leading members of the profession were involved, and thus the profession as a whole should apologize. In any case, the people who are apologizing now are almost certainly not any of the people who perpetrated any of these crimes, as the majority if not all of them are most likely dead.

[haroldamaio]

In addition to performing pseudo-scientific experiments in concentration camps, German doctors also were key to the Nazi's program of forced sterilization or --euthanasia-- of the mentally ill or others deemed "unworthy of life."

"Euthanasia" was Nazism for murder. Its appearance in an "apology" is wholly offensive.

Harold A. Maio

[MissNormaDesmond]

It didn't appear in the apology, it appeared in CBS's description of the apology.

[prm777]

Better late than never? Clearly, such an apology is very long overdue, but nonetheless important.

[jackp32]

Following WWII, a number of the Nazi doctors were tried and convicted of war crimes, and executed. Others were convicted and sentenced to prison while others were never prosecuted and escaped the wheels of justice.

[audemus]

While the apology is, I'm sure, appreciated...the ones who really should be making the apologies are long since gone.

I was born and raised in the South, and there is some history of slave "ownership" in my family tree, however, I am not the one who did these things. Though I can, and do, regret the actions of my ancestors in this regard, an apology from me is somewhat meaningless, and certainly unjustified.

[MissNormaDesmond]

Eh, yes and no. Did you inherit wealth or social position passed down from them? If so you, too, benefited from slavery. I think the apology from the German medical society recognizes that kind of inherited debt, and attempts to discharge it in the only way they now can. It seems like a well-meant, conscientious gesture.