Transgenderism in NAZI Germany

Transgenderism in Nazi Germany

In Nazi Germany, transgender people were prosecuted, barred from public life, forcibly detransitioned, and imprisoned and killed in concentration camps. Laws such as Paragraph 183 were implemented during the German Empire (1871–1928) and Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to prosecute transgender individuals. Through Magnus Hirschfeld's advocacy, Germany allowed transgender individuals to obtain transvestite passes in 1908, protecting them from legal repercussions for their public transgender status. As described by historian Katie Sutton in her article, "Trans Rights and Cultures in the Weimar Republic," without these passes, and occasionally even with them, gender diverse individuals could be persecuted under Germany's “gross mischief” or “public nuisance” laws.

In 1928, the Berlin Police (stamped by the Criminal Commisar) issued Gerd Katter, at age eighteen, a transvestite pass. German apprentice carpenter Katter (14 March 1910 – 1995) worked as an insurance agent and was a patient of renowned German sexologist and doctor Magnus Hirschfeld.

Though he was assigned female at birth, Katter lived as a man, changing his name, pronouns and physical form to align with his sense of gender. Katter's various transvestitenschein documents represent some of the few artifacts that scholars have access to today, and have been used to examine the role of identity documents in the fashioning of gender identity in Weimar Berlin.

From the conclusion of World War I until 1933, transgender individuals were granted unprecedented freedoms and rights. Transgender medicine made huge steps forward with the help of the Institute for Sexual Science, and transgender culture grew in Berlin. In addition to more widespread cultural acceptance, Berlin also became a hotbed for research into transgender medicine. Some of the first academic studies of transgender medicine were done at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. They are also known for providing some of the first gender-affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy.

Ludwig Levy-Lenz was a German doctor of medicine and a sexual reformer, known for performing some of the first sex reassignment surgeries for patients of the Hirschfeld institute. His patients included Dora Richter, Charlotte Charlaque, Toni Ebel and Lili Elbe. In 1933 Levy-Lenz fled from NAZI Germany with his wife to Paris, and in 1939 he was stripped of his German citizenship.

In 1931, Gohrbandt, with Ludwig Levy-Lenz, was one of the first surgeons to perform sex reassignment surgery with vaginoplasty on some transgender patients - a pioneering experimental achievement at the time. He held several important positions during Nazi rule, including vice president of the Berlin regional association of the German Red Cross; in 1951 he was chairman of the Berlin Surgical Society.

Erwin Gohrbandt, Ludwig Levy-Lenz, and other surgeons affiliated with the Institute conducted gender-affirming surgery, including the initial stages of facial feminization surgery and sex reassignment surgery on trans women, as well as facial masculinisation surgery, chest masculinisation surgery, and hysterectomy and oophorectomy on trans men. Dora Richter, the first transgender woman known to have received sex reassignment surgery, received it through the Institute, as did Lili Elbe, Toni Ebel, Gerd Katter and many other notable transgender people of this period. Levy-Lenz is quoted as saying of his time at the Institute, "Never have I operated upon more grateful patients.".

Lili Elbe, was a Danish painter, transgender woman, and one of the earliest recipients of gender-affirming surgery (then called sex reassignment surgery). The UK and US versions of her semi-autobiographical narrative were published posthumously in 1933 under the title Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex. A film inspired by her life, The Danish Girl, was released in 2015. An opera based on her life, Lili Elbe, composed by Tobias Picker, premiered in 2023.

Toni Ebel was a German painter, housekeeping staff of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and one of the first trans women to receive gender-affirming surgery. When the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology) was attacked in 1933, a collection of Ebel's drawings and paintings was destroyed. After the end of the war, Ebel lived in East Germany, where she received a small pension as a victim of the "racial prejudice" of National Socialism, and continued to work as a painter.

Dora Richter was a German trans woman and the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender-affirming surgery. She was one of a number of transgender people in the care of sex-research pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld at Berlin's Institute for Sexual Research during the 1920s and early 1930s. Richter was portrayed by German actor Tima die Göttliche [de] in the 1999 German film The Einstein of Sex, a biopic about Magnus Hirschfeld directed by Rosa von Praunheim.

Charlotte Charlaque was a German–American actress. She was an early trans activist and one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery. In 1929, Charlaque accompanied Magnus Hirschfeld and his partner Karl Giese to the third international congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) in London. She fled to New York City in 1942, and in her private life, she was in contact with the German-American doctor and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin.

Transgender groups, gathering spots, and organisations, including the first homosexual movement, the Eldorado nightclubs, and the Institute for Sexual Science, were disbanded, frequently by force, after the Prussian coup d'état in 1932 and the Nazi takeover of power in 1933. The Eldorado, along with other venues, is central to the history of LGBTQ+ and transgender life in interwar Germany, acting as a crucial, albeit temporary, space for identity expression.

The Eldorado nightclubs were a famous group of bars in Berlin, Germany, that flourished during the Weimar Republic (roughly 1918–1933) and were known for their open, inclusive atmosphere for LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly transgender and gender-nonconforming people. The club featured transgender performers, often referred to in contemporary reports as "transvestites" or "female impersonators". Regular performers included figures like Hansi Sturm, who was named "Miss Eldorado" in 1926. Regulars also included transgender pioneers like Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel.

