ABSTRACT
In contrast to the compulsory castration and typhus fever experiments, the hormonal experiments on homosexual men at Buchenwald are quite well documented. They were conducted in strict secrecy on the orders of the SS by the Danish doctor Carl Peter Jensen, alias Carl Vaernet. He went to Germany in 1942 after being forced to give up a practice he had had in Copenhagen since 1934. His contact with the leader of the Danish Nazi Party, his colleague Frits Clausen, must already have cost him a lot of patients in the first year of the war. In summer 1943 he was brought to Himmler's attention by the SS Reich Doctor, Dr Grawitz. Vaernet's claim that his hormonal research in the thirties had made it possible to cure homosexual men aroused Himmler's undivided interest. He gave instructions for Vaernet to be treated with ‘the utmost generosity’, and to be given the possibility of continuing his research in a Prague cover firm coming under the Reichsführer-SS, ‘German Medicines Ltd.’ By July 1944 he was in a position to start the human experiments. Buchenwald concentration camp was instructed to place five prisoners at his disposal.
