At the beginning of the First World War he was stationed as a soldier in Poznań in a special hospital for reconstructive surgery and orthopedics that he set up himself.
After the war, with the financial support of his parents, he opened a medical practice in Berlin on Rosenthaler Platz, adjacent to the proletarian-Jewish quarter Scheunenviertel.
From 1925 he was a member of the medical staff at Hirschfeld's institute, where he performed surgical operations such as castration and gender reassignment, the latter in collaboration with Erwin Gohrbandt; his patients included Dora Richter,[1] Charlotte Charlaque,[2] Toni Ebel[2] and Lili Elbe.
[4] In 1933, when power was passed to the National Socialists, Levy-Lenz married Marya Goldwasser, who was twenty years younger than her and had to flee with her to Paris because of the German persecution of Jews.
In the run-up to the Olympic Games, he believed that German anti-Semitic politics would relax and returned to Germany, only to emigrate to Egypt in 1937.
Since the propagation of contraception was considered immoral and under threat of punishment, the educational courses on "sexual hygiene" offered by Levy-Lenz had to cover up their actual topic.