Opinion: Doctors were complicit in Holocaust atrocities. Current and future health care workers need to know that

The liberation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, revealed many horrors. Among them were the atrocities perpetrated by doctors who took ethics very seriously, albeit with an unusual code of ethics with the State as the “patient.”
When SS physician Fritz Klein was asked by a prisoner-physician how he reconciled his actions in concentration camps with his ethical obligations as a physician, he answered , “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a purulent appendix from a diseased body. The Jews are the purulent appendix in the body of Europe.” Read the rest…