This September, Germany's Anatomical Society will hold a symposium called “Anatomy in the Third Reich,” which is a panel discussing the work of Nazi anatomists, like Eduard Pernkopf, who used victims of genocide to further medical research. It’s important to continue to examine the Nazis' "final solutions" lest we forget the horror and evil of those times.

But perhaps we’ve already started forgetting—this report reminded me that, perhaps, we’re not so far from carrying out the same heinous acts that people like Pernkopf did.

A few years ago, 60 Minutes aired a segment showing “Dr. Death” (Jack Kevorkian) helping to kill someone—it was termed assisted suicide. That the show was aired and watched demonstrates the extent to which the lust for blood, so to speak, has been encouraged.

A year or so before the ghoulish show, Kevorkian hosted his own show—this time it was a collection of his own paintings, which was a real eye-opener. People attended and, sipping wine, viewed the paintings depicting decapitation or other grizzly aspects of death and dying. These paintings where just another outlet that oozed Kevorkian’s sick worldview.

Many years ago, he’d earned his sobriquet, “Dr. Death,” by being extremely keen on watching and photographing people as they were dying. Not content with watching patients in the hospital who were dying, Kevorkian turned his sights to the prisons where he obtained the warden’s permission to conduct experiments upon executed convicts.

There is a term for the “science of killing” called “ktenology.” The great humanitarian Dr. Leo Alexander used it when he wrote about Nazi physicians using human subjects for experimentation, and I think it applicable to Kevorkian and others who’d use people in such manner.

While Kevorkian’s machinations seem to pale in contrast to Nazi doctors, it is only because, I suspect, that most of us can stomach hearing about one or two people who advocate this type of human experimentations; we simply call them nut jobs. Slowly, ever so slowly, many of us are succumbing to the deadly ethical malaise that Nazis imbibed.

I hope that many American ethicists attend this symposium, and for the rest of us, I hope we remember that what happened in Nazi Germany can happen here, American style.