The summary below - by Birger Danielsen, who is one of the books co-authors - concentrates the aspects of the Vaernet case which are new or which lead to different conclusions from those in the above-mentioned website.

SUMMARY OF KEY REVELATIONS

Danish co-author Birger Danielsen writes:

There are four aspects of our book that are of special interest:

1). The letter by Peter Tatchell of OutRage! to the Danish government on the 16th of March 1998 triggered the reopening of the Vaernet case in the Danish media. This case had previously been only sporadically mentioned in Danish newspapers - in the late 1940's and the 1980's.

The Danish government did not answer OutRage! for over a year - until June 1999. The Danish Prime Minister passed the buck to the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Justice passed the buck to Tatchell and the National Archives of Denmark.

Refusing to launch an inquiry into Tatchell’s allegation that Vaernet had committed crimes against humanity and that his escape from justice had been aided by prominent Danish citizens, the government of Denmark advised Tatchell to do the criminal investigation himself. It referred him to the Danish National Archives. When Tatchell approached the National Archives, he was told that the files on Vaernet were not open to the public and that they could not be examined for 80 years from 1945.

Unofficially, however, the government’s reaction was to eventually give Danish journalists and historians access to the hitherto closed files. The most important details of Vaernet's story were subsequently finally revealed in Danish newspaper stories in the summer and autumn of 1999. These articles were the starting-point of our book.

2). Carl Vaernet was a prisoner in the Alsgades Skole (school) POW detention
centre in Copenhagen from June to November 1945. Here Danish war criminals
and other people who were suspected of cooperation with the Germans were
detained.

The detention centre was run jointly by the British Military Mission in Denmark and by the Danish intelligence service under the jurisdiction of the Danish police. The leading officer at Alsgade Skole was a British Major, Ronald F. Hemingway, who gave his
permission for the transfer of Carl Vaernet to a hospital in Copenhagen in November 1945. Vaernet claimed he was suffering from a serious heart condition.

During his detention, Carl Vaernet - unlike the other prisoners – was allowed to communicate with the outside world, including with business people who were working to market his hormone therapies world wide. These included therapies to "cure" homosexuality. The evidence clearly indicates that Vaernet succeeded in convincing the British military authorities, as well as Danish police officers, that his hormone therapies were morally justifiable and could be an international success. He therefore received special, privileged treatment in the POW camp.

3). We have found three Danish patents and one American patent that Carl
Vaernet took out for his medical treatments. One document suggests that he may also have taken out a British patent, but we have not been able to confirm this.

4). Vaernet's attempted cures for homosexuality paralleled similar research and therapies officially authorised in Britain. The British mathematical genius, Alan Turing, who broke the Nazi Enigma-code during the Second World War and initiated the modern computer revolution, suffered tragically as a result of similar British attempts to "cure" homosexuality.

Turing's gayness became an issue in 1952. Declared a security risk by the British authorities, he was forced to undergo a humiliating hormone treatment that was supposed to eradicate his homosexuality. Two years later, he committed suicide.

The death of Alan Turing was a result of a treatment not dissimilar to the one developed by Carl Vaernet: both were premised on the idea that homosexuality was the result of a hormonal imbalance and could be "cured" by hormone therapy. This view was widespread in the medical profession until the 1950's and persisted in some medical circles until the 1970s.

VAERNET’S BIOGRAPHY

Carl Vaernet was born on the 28th of April 1893 and grew up in a fairly well-off farmer family in Jutland. He was educated as a physician at the University of Copenhagen where he obtained his degree of medicine in 1923, the same year in which the future Danish Nazi Führer Frits Clausen got his medical degree.

Vaernet established himself as a general practitioner near Copenhagen in 1927 and quickly built up a successful practice. He was especially engaged in developing hormone therapies for various diseases, and he also researched shortwave and microshortwave therapy.

According to Vaernet's own post-war accounts, he took various postgraduate courses with prominent professors in Germany, Holland and France, and achieved a reputation as a society doctor and became prosperous.

In those years hormone therapy was regarded as a possible cure for a much wider range of diseases than today, and great hopes were also directed towards shortwave therapy. Carl Vaernet claimed that he could cure cancer with his methods, and around 1940 he claimed that he had developed a hormone therapy which could convert the sexual orientation of homosexual persons.

The method was to insert an artificial gland containing the male hormone testosterone into the groin of the patient. The functional novelty of the "gland" was that it could release constant doses of hormone into the patient thereby enabling a therapy over a long period.

Carl Vaernet developed the method with his assistant, a young, newly educated physician by the name of Gunnar Kelstrup. While Vaernet's methods were popular with a large number of patients, the methods of Vaernet and Kelstrup were never recognised by the established authorities of the medical profession.

Vaernet was a member of the Danish National Socialist (Nazi) Party from the late 1930's. In April 1940 Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, and during the following years fewer and fewer patients visited his clinic because his positive attitude towards the Germans was well known.

As a result of declining patients and the general business downturn during the war, by
1943 Carl Vaernet realised that he could not get enough money in Denmark to carry on his hormone research.