This photograph illustrates two members of the Berlin Order Police who are stationed outside the local Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) headquarters in March 1933. The windows are boarded up and adorned with pro-Hitler posters and Nazi flags. The Eldorado nightclub, a hub for Berlin's gay and transgender communities, had been housed in this building just weeks before. Eldorado remnants can still be seen. The signs of the nightclub are still visible, and a partially obscured banner above the front door bears the phrase "Hier ist's Richtig" or "Here it is right.".

The club's unique system of buying tokens to dance with performers—men dressed as women or vice versa—became its signature feature and directly influenced the fictional Kit Kat Klub in the film Cabaret..

The premises of the Motzstraße club were repurposed as a headquarters for the Sturmabteilung (SA). The clubs' legacy is often referenced as a symbol of the Weimar Republic’s "lost golden age" of queer freedom and the subsequent destruction of these communities by the Nazis. The Museum of Jewish Heritage asserts that the German government "brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.".

The transvestite passes of trans men and trans women were either revoked or disregarded as a result of the renewed enforcement of Paragraphs 175 and 183. Books and texts relating to transgender experiences or medicine were destroyed as "un-German". Transgender individuals were killed and imprisoned in concentration camps.

Magnus Hirschfeld

In 1933, the Nazi government revoked Hirschfeld's German citizenship, which he had maintained as a physician, sexologist, and LGBTQ advocate. Hirschfeld received his education in medicine, philology, and philosophy. He was an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities and was the founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg in the 1920s.

Magnus Hirschfeld's likeness was featured in a 1932 campaign handbill alongside other prominent Jewish figures, contrasting them with "strong ethnic Germans" like Hitler and Göring to force voters to choose between "Jewish" or "German" identities.

In February 1929, the Nazi newspaper "Der Stuermer" depicted a caricature of Magnus Hirschfeld. The Nazi Party attacked Dr. Hirschfeld for his ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender, as well as his Jewish ancestry.

His committee did "the first advocacy for gay and transgender rights.". Hirschfeld is thought to be one of the most important sexologists of the 20th century. Due to his Jewish and homosexuality, he was initially targeted by fascists and subsequently by the Nazis. He was assaulted by völkisch activists in 1920, and in 1933, Nazis looted and burned his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

Magnus Hirschfeld, director of the institute, on the 6th May 1933 has his library looted by Nazi SA (The Sturmabteilung, known as 'Storm Division' or loosely 'stormtroopers' was the original paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany. It played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s.) members and German students (Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt). The looted material was witnessed by the international press being loaded on to a truck and, on 10 May, it was taken to the Bebelplatz square at the State Opera (colloquially known as Opernplatz), and burned along with volumes from elsewhere.

Nazi Party members at Berlin's Opernplatz book burning. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but came to include other authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Magnus Hirschfeld, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. Many artists, writers and scientists were banned from working and publication. Their works could no longer be found in libraries or in the curricula of schools or universities. Exiled authors despaired and died by suicide, for example: Walter Hasenclever, Ernst Weiss, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, and Stefan Zweig. A memorial to the book burnings stands at Bebelplatz in Berlin.

As many as 25,000 of the Institute's books, many of which contained unique insights into transgender history and medicine. A bust of Hirschfeld was paraded on a stick before being thrown onto the pyre, a spectacle documented in Nazi newsreels.

The term "transsexual" was first used by Magnus Hirschfeld in his 1923 essay "Die Intersexuelle Konstitution." This laid out the clinical category that Hirschfeld's colleague Harry Benjamin would later create in the US. It wasn't until Benjamin's work, about thirty years after Hirschfeld first used the term, that it became more common. In 1910, Hirschfeld also came up with the word "transvestite." He also used the terms "extreme transvestites" and "total transvestites" to talk about transsexuals.

In his research for the Institute, Hirschfeld referred to transgender people as "total transvestites" or "extreme transvestites" as early as the 1920s, notably differentiating them from crossdressers, as well as stating his belief that there naturally existed people who had "characteristics that did not fit into heterosexual or binary categories".

The homosexual movement and Institute for Sexual Science were frequent targets of conservatives such as the Nazi Party and both Catholic and Protestant churches, which accused the movements of "degeneracy", going against family values and promoting "un-German" ideas. Hirschfeld himself was targeted both politically and in the press. After being physically attacked and beaten in Munich in 1921, a nationalist newspaper article celebrated, threatening that "the next time his skull might be crushed".

Li Shiu Tong was a Hong Kong medical student and sexologist. Some consider him an early LGBTQ activist. He was a companion of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Li met Hirschfeld in Shanghai at a public lecture for Chinese feminists at China United Apartments in 1931. Li and Hirschfeld spent many years in European exile, with Li acting as Hirschfeld's student, nurse and secretary. In 1932 Li submitted a paper with both his and Hirschfeld's names on it to the Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in Brno in Czechoslovakia. This paper was one of the first to cover intersex people extensively as well as the idea that homosexuality was not a disease, but rather a natural human variation influenced by disposition and environment.

In May 1933, after the Nazi looting and destruction of Hirschfeld's institute in Berlin, Li helped Hirschfeld to escape from Switzerland to France. From 1933 to 1935, Hirschfeld lived, mostly together with Li, in Paris and Nice. Li Shiu Tong broke from common beliefs with his claims that "A homosexual is not born but made" and asserted that homosexuality is nature's defence against overpopulation. He believed that there were a lot of transgender people, who he claimed were:

"the most interesting mankind. A complex sexual mankind. Dr. [Hirschfeld] was the best authority on this subject. In fact he discovered it. The behavior of transvertit helped to explain some of that of the homosexual, bisexual, and even heterosexual."