The Weimar Republic was a time in European history following World War One and the rise of the Nazis, and the nation was a hub for LGBTQ+ individuals, with motions supporting transgender and gender non-conforming people.
All of that changed when Adolf Hitler seized the presidency in January 1933. A first glimpse of the deadly discrimination gay and trans people would immediately experience came as a result.
On 6 May, zealous Nazi individuals raided the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, about translated as the Institute of Sexology. Tens of thousands of books, documents and studies were taken from shelves and fired.
The university, which was led by Magnus Hirschfeld, was an intellectual body specializing in sexological research and studies of transgender people’s experiences. Additionally, it provided some of the world’s first current gender-affirmation clinics.
Tragically, the institute’s large lists of patients ’ names and addresses were seized during the raid and, it ’s believed, were instrumental in the arrest thousands of people– and the subsequent deportations to concentration camps – in the months and years that followed.
Because he was on a talking tour of Europe, Hirschfeld himself escaped. He always went back to Germany, and he passed away in France in 1935.
The Nazis continued to pin transgender and gender-non-conforming people, alongside other parties they believed threatened their worldview and law. In the terrible years that followed, transgender individuals would be sent to the tents and other areas of death, alongside Immigrants, the disabled, transgender gay people, members of the Roma and Sinti communities and different groups considered corrupt or of no use.
The Nazis targeted transgender and gay men and women by using existing laws, including the famous paragraph 175, a provision of the European legal code that made homosexuality unlawful. For the first time in history, the European parliament focused its memorial day events on those who were targeted by the Germans because of their gender identity and sexual orientation in 2023.
Dr. Bodie A. Ashton, a historian, is studying how Hitler deported trans people to concentration camps and destroyed once-vibrant help structures.
He claims that the Weimar Republic represented a significant period of transition and resurgence in European society. In the midst of World War I, there was a time when “everything that had existed before is called into question.”
“We have, for example, what could be considered the first gay rights movement in Germany, founded in the last decade of the 19th century: the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, that ’s helmed by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, ” Ashton says.
At the start of the 20th century, Hirschfeld, a transgender queer man, began doing clinical research into death transvestiten, which “maps imperfectly but almost on to what we would today call trans ” names, Ashton adds.
Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1919, and began building a collection of work around the experience of transgender people.
He looked at things that were happening to his so-called transvestiten and, acknowledging that they have a very difficult position in society because gay sex is prohibited [under ] paragraph 175, he was specifically looking at people who were born as male.
Because they will be identified as queer people, they have a lot of trouble presenting themselves as the female they want to be in public or more authentically identify with. ”
This was dangerous because the police could identify trans people as violating Article 175, which stated that a transgender girl was “soliciting for gay sex .”
Hirschfeld, however, provided evidence to the Berlin police that trans people do n’t “out there soliciting for sex” and have an “inner drive to present” as their true selves.
In partnership with the police, he created transvestitenschein, a type of state licensing for transgender people.
Dr Jake Newsome, a researcher and writer on German and American LGBTQ+ past, describes these files as “essentially gender-affirming identifying cards that trans people could have [to] acknowledge their real identity”.
It was, he says, unprecedented for the time. According to the statement, “Some fresh research is being conducted to determine how many of these certificates were issued, to whom, and how much they cost.”
Although Magnus Hirschfeld is a significant figure in the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the trans community, his personal experiences have made his place in history difficult to find. He held, what we know today as racist and sexist views and was a proponent of eugenics.
It is crucial for Ashton to keep in mind that Hirschfeld was a person in a particular time and place. He had “positions or interests that would horrify us now, ” he said, but it was “completely expected given the time, the person, and the society that he was in”.
Historians uncovered the stories of a number of transgender people, including performer Liddy Bacroff, Gerd R, cafe owner Toni Simon, Fritz Kitzing and carpenter Gerd Katter who all suffered under the 12-year Third Reich.
After the Nazis “reduced their entire complex, dynamic personhood down to a singular aspect of their lives that the regime considered deviant or criminal,” Dr. Newsome says it is important to keep these transgender people’s names in mind.
On a larger scale, remembering the persecution of trans people between 1933 and 1945 is crucial in understanding that the “attacks, lies and stereotypes we are experiencing today aren’t new”, he adds.
“Some of these things, they come from an almost copy-and-paste playbook from the extreme far-right. Many of the arguments being used by the right-wing in the US today are almost play-by-play the same as those made by the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s, such as the notion that trans people are a threat to young people or that they will try to con them into a lifestyle.
Knowing this past also serves as a historical omen for a historical warning that progress is fragile. We examine the Weimar Republic, examine this vibrant culture queer people built for themselves, and then quickly it was destroyed and put back in the underground.
That admonishes me that marginalized communities can be taken away from them just because they have won rights today. ”