In that year he told an old acquaintance of his - the Danish born, internationally famous opera singer Helge Roswaenge - about his problem. Roswaenge was a star at the Berlin Opera, and he had good contacts to the top echelons of the Nazi power structure. Roswaenge introduced Vaernet to the Reichsarzt-SS Ernst Grawitz (the top SS-doctor), who agreed to recommend that Vaernet could continue his research as an employee of the SS. The idea was also recommended by the chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

In November 1943 the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler agreed, and a contract was drafted. In December 1943 Vaernet was named SS-Sturmbannführer (Major), and he was placed under an SS medical company in Prague, Deutsche Heilmittel GmbH.

Carl Vaernet arrived in Berlin on the 6th of October 1943 with his wife and four of his six children. Three of them were minors, and his then 21 year old daughter, Aase, was with him as his secretary. On the 26th of February 1944 Vaernet and his family moved on to Prague where they were installed in a big flat originally belonging to a deported Jewish family.

Vaernet visited Buchenwald at least six times between June and December 1944 from his base in Prague and operated on patients four times. His closest partners were the SS garrison doctor in Buchenwald Gerhard Schiedlausky, who after the war was hanged for participation in medical experiments (the Ravensbrück Process in Hamburg 1946-47), and Erwin Ding, who was in charge of typhoid experiments in Buchenwald which cost at least 150 inmates their lives.

Carl Vaernet operated on a total of 17 male KZ-inmates who were forced to undergo an operation with the artificial gland. Vaernet used various types of persons for his experiments - homosexuals, non-homosexuals, criminals, non-criminals. It seems that one or two of his "patients" later died from infections caused by the horrible sanitary conditions in Buchenwald, but otherwise no evidence points towards any physical effects of Vaernet's operations. Reports that Carl Vaernet castrated KZ-inmates have not been confirmed by our research.

Vaernet quickly became unpopular with his SS-superiors because he achieved few results and worked in various other directions. He simultaneously tried to develop an artificial insulin gland, and he also believed that some of his therapies could give patients almost eternal youth. He appears not to have carried out any credible scientific tests to substantiate these claims.

Carl Vaernet addressed a final report to Heinrich Himmler on the 10th of February 1945 where he described his hormone projects and his alleged results without even mentioning his experiments in Buchenwald. This omission suggests that his research in Prague and Buchenwald was probably deemed - even by him - a failure; or at least not sufficiently credible to merit a mention.

It seems that from the autumn of 1944 Vaernet directed his thoughts towards the post-war possibilities of his hormone ideas. In September 1944 he began to cooperate with a Danish SS officer and engineer, Holger Winding Christensen, who visited Prague. Winding Christensen agreed to be in charge of the technical part of the hormone project.

In February and March 1945 both Carl Vaernet and Holger Winding Christensen
returned to Denmark. Winding Christensen brought with him an amount of money equivalent in 2002 to £15,000 British pounds sterling which, on behalf of Vaernet, he received from the Reichsarzt-SS (national doctor), Ernst Grawitz. By the end of 1945 the money had been spent on a machine designed to produce artificial glands. Whether the machine was ever used for that purpose is not known.

When Denmark was liberated on the 5th of May 1945, both Carl Vaernet and Holger Winding Christensen were arrested and detained at Alsgade Skole camp in Copenhagen. Various Danish police officers who had been inmates in Buchenwald could confirm that Vaernet had visited the camp wearing an SS uniform, so there was no way for him to deny that. When interviewed, he explained to the Danish police that he had been in Buchenwald to treat detained Danish police officers, and that the only purpose of his activities in Germany was scientific.

Moreover, he claimed he had never been a Nazi. In 1945 the Danish authorities merely accused Carl Vaernet of membership of the SS and of espionage. The evidence against him regarding his medical experiments was still vague. The full nature of his activities was not revealed until 1947.

Nevertheless, the leader of the British Military Mission at Alsgades Skole in September 1945, Major Hemingway, stated that Vaernet "undoubtedly will be sentenced as a war
criminal".

During his detention Carl Vaernet succeeded in awakening the interest of the British and Danish authorities in his hormone treatment ideas. He was allowed to keep contact with the outside world from his cell for the purpose of promoting his hormone therapies. Vaernet seems to have gained promising contacts with the British-American pharmaceutical company "Parke, Davis & Comp. Ltd., London & Detroit" and maybe also with the American chemical giant Du Pont.

In January 1946, while he was hospitalised with an alleged critical heart disease, an application for his second patent relating to the artificial gland was filed with the Directorate of Patents at Copenhagen. Vaernet's partner, Holger Winding Christensen, also worked on the project from his cell. It is not clear whether the two men were allowed to meet, but we know for sure that the 25-year-old son of Carl Vaernet, Kjeld Vaernet, acted as an intermediary who passed on information from one to the other.
Kjeld Vaernet later became a prominent brain surgeon in Denmark. He is 81 years old today and has contributed to our book with long personal interviews.

