Hitler-Praising Plastic Surgeon Under Investigation, Leading American Academy Tells Wiesenthal Center

August 28, 2017

The American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery responded to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s call to expel Dr. Katsuya Takasu, one of its most high-profile members, for publicly praising Hitler, venerating “Nazi Science” and for denying both the Nazi Holocaust and the Nanjing Massacre.

A senior official at the Chicago-based Academy confirmed to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean and Director Global Social Action for the Wiesenthal Center, that the charges against Takasu -- an influential and popular media celebrity in Japan -- are serious and that an investigation will be completed in the next few weeks.

In his original letter to the Academy, Rabbi Cooper wrote, “[Takasu] claims that ‘The science developed [by] the Nazis is immortal.’…He dismisses the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of the physically and mentally disabled by the Nazis, as ‘Allied propaganda’. He insults the memory of the victims of the Nazis and of Imperial Japan: ‘I think both the Nanjing [massacre] and Auschwitz are fabrications.’”

Cooper also wrote that Takasu’s claims “… violate all norms of decency and reveal a person who is a racist anti-Semite and outright lover of Nazism….The last thing our world needs today is the embrace of Nazi ideology, under whose banner physicians carried out unspeakable crimes in the name of ‘progress’.”

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).