Germany’s leading dental association has issued an unprecedented apology acknowledging its members’ complicity in Nazi atrocities committed during the Holocaust.
The German Society for Dental, Oral and Orthodontic Medicine (DGZMK) held its first official memorial Thursday at Berlin’s Humboldt University, confronting evidence that hundreds of dentists aided selections at death camps, stole victims’ gold fillings, and performed forced sterilizations on patients deemed unfit to reproduce.
“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,” said board chair Martin Hendges.
Studies commissioned by German medical historians show that more than half of the country’s dentists joined the Nazi Party. Around 300 served in the Waffen-SS, including camp dentists tasked with overseeing “tooth selection,” where prisoners were lined up and examined like livestock before many were dispatched to their deaths.
At Auschwitz and Treblinka, SS dentists removed gold crowns from corpses and the living alike, often without anesthesia. Others signed off on sterilization orders for people with cleft palates and other deformities, expanding eugenic policies that targeted both Jews and disabled Germans.
The extracted metal was melted down at Reich facilities and, under orders from Heinrich Himmler, shipped to the Reichsbank to fund the German war effort. Hitler’s own dentist, Hugo Blaschke, managed parts of the operation and personally handled more than 50 kilograms of confiscated dental gold, according to postwar testimony.
Although fifteen dentists were tried and executed for war crimes, the vast majority faced no punishment. Many resumed academic or private practice careers within a few years, aided by what researchers describe as the “gratitude of the postwar generation” toward their compromised mentors.
While Germany’s broader medical establishment issued its apology in 2012 for doctors’ role in the Holocaust, it took another decade to confront its own past. During the memorial, names of Jewish dentists expelled or murdered under the Third Reich were read, which organizers called a “step toward accountability” for a field that long saw itself as peripheral to the machinery of genocide.
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