In November 1945 Vaernet was hospitalised in Copenhagen, and the authorities at Alsgades Skole agreed to release him. But the charges against Carl Vaernet were not dropped. He allegedly suffered from a critical heart condition, and in February 1946 he was discharged from hospital and allowed to go to his brother's farm in the countryside as a convalescent. The consultant doctor of the hospital, Tage Bjering, had declared that Carl Vaernet suffered from a critical, chronic heart condition for which there was no cure at the time. Bjering estimated that Vaernet could probably only live one or two more years "and maybe not even that long".

From our research material, however, it is clear that Carl Vaernet's electro-cardiogramme was normal, and that he received no treatment during his three months in hospital; he merely stayed there. During his stay he typed long letters to his business partners about his hormone therapies, and promoted his ideas to various corporations abroad.

Meanwhile, the Copenhagen doctor Gunnar Kelstrup tried to pressure the police and the Public Prosecutor drop the charges against Vaernet. It seems that his motives were loyalty to his old employer, a strong belief in the future of Vaernet's hormone therapies and - not least - the opportunity to gain scientific fame for himself and a lot of money.

Another important aide of Carl Vaernet's was a man called Johan Laub Ostenfeld, who during the period 1936-43 had been administrator of Vaernet's clinic. He also tried to influence authorities by eliciting supportive letters from various persons. Additionally, he did medical research for Vaernet in libraries, while Vaernet himself was imprisoned in the POW camp.

After Carl Vaernet was discharged from hospital in February 1946, Gunnar Kelstrup and Vaernet's solicitor, E. Bang-Ebbestrup, continued their efforts to convince the authorities of the seriousness of Vaernet's illness. In August 1946 Kelstrup wrote to the Public Prosecutor that Vaernet's health had deteriorated further so that he was almost crippled. A so-called E-vitamin cure by a respected professor at a Swedish hospital in
Stockholm, Anders V. Kristensson, was allegedly the only hope for him. On the basis of this medical certificate the Public Prosecutor allowed Vaernet to go to Sweden, and he was even paid a small stipend to support himself during his stay in Sweden.

We have found a few letters in Vaernet's hand from the period between February and August 1946, when his health was allegedly deteriorating sharply. In April he wrote to his solicitor that "everything is ready in Argentina" and "the money is ready in Sweden". He also mentions an agreement with "pont" (probably the American chemical corporation Du Pont) and that "all that remains is that I have to be present myself".

We don't know much about Carl Vaernet's period in Sweden, although we have applied extensively for information from Swedish archives. Vaernet probably lived there under a false name and got his costs paid by persons from the extensive Nazi escape network which operated in Denmark and Sweden during the post-war years. In November 1946 the Danish police contacted the Swedish professor Kristensson, who was supposed to be treating Carl Vaernet with his E vitamin cure, but Kristensson stated that he had never heard of Vaernet.

The last trace we have of Carl Vaernet in Europe is from December 1946, when he visited a Dutch doctor in Amsterdam. Immediately afterwards he probably boarded an trans-Atlantic passenger ship somewhere in western Europe. In January 1947 Gunnar Kelstrup called the police chief in Frederiksberg (a district of Copenhagen) and informed him that "Vaernet has arrived in Brazil". The police chief took note of the information
but didn't do anything further. He was later identified as having settled in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.

Gunnar Kelstrup's extensive help to Vaernet was never questioned by the authorities. Kelstrup wrote his letters on the paper of the military intelligence service to which he had connections from the wartime, and that probably helped him maintain an air of having powerful connections when he addressed the authorities on Vaernet's behalf.

During the spring of 1947 Brigadier Telford Taylor, who was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg doctors' trial, wrote a letter to the Danish Medical Association with new information about Carl Vaernet. Until then knowledge of Vaernet's activities in Prague and Buchenwald had been vague and unspecific, but by the summer of 1947 it was explicitly reported in Danish newspapers that the Copenhagen doctor had participated in medical experiments in the Buchenwald KZ camp.

The Danish authorities collected more information and considered whether to try to get the Argentine authorities extradite Vaernet. In February 1949 the Danish Minister of Justice Niels Busch-Jensen concluded that it would be futile and decided not to launch an extradition case.

During the following years Carl Vaernet was reunited with his family in Argentina, and he got a job with the Argentine Ministry of Health; building up a personal relationship to the Health Minister of the Peron government, Ramón Carillo. Carillo was interested in Vaernet's hormone project, but we have found no indication that anything concrete
ever came out of his research. From around 1950 Carl Vaernet had his own clinic as a general practitioner in Buenos Aires.

In 1959 and again in 1965 Carl Vaernet tried to sound out through his son Kjeld Vaernet whether the Danish authorities would refrain from pressing charges against him if he went back to Denmark. On both occasions the answer was that the authorities could give no such guarantee. Therefore Vaernet stayed in Argentina till he died in November 1965, living openly there with the full knowledge of the Danish and Allied authorities.

Our book is based on a large amount of newly released archival documents and interviews with persons still alive who have first-hand knowledge of relevant individuals and events. Among these persons is one surviving inmate from the Buchenwald camp who now lives in Berlin at the age of 81; he is called "Gerhard S." in our book. He hesitatingly agreed to be interviewed by us, but in our opinion it is unlikely that he will accept to be interviewed again.