The Secret Experiment of Block 5: The Shocking Truth About “Healing” Surgeries on Prisoners
Buchenwald, summer of 1944. An overwhelming, suffocating heat sat heavily upon the Ettersberg hill. The air vibrated over the wooden barracks, thick with dust and the omnipresent, sickly-sweet stench of the crematorium, which was operating at maximum capacity to process the 50,000 men crammed into that concentration camp. Survival was a daily lottery, a game of chance played against starvation and brutality. But for a specific category of inmates, hell had a basement. These men wore a pink triangle sewn onto their chests. They were the “175s”—homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code.
At the very bottom of this hierarchy of suffering was Arthur. Before the war, Arthur had been a literature student in Berlin. He loved the poetry of Rilke, the atmosphere of smoke-filled cafes, and the company of bright-eyed young men. Today, he was nothing more than a number. He was a skeletal shadow of a man, his hands destroyed by the grueling labor in the stone quarry. Arthur knew he was going to die. The “pink triangles” were favorite targets for the SS guards, who used them for target practice or beat them to death for pure entertainment. The life expectancy of a homosexual in Buchenwald rarely exceeded three months. Arthur was in his fourth month; he was living on borrowed time.
It was then that a rumor began to circulate through the camp—a mad, nonsensical whisper. There was talk of a new doctor, a Dane, an elegant man and a member of the SS who did not carry a whip. They said he didn’t want to kill the pink triangles; they said he wanted to “cure” them. This doctor’s name was Dr. Carl Vaernet.
Vaernet was not a common sadist. He was a scientific fanatic. He was convinced he had discovered the biological secret of homosexuality. To him, it was not a moral vice but a hormonal imbalance. According to his theory, homosexuals suffered from a deficiency of testosterone. It followed, in his mind, that simply returning it artificially would transform them into “real men,” into good soldiers of the Reich, and into Aryan family men.
One July morning, the roll call was different. An SS officer entered the homosexuals’ barracks. He didn’t scream. He read a list of names with a cold, bureaucratic voice. “Number 4608, number 92…” Arthur heard his registration number. His heart stopped for a moment. Was this the execution? Was it the black transport to Auschwitz?
They were led outside. There were fifteen of them—thin, terrified men blinking under the implacable sun. They were led not to the firing wall, but to the infirmary, the Revier. It was a clean brick building that smelled of ether and disinfectant—a terrifying scent of luxury for men used to the stench of the latrines. In an immaculate examination room, Dr. Vaernet awaited them. He wore a perfectly pressed white lab coat over his SS uniform. His hair was slicked back with gel, his face was cleanly shaven, and his round glasses gave him an air of almost benevolent intellect.
He approached Arthur. He did not strike him. He held Arthur’s chin delicately, turned his face toward the light, and examined his pupils. “You have fine features!” he said with a heavy Danish accent. “Too fine. Your voice is too high. Your hips are too wide. Nature made a mistake with you, my boy. But science can correct nature.”
Arthur trembled, unable to comprehend. Vaernet addressed the group. His voice was calm and measured, like that of a university professor. “The Reich offers you a unique chance, a chance for redemption. You are sick, but I have the remedy. I have developed an artificial gland, a small capsule that we will insert under your skin. It will diffuse masculine strength into your blood.” He paused, letting his words float in the sterile air. “Those who accept the operation and are cured will be released. You can go home. You will be free men.”
“Free.” That word echoed in Arthur’s head. To go home, to see his mother, to eat fresh bread, to sleep on clean sheets. It was a lie, of course. Deep down, a voice screamed that it was a trap. Prisoners are not released from Buchenwald; they are consumed. But when you weigh 45 kg, when you are covered in lice and expect death every morning, hope is a drug more powerful than heroin. Vaernet knew this. He played upon their desperation.
“Who is a volunteer?” the doctor asked. A heavy silence fell over the room. Then one man stepped forward. Then another. Arthur hesitated. He looked at the shiny surgical instruments on a silver tray. He looked at Dr. Vaernet’s paternal smile. He thought of the approaching winter. He would not survive another winter in the quarry. If this was his only chance… Arthur stepped forward. “I am a volunteer, Herr Doctor.”
Vaernet smiled—a smile that did not reach his cold eyes. “Excellent choice, number 4608. You will see soon. You will not recognize yourself. You will thank me.” They made him sign a paper, a consent form—a legal farce to give an appearance of legality to the abomination. Arthur signed with a trembling hand. He had just signed a pact not with the devil, but with a madman who believed himself to be God.
They took him to a private room. They gave him a warm bath and a full meal: soup with real meat. Arthur ate while weeping. He thought he was being saved. He did not know that the meal was intended to strengthen his body so that he wouldn’t die during the operation. Vaernet needed live guinea pigs for his observations. Death had to be slow to be scientifically valid.
The following morning, they came for Arthur. They shaved him entirely, particularly the groin area. They laid him on a cold, metal operating table. Vaernet entered, snapping on his rubber gloves. In his hand, he held a thick metal capsule, the size of a battery. “Here is your virility, Arthur,” he said softly. Arthur saw the glint of the scalpel. He suddenly realized there was no anesthesiologist in the room, only two robust orderlies to hold down his legs. “Herr Doctor! The anesthesia…” Arthur stammered. Vaernet pressed the tip of the blade against the tender skin of the lower abdomen, just above the femoral artery. “Pain is a masculine reaction, Arthur. You must learn to endure it.” And he pressed down.
The pain had a color. For Arthur, that day, it was a blinding white. He was fastened to the operating table by thick leather straps: at his ankles, his wrists, and his chest. He couldn’t move a millimeter. He could only stare at the immaculate ceiling and smell the metallic odor of his own fear. Dr. Vaernet did not bother with a lengthy hand-washing. He was in a hurry. He had fifteen patients to operate on that day. It was assembly-line work.
He held the scalpel. Without a word, without a warning, he drove the blade into Arthur’s right groin. Arthur’s body arched violently against the straps. A scream tore from his throat, a sound so powerful it made the instruments on the silver tray vibrate, but no one came to soothe him. The two orderlies threw their entire weight onto his legs to keep him from thrashing. Vaernet worked with an efficient brutality. He didn’t cut like a surgeon who wants to preserve tissue; he cut like a butcher who wants to access the meat.
He incised the skin for 8 cm and then pried the muscles of the abdominal wall apart with cold steel retractors. Arthur felt everything. He felt the blade sever small nerves. He felt the hot blood running down his thigh. He felt the cold air entering his opened body. The pain wasn’t localized; it radiated through his entire pelvis, shooting up his spine and down to his toes. “Stop screaming like a woman!” Vaernet growled, irritated. “Do you want to become a man, yes or no? A strong man?”
Then came the moment of implantation. Vaernet picked up the metal capsule. It was large and heavy, filled with an experimental chemical cocktail: synthetic testosterone mixed with vegetable oils and other unidentified substances. It was a hormonal time bomb. He forced the capsule into the open wound, burying it deep under the muscle near the lymph nodes. Arthur felt as though a hot coal was being shoved into his gut. The sensation of a foreign body was immediate and unbearable. It didn’t belong there. His body screamed that there was an intruder, but he could do nothing.
The doctor stitched the wound with thick black thread, pulling the skin together without any delicacy. “Done!” he said, wiping the scalpel on a cloth. “The artificial gland is in place. It will diffuse virility into your veins for a year. You will see changes very quickly.” The operation lasted 20 minutes. 20 minutes of pure agony. They unstrapped Arthur. He couldn’t stand. His right leg was paralyzed by pain. They tossed him onto a stretcher and took him not to a comfortable recovery room, but to an isolated zone of the Revier.
The following days were a descent into a hallucinatory hell. Vaernet’s promise that he would feel “stronger” revealed itself as a deadly lie. By the second day, the operation site began to change. The skin around the scar turned bright red, then purple. It was hot to the touch and hard as stone. Arthur’s body was rejecting the capsule. His immune system, weakened by months of starvation, tried desperately to attack that metallic object full of chemicals. But it couldn’t win.
Instead of healing, the wound began to suppurate. His fever rose to dangerous levels. Arthur deliria on his straw mattress. He saw monsters. He saw his mother. He saw Vaernet laughing with a skull for a head. He sweated an acidic perspiration that smelled of disease. But the fever was not the worst part; it was the effect of the hormones. Vaernet’s cocktail was overdosed. Synthetic testosterone poured into Arthur’s blood at a toxic rate. His heart raced. He had violent palpitations, as if his heart wanted to break through his ribcage. His moods swung sharply. He went from total apathy to uncontrollable fits of rage, followed by hysterical crying. He wasn’t becoming a man; he was becoming a chemical monster destroyed from within by an organized overdose.
Dr. Vaernet came every morning for inspection. He didn’t look at Arthur’s suffering; he looked at the wound. “Interesting,” he would mutter, jotting down notes in his leather notebook: “severe inflammatory reaction, increased hair growth not observed, protocol continuing.” He gave no antibiotics, no painkillers. To Vaernet, the infection wasn’t a medical failure; it was data. If the patient died, it simply proved their body was too weak or too degenerate to accept the cure.
On the fifth day, the wound burst open. The black thread gave way under the pressure of the pus. A yellow, nauseating liquid ran down Arthur’s thin thighs. And in the middle of this infection, one could see the metal of the capsule glinting. It was always there, immovable as a curse. Arthur pleaded with a Polish orderly who was passing by: “Take it out! I beg you, take it out! It’s burning me!” The orderly shook his head with pity. “Impossible. It is the doctor’s property. If we touch it, we will be shot.”
Arthur understood then that he was no longer a human being. He was a container, a living laboratory whose only function was to carry Vaernet’s invention until death arrived. But Arthur was not the alone. In the neighboring room, 14 other men suffered the same fate. And soon, one of them would stop screaming forever, triggering a new phase of the experiment: an immediate autopsy to see how the “virility” had acted on the internal organs.
The camp infirmary, supposedly a place of healing, had become a silent morgue. In the small white-walled room, the air had become unbreathable. It no longer smelled of disinfectant; it smelled of decaying flesh. Of the fifteen men operated on, three were already dead. The first was Helmut, a young worker from Hamburg. His body had rejected the capsule with unheard-of violence. Gas gangrene had set in within 48 hours, turning his leg into a black, swollen log. He had died screaming, begging for his mother to come and put out the fire consuming him.
Arthur, from his bed, had watched the final scene. He had seen Dr. Vaernet enter the room at the moment of death. The doctor showed no emotion. He did not hold the dying man’s hand. He simply checked his pocket watch to note the exact time of cardiac arrest. “Patient number 1: Deceased by septic shock. Prepare the autopsy table. I want to see the state of the tissues around the gland.” To Vaernet, Helmut was not a human loss. He was a data point on a graph. The failure was not moral; it was technical. Perhaps the dosage needed adjusting? Perhaps the capsule should be inserted deeper?
That same night, two other men died in their sleep, poisoned by the hormonal cocktail that had destroyed their livers and kidneys. Arthur knew he was next. His wound was a gaping, festering mouth. The fever wouldn’t leave him. He felt the metal capsule move inside him with every shift, like a steel parasite trying to dig its way into his vital organs. He then understood a terrifying truth: Vaernet would never let them leave. Even if they “cured,” they knew too much. They were living proof of a medical aberration. The only exit planned by the doctor was the chimney of the crematorium.
If he wanted to live, Arthur had to rid himself of it. On the night of the sixth day, an opportunity arose. An Allied bombing raid in the distance made the barracks’ windows vibrate. In the slight panic, an orderly knocked over a medication cart. A dark glass bottle fell to the floor and shattered. The orderly quickly swept up the debris, but in the gloom, he missed one piece: a triangular glass shard, sharp as a razor and about 5 centimeters long.
Arthur waited for silence to return. He waited for the night rounds to pass. He crawled out of bed. Despite the pain sawing through his pelvis, he recovered the glass piece. He hid it in his hand, squeezing so hard it cut his palm. He didn’t even feel that pain. He returned to his gray blanket. It was two in the morning. He had no alcohol to disinfect, no clean bandages, no light—except for a pale moonbeam through the window.
He pulled back his gown. The smell of pus rose to his nose; the wound throbbed. He could feel the hardness of the capsule under the inflamed skin. Arthur took a deep breath. He bit his pillow to muffle the screams that would inevitably come. He placed the tip of the glass on his infected scar. What he did next bordered on the unimaginable. He began to dig. It was not a clean surgical incision. It was a desperate act of butchery. The glass tore through the necrotic tissue. Arthur had to rummage through his own flesh, his fingers slipping in blood and pus, to find the metal. The pain was absolute. It surpassed everything he had known in the quarry. It was a white, blinding pain that made him want to vomit and faint. But he could not faint. If he lost consciousness now, he would bleed to death before dawn.
He pushed the glass deeper. He felt the contact, the rasp of the glass against the metal of the capsule. “Get out, get out of there!” he wept silently, tears and secretions mixing on his face. He used the glass shard as a lever. He pried against his own pubic bone. He pushed. A wet snap echoed under the blanket. The capsule moved. Arthur plunged his fingers into the open wound. He gripped the slimy cylinder. He pulled. He pulled with all his strength, tearing away the adhesions of flesh that had begun to form around the object. With a sickening suction sound, the capsule came out.
Arthur let it fall onto the mattress. It shone in the dim light, covered in dark blood. It was heavy. That was Vaernet’s “virility”: a piece of cold metal that killed men. Arthur was in shock. His whole body shook. Blood flowed profusely from his mutilated groin. He had nothing to sew it with. He grabbed his gown, tore it into strips, and made an improvised pressure bandage, tightening the knot as hard as he could, praying the hemorrhage would stop. Then, he took the capsule and the glass shard. He couldn’t leave them there. If they were found, he would be hanged for sabotage. There was a mouse hole in the corner of the wall near the head of the bed. With his last strength, he slid the capsule and the glass into the hole and stuffed the opening with straw and dust.
He collapsed on the bed. He had a gaping hole in his gut. He risked a deadly superinfection. But for the first time in six days, he no longer felt the poison diffusing into his veins. His heart began to slow. The fever seemed to drop slightly. He had taken back possession of his body.
However, the next morning during the rounds, Dr. Vaernet immediately noticed the change. He saw Arthur’s extreme pallor. He saw the fresh bloodstains on the blanket. He approached the bed. He ripped away the blanket. He saw the makeshift bandage. Vaernet didn’t get angry. He gave a dry, glacial chuckle. “Well, well… the patient playing doctor.” He ordered the guards to remove the bandage. He inspected the open, empty wound. “Where is the gland, number 4608?” he asked softly. Arthur did not answer. He stared the doctor in the eyes.
Vaernet straightened up. He wiped his hands. “It’s a pity. You were a promising patient. But you interrupted the experiment. You are no longer scientifically useful.” He turned to the SS officer accompanying him. “Transfer him to Block 50, the invalids’ block. Let nature finish the work. Without care, gangrene will take him in three days.”
Arthur was tossed out of the infirmary. He was dragged through the mud to the death block, where they piled those the camp no longer wanted to feed. He had won: he no longer had the capsule. But he had lost: he was condemned to rot, alone among the corpses. Yet, fate is sometimes capricious. Arthur did not die in three days. In Block 50, he had an encounter—a man who would change the course of his end: a “kapo” with a red triangle, a communist who had heard of the operation and was seeking evidence against the SS doctors for the post-war period.
Block 50 was not a dormitory; it was a human garbage dump. It was where the camp administration threw those who could no longer work, those who were too contagious, or those who, like Arthur, were failed experiments awaiting liquidation. Arthur was thrown onto straw soiled with excrement. The odor was unbearable. Around him, men were dying of typhus, dysentery, and hunger. They were nothing more than skeletons covered in gray skin as thin as paper.
Arthur waited for the end. His gaping, poorly bandaged wound burned like a coal. The fever made him delirious. He saw Vaernet’s face floating in the darkness, laughing with his white teeth. “You failed, Arthur. You are not a man, you are nothing.” But on the third day, as Arthur drifted into a febrile coma, a hand touched his forehead. A cool hand, not the hand of death.
Arthur opened one eye. Above him stood a massive man with a square face, wearing a red triangle on his striped jacket. It was Walter, a communist political prisoner. In the complex hierarchy of Buchenwald, the communists had managed, after years of clandestine struggle, to infiltrate key posts in the internal administration. They controlled parts of the infirmary. They couldn’t save everyone, but they could sometimes discreetly save those who were useful to the cause.
