MEDICAL GROUP DEFENDS CHIEF WITH SS PAST

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 21, 1993                   TAG: 9301210065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BRUSSELS, BELGIUM                                LENGTH: Short
MEDICAL GROUP DEFENDS CHIEF WITH SS PAST
A leading official of the World Medical Association on Wednesday defended the group's president-elect, who has acknowledged belonging to the Nazi SS.
October's election of Dr. Hans J. Sewering as the association's president has provoked an outcry over his SS past.
The group's secretary general, Dr. Andre Wynen, said the association's 40-member council will meet in April in Turkey, to discuss mounting pressure for Sewering to step aside.
"I'm convinced he was not involved in criminal activities," Wynen said Wednesday.
The American Medical Association is leading the calls for Sewering to withdraw. Wynen said the world association would yield if the German Chamber of Physicians joined in the calls.
But the German group's chairman, Dr. Kasten Vilmar, said it backed Sewering.
Sewering, 76, has said he joined the SS before World War II, but that German youths did not realize Hitler's ambitions at the time. He denies accusations that as a young doctor in 1943 he sent a retarded teen-ager to her death in a Nazi clinic.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB