Aubrey Levin, the man dubbed ‘Dr Shock’, who for decades evaded accountability for abhorrent apartheid-era experiments, including the-then outlawed shock ‘aversion treatment’ to try to cure homosexuality in conscripted SA Defence Force (SADF) soldiers, has died aged 87 in Canada, News24 has exclusively confirmed.
A letter mailed by the Canadian province of Ontario’s Vital Statistics Death Registry finally reached News24 this week, confirming that Levin died on the 18th of December 2025.
Various sources confirmed to News24 at the time that the disgraced former doctor’s death came on his 87th birthday, and that he had reportedly been suffering from advanced alzheimers in a Toronto hospital. A Thornhill-based funeral home also confirmed a private Jewish levaya for Levin, but could not comment further.
All attempts to gain comment from his family have come to nought. Dr Lance Levin, Aubrey’s son still based in Gauteng’s East Rand, has refused to say anything, ignoring calls and messages. Other relatives have also shut down their social media profiles to avoid the media’s questions.
Some of Levin’s surviving victims, however, have expressed a mix of disappointment and distress that Levin evaded South African justice for so long, while others say they’re relieved that he’s finally dead.
South African forensic psychiatrist, Professor Robert Kaplan, now based in Australia, has been the lone academic voice for decades now, calling for Levin to be brought to justice in SA for his alleged crimes.
He told News24 in writing: “The death of psychiatrist Aubrey Levin brings to an end a trajectory of moral corruption, abuse of conscripts in the SADF and molestation of male prisoners in Canada. It is an appalling tale of a doctor driven by a grandiose self-image, extreme ideological views and sexual disturbance while claiming the morality of an orthodox Jew. The lessons to be learned from his calumny have yet to be fully absorbed. He has brought shame on the discipline of psychiatry, the medical profession and on Judaism”.
Levin’s crimes can be summed up in two chapters of his career: his apartheid-era experiments as a psychiatrist in the old defence force before turning senior lecturer at
Rhodes University, then evading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s questioning in the mid-90s, fleeing to Canada, and then preying on that country’s prisoners in Calgary’s rehabilitation system, for which he was sentenced.
Call him “Bubbles”
Born to a Jewish family that openly supported the National Party, Levin quickly rose through the ranks of the SADF in the late 1960s by promising policymakers he could cure homosexuality.
Also known as ‘Die Kolonel’ or ‘Bubbles’ (by soldiers making fun of his bulbous stomach), Levin stands accused of a raft of apartheid-era crimes, including physical torture and sexual assault of conscripted male and female soldiers, some gay, and countless psychiatric patients up to the early 1990s. The 1999 Aversion study, along with several archival excerpts and whistleblower reports, bears testimony to this.
Levin presided over the ultra-secretive ‘Ward 22’ at One Military Hospital on Voortrekkershoogte, Pretoria, in the early 1970s, as well as the equally mysterious Greefswald SADF camp (Mapungubwe archaeological site) near the border of Zimbabwe. Survivors allege that Levin heavily drugged and shocked his victims in the ward. He would also fly in via army helicopter to Greefswald to oversee the SADF’s hard labour drills on drug-addicted or mentally ill conscripts; another of his supposed experiments to try and cure them.
A whistleblower’s report by the Committee on South African War Resistance (COSAWR) in the late 1980s first sounded the alarm: “Under (Levin’s) tutelage, electro-convulsive aversion therapy was used on gay soldiers until at least 1978”. The 1999 Aversion study, although it doesn’t directly name Levin due to study funding terms to protect all identities concerned, it states: “(Trudie) Grobler, an intern psychologist in the psychiatric unit at 1 Military Hospital, was forced to observe an aversion therapy session under the guidance of the psychiatrist (Levin). A woman was subjected to such severe shocks that her shoes flew off her feet: ‘It was terrible. I couldn’t believe that her body could survive it all”.
In 1995, several years after leaving the SADF, the then Grahamstown-based professor Levin got wind of the impending establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and suddenly uprooted his family from their hillside home on the outskirts of Makhanda, fleeing to Calgary, Canada, claiming concern over rising crime.
Canadian convict
Levin, it appears, through archived news reportage, used the power of attorneys in the coming years to slow the slew of SA media queries regarding his dark apartheid past.
Levin threatened legal action and never physically gave testimony at the TRC in exchange for amnesty, nor did he apply for amnesty, which was offered to some apartheid-era criminals. He was also never subpoenaed.
In 2004, Kaplan wrote that the most prominent case involving Levin was “(gay conscript) Jean Erasmus, who killed himself in 1999 after providing detailed information (to Amnesty International) about (Levin’s Aversion) programme”.
Despite dogged SA news coverage, Levin was surprisingly appointed as a hospital-based forensic psychiatrist for the Alberta prison rehabilitation system. It would be Levin’s heinous crimes in Canada, as a practising psychiatrist, that later brought him back into the mainstream news spotlight. Kaplan wrote several letters to the Canadian authorities that seemingly went unheeded. Between 1999 and 2010, Levin was accused of preying on several of his patients, before, eventually, he was convicted in 2013 of sexually assaulting three men, while still accused of molesting many more.
Levin’s undoing came when he was caught on camera by one of his victims, known in court papers as “RB”, wearing a secret ‘spy’ wristwatch. The grainy footage revealed to the courts shows how Levin, a supposed psychiatrist, sexually assaulted this drugged patient over the span of eight years. Levin was sentenced to five years in prison.
Levin, though, only served 18 months’ hard time before he was released on day parole in 2016. In 2023, Levin then succeeded in rescinding his registration as a sex offender in the Canadian province of British Columbia. All while he, at the time, continued to face civil lawsuits from other suspected victims.
Levin and his wife Erica, who herself was also convicted of notoriously attempting to bribe one of the jurors in her husband’s trial (and was caught on camera), went on to lead a life of relative obscurity, spending their final days together in Thornhill, Toronto.
SA accountability evaded, forever
In 2024, a bilateral SA-Canadian documentary team, tasked with telling the full story of Levin, expertly tracked Levin’s movements to Toronto.
This team, comprising News24 broadcast journalist Graeme Raubenheimer, fellow accomplished journalist Jan Bornman, and Canadian filmmakers Michael Peterson, director, and Jay Beechinor, producer, has since lodged a submission to the Khampepe Commission, which is considering the complexities of unresolved apartheid-era crimes.
This inquiry has been tasked with looking into allegations of political interference and obstruction in the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes referred to the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) by the TRC.
The documentary team put it to the inquiry: “We respectfully submit that the Khampepe Inquiry consider reopening or formally reviewing Dr Aubrey Levin’s case as part of its ongoing mandate. Doing so may allow survivors, many of whom are now elderly, to provide testimony, participate in restorative proceedings, and achieve long-overdue recognition and closure”.
This closure, though, has been delayed by more than five decades, and the call for accountability before an SA judge will now go unheard forever, as the story of ‘Dr Shock’ Aubrey Levin is relegated to the annals of this country’s dark history.