Walter looked at Arthur’s wound. He saw the crude hole, the raw flesh, the tracks of the barbaric self-surgery. “You took that crap out yourself?” Walter asked in German. Arthur nodded weakly. Walter let out a small, admiring whistle. “You’ve got guts! The pink triangle… we thought you were all weak.” Walter leaned in and whispered in Arthur’s ear, so low that even the dying neighbors couldn’t hear: “Listen carefully. The clandestine committee has its eye on you. You are the only conscious survivor of Vaernet’s operations. You are a witness, and we need witnesses for what comes after.”
Walter pulled a small paper envelope from his pocket. Inside was a white powder. “It’s sulfonamide, stolen from the SS pharmacy. It’s worth more than gold here. Swallow this and put the rest in the wound.” Arthur swallowed the bitter powder. It was the miracle of modern chemistry. Within 48 hours, the fever broke. The infection receded. The wound began to heal slowly. Arthur wasn’t cured—far from it—but he was no longer dying.
Walter returned three days later. “Can you walk a bit?” Arthur said he could. “Good. You’re not staying here to rot. I’ve arranged your transfer. You are officially dead in the Block 50 records. Your new registration number corresponds to a worker on the Revier cleaning crew. You will sweep the hallways; you will be invisible.”
Arthur became a ghost. Every morning, he dragged his stiff leg through the immaculate corridors of the infirmary, a broom in his hand. He lowered his head whenever a black uniform passed. He cleaned up bloodstains. He emptied trash bins filled with purulent dressings. He watched Dr. Vaernet pass by arrogantly, briefcase under his arm. Vaernet did not recognize him. To the doctor, Arthur had been dead and incinerated long ago. Skeletons all look alike.
Arthur’s mission was simple but terrifying: observe. The committee wanted proof. It was known that Vaernet kept a precise diary of his experiments, a black notebook where he noted dosages, names, and survival times. That notebook was the evidence of the crime.
The opportunity arose on a Tuesday afternoon in November 1944. An air raid siren sounded. The sirens wailed. Chaos ensued. SS officers rushed to concrete shelters. Vaernet left his office in a hurry, leaving the door ajar. Arthur was in the hallway, broom in hand. He looked around. The corridor was empty. It was madness. If caught, he would be hanged immediately in the roll-call square on a butcher’s hook. But he thought of Helmut, who died screaming. He thought of the others, butchered for nothing.
Arthur dropped his broom. He slipped into the doctor’s office. The room smelled of blond tobacco and cologne. On the large oak desk, amid medical files, was the notebook: a small, black leather-bound diary. Arthur opened it. His hands shook so much he almost dropped it. The pages were filled with Vaernet’s fine, careful handwriting: “Patient 4608: Successful implantation, inflammatory reaction, patient failure…” It was all there. The diagrams of the capsules, the chemical composition of the hormonal cocktail, the correspondence with Himmler, who personally financed his research.
Arthur couldn’t steal the whole notebook; Vaernet would notice its disappearance immediately and have the entire camp searched. So Arthur did the only thing possible: he tore out the three center pages, the ones containing the summary of the experiments and the list of the fifteen victims with their numbers. He folded the sheets into four, then eight; he placed them in his mouth, under his tongue, ready to swallow them if anyone entered. He put the notebook back in its place, ensuring it looked untouched. He stepped out of the office, took up his broom, and began scrubbing an imaginary stain on the floor, his heart racing at 200 beats per minute.
Two minutes later, Vaernet returned, brushing dust off his uniform. He entered his office and closed the door. He didn’t come out screaming; he hadn’t seen a thing. That night, in the secrecy of the latrines, Arthur handed the damp, crumpled pages to Walter. The communist kapo read them by the light of a match. His hardened face lit up with a fierce smile. “We’ve got them!” he whispered. “With this, Arthur, you’ve just signed their death warrant. These papers will get out of the camp. They’re going to London or Moscow. The world will know.”
