German dentists admit systemic involvement in Nazi crimes after decades of silence

German dentists have belatedly acknowledged their profession’s brutal practices during the Nazi era, admitting their broad "systemic" involvement in crimes at concentration camps, including sadistic tooth extractions, human experiments, forced sterilizations, and murder.

Their central professional organization, the German Society for Dental, Oral and Orthodontic Medicine (DGZMK), held its first memorial ceremony exposing the atrocities committed by dentists during the Nazi era and paying tribute to the victims, at Berlin’s Humboldt University on Wednesday. 

"As a profession, we have a responsibility to learn from history and take a firm stand against all forms of antisemitism, exclusion, and contempt for humanity," DGZMK board chair Martin Hendges said at the event.

Studies commissioned by the medical community in recent years have begun to reveal the extent of dentists’ complicity under Adolf Hitler.

The systematic removal of gold crowns and fillings from corpses in the camps, for example, allowed them to be reused in German patients – a practice carried out by Hitler’s personal dentist, Hugo Blaschke – or melted down to fund the war effort.

More than 60% of lecturers and professors of dentistry under the so-called Third Reich joined the Nazi party – including eight of the nine presidents of the DGZMK," said Dominik Groß, director of the Institute for the History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine at Aachen University and a trained dentist. This included 55% of dentists in general – a much higher rate than doctors or teachers.

"More than 300 dentists served in the [elite military force] Waffen-SS, and about 100 dentists were responsible for stealing dental gold in concentration camps, as well as for deadly selections and mistreatment."

As part of the "selections," dentists stood at the ramps to inspect camp prisoners as they arrived to help choose who would be sent immediately to their deaths or chosen for forced labor.

Georg Coldewey performed excruciating tooth extractions on prisoners without anesthesia and stole gold crowns from living as well as dead victims. Willi Jäger, a dentist with ambitions of becoming a surgeon, amputated limbs from deportees before killing them with deadly injections.

Groß also uncovered that dentists and oral surgeons ordered the forced sterilization of patients with cleft palates or lips.

Fifteen dental professionals were sentenced to death after the war for crimes against humanity.

However, the vast majority involved in Nazi atrocities received only minimal if any punishment and many continued to pursue their careers without interruption, according to the commissioned studies.

Groß said that while much of his team’s research had been published in 2019, the memorial ceremony had been delayed due to the pandemic and now incorporated information uncovered since then.

A DGZMK spokesperson, Kerstin Albrecht, said the association had also issued an apology at the time the preliminary research was published. Wednesday’s ceremony "emphasized the importance of an open and self-critical examination of our own past."

The new findings also examine the persecution of Jewish dentists. About two-thirds fled abroad, settling primarily in the US, Palestine, and Britain.

The German Medical Association issued a formal apology in 2012 for doctors’ role in the Holocaust, including grotesque experiments on camp prisoners and mass "euthanasia" of those deemed unfit to live.

However, the DGZMK, founded in 1859, took even longer to own up to the misdeeds of its members more than 80 years ago.

Groß said many factors had been in play including a perception that "dentists’ area of expertise was restricted to dental health and not a matter of life and death."

The "gratitude of the postwar generation towards their politically compromised older academic teachers and mentors" had also thwarted an honest historical record, Groß added.

It took until the 2000s, for example, for it to emerge that Hermann Euler, DGZMK president in the Weimar republic, Nazi period and postwar West Germany, had shared responsibility for the "cleansing" campaign to expel Jewish staff from the University of Breslau, now the University of Wrocław, in today’s Poland.

At the memorial ceremony, a Hans Türkheim prize for research on the profession’s history in the Nazi era was awarded for the first time, named for a Jewish dentist forced in 1936 to flee Hamburg for England, where he resumed his practice.

The winner was Lisa Bitterich for her work on German dentists tried for war crimes by British courts after 1945.