‘Gay Cure’ Experiment - At Buchenwald concentration camp,

Danish SS doctor Carl Vaernet experimented on homosexual subjects using hormones and artificial glands. His goal was to override homosexual feelings by injecting hormones into mens’ testicles and implanting glands in their bodies. Many of the subjects died due to complications and infections, and rumors circulated that as many had been castrated.

Between June and December of 1944, Vaernet tried various gland techniques on 17 Buchenwald inmates. Two contracted fatal illnesses as a result. In the grand scheme of things, almost all of the 15,000 gay and lesbian inmates of Nazi camps did not survive.

All of Carl Vaernet’s research proved to be a complete failure. Within the Third Reich, Vaernet became a laughingstock. At war’s end, he cowardly escaped justice by faking a heart attack while in custody and fleeing to South America, where he died in 1965.

Vaernet was the only Nazi doctor proven to have taken an interest exclusively in homosexuality, and it is possible that he helped inspire the South African apartheid government to take a similar interest. From the 1960’s until the late 1980’s, the South African military forced it’s white gay and lesbian members to undergo various ‘cures’ for their orientation, including mandatory sex change operations.

(via lunarpolitics)