The U.S. Justice Department has begun an investigation into the wartime activities of a German doctor elected president of the World Medical Association.
The probe would determine whether Dr. Hans Joachim Sewering, a former member of the Nazi SS, should be placed on the “watch list” which bars entry into the United States.
The action by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations follows a request by the World Jewish Congress, which is launching its own investigation into the case.
These actions came after a campaign was launched to ask Sewering to withdraw his name from the presidency of the World Medical Association, to which he was elected last October.
The American Medical Association, a constituent member of the world organization, has asked Sewering to step aside. A spokesman for the Chicago-based group said if Sewering did not withdraw as president-elect, the American group would oppose his taking office.
Under the rules of the world body, he is to become president this coming October.
The campaign to bar Sewering from the association presidency was initiated by Professor Michael Kochen of the University of Gottingen, in Germany, and doctors from the United States, Canada and Israel.
Sewering, who is 76, has acknowledged he was an SS member before World War II but denied accusations that he sent a tuberculosis patient to death as part of the Nazi euthanasia program.
Sewering, who lives in Dachau, the site of a wartime death camp, told The New York Times, “I was 17 in 1933 when I had to join the SS.”
Later, he said, “I joined the armed forces and was no longer active in the SS except in its cavalry branch, the only part of the organization not accused of war crimes.”
CHARGES ‘KEEP COMING UP’
Charges against Sewering were first made by the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1978.
At that time, it was reported that Sewering was a doctor in 1943 at the Schonbrunn tuberculosis hospital.
“I still work at Schonbrunn,” the doctor told the Times, emphasizing that the hospital run by a Roman Catholic order “never would have suggested anyone who was involved in the euthanasia program as a candidate for the presidency of the World Medical Association.”
Sewering said the patient in question had simply been discharged on order of hospital authorities and said the Nazi euthanasia program had been stopped in 1941.
The chairman of the German National Chamber of Physicians, in Cologne, told the Times that the organization remains behind Sewering, whom it put forward for president of the world body.
Dr. Karsten Vilmar said the charges against Sewering “were proven baseless in 1978, but they keep coming up.” He said the organization would never have suggested Sewering for the post if the charges against him were true.
But Dr. Kochen, who opposes Sewering’s nomination, told the Times that “to say the charges are baseless is simply a lie.”
Sewering would have to have known what would happen to a patient sent to a known euthanasia facility, Kochen said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