Arthur went back to his mattress. His mutilated groin ached. He was hungry, he was cold. But for the first time since his arrival at Buchenwald, he didn’t feel like a victim. He felt like a soldier. He had fought his war with a glass shard and a broom, and he had won a battle. But the war wasn’t over. The Allies were approaching. One could hear the thunder of cannons to the west. The SS was getting nervous. They began to erase the tracks. They burned files. They executed inconvenient witnesses. Arthur was an inconvenient witness, and Walter gave him terrible news: Arthur’s name was on the list for the next evacuation transport. The “death marches.” Vaernet was fleeing. He was taking his secrets with him and wanted no one left behind who could point a finger at him.
In April 1945, when General Patton’s Third Army tanks broke through the gates of Buchenwald, they found a world of nightmares: piles of corpses, men weighing no more than 30 kg, and an odor that would stay on the liberators’ skin for the rest of their lives. Arthur was there. He hadn’t left on the death march. Walter and the clandestine network had hidden him in a decommissioned septic tank for the last three days. He emerged covered in filth, trembling, barely able to stand. He was alive. He had survived the scalpel, the poison, the gangrene, and the SS.
When an American soldier gave him a chocolate bar and a cigarette, Arthur wept. He thought justice would finally be served. He thought Dr. Vaernet would be hunted down, tried, and hanged for what he had done. He was profoundly mistaken. Dr. Carl Vaernet had left Buchenwald long before the Americans arrived. He had returned to Denmark, blending into the masses. He was briefly arrested in Copenhagen in 1945. The Allies knew who he was. They had testimonies; they had even recovered some of his reports. But Vaernet played a master card: he faked illness. He simulated severe heart problems. Instead of being sent to the Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against humanity, he was transferred to a private clinic. And on a night in 1947, when surveillance relaxed, Vaernet disappeared.
He hadn’t disappeared by magic. He was helped—helped by the Nazi “Ratlines” that sent war criminals to South America. But there was something worse: declassified documents decades later suggested that British and American secret services were interested in his testosterone research. The Cold War was beginning, and a scientist, even a Nazi one, was a precious resource.
Vaernet landed in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. There, he didn’t hide in a hole. He didn’t even change his name. He went by Carlos Vaernet. He was welcomed with open arms by the Perón regime. He was even hired by the Argentine Ministry of Health. While Arthur, in Germany, fought for a disability pension that was systematically denied to him, his executioner lived in a sun-drenched villa. Vaernet opened a medical practice. He treated patients. He even continued to correspond with pharmaceutical companies to try and sell his patent for the artificial gland. He died in his bed, free and wealthy, in 1965. He never spent a single day in prison for his crimes.
And Arthur? Arthur’s fate was that of thousands of pink triangles. After liberation, he wasn’t treated as a hero. In West Germany, the paragraph criminalizing homosexuality remained in force, in its Nazi version, until 1969. This meant that, in the eyes of the law, Arthur wasn’t a victim of fascism; he was a common criminal. If he spoke of what had been done to him, he risked being arrested again. So, Arthur remained silent. He kept his horrendous groin scar as a shameful secret. He never told anyone how he had extracted the metal from his own flesh with a piece of glass. He lived alone, haunted by nightmares, working as a librarian, surrounded by books to forget men.
Only in the 1980s, when he was already an old, tired man, did the silence begin to break. Historians found Vaernet’s famous notes—the ones Arthur had seen, which detailed the agony of the fifteen guinea pigs. Arthur gave his testimony only once, shortly before he died, under a pseudonym. He showed his scar to a journalist: a deep white crater in his wrinkled skin. “He wanted to cure me,” he said with sad irony. “They only managed to kill my soul. Vaernet died in peace. Where is the justice?”
Arthur died in 1989, just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He never received an official apology in his lifetime. The artificial gland experiment remains one of the most grotesque chapters of Nazi medicine. It proves how far ideology can distort science. It reminds us that, for extremists, being different was a deadly disease. Today, it is known that Carl Vaernet operated on at least ten men; only two survived the war. Their names were long erased from monuments.
But we remember. We remember Arthur and his glass shard. We remember Helmut, who died calling for his mother. We remember that hate, when it wears a white coat, is even more terrifying. This story was meant to chill your blood, because we must not look away. Dr. Vaernet escaped human justice, but he will not escape the justice of history as long as we tell of his crimes. The truth is our only defense.
