Transgender People, the Nazi State, and the Holocaust
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0:00 Intro 2:11 Before Stonewall-Trans history and Magnus Hirshfeld 14:00 Berlin Queer Subculture 22:54 Nazis goes after LBGTQ+ community 28:20 Laws used against trans people 38:17 Trans survival 48:06 Q+A In the 1920s, Berlin was home to a thriving transgender community, with trans-focused magazines, famous drag clubs, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, where some trans people went for gender-affirming care. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 changed everything. In this talk, Laurie Marhoefer (he/they) explores what happened trans people under the Nazi state, beginning with pre-war Berlin and then under the repressive Nazi regime. Marhoefer will look specifically at violence against trans women that was recorded in police files from the era. Laurie Marhoefer is the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. His work has been influential in international debates about the Nazi State and lesbians and transgender people, and in the public memory of the early gay rights movement, Magnus Hirschfeld, and the Weimar Republic. He is the author of two books, most recently a biography of Hirschfeld and his student Li Shiu Tong, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love, and of a number of essays and articles on queer and trans histories.

The other law that was used, again, in particular against trans women was paragraph 175. If you’ve […] come to other lectures or read about this, you maybe already know about paragraph 175. It was Germany’s […] national law against… what was called ‘sodomy’ or what we would call consensual adult male–male sex—was illegal. Um… lots of countries had laws against male–male sex, […] also a number of countries had gender neutral laws against same‐sex sex. So Austria, for example.

[…]

And paragraph 175 predates [1933], but the [Fascists] rewrote it and made it harsher, and often trans women, when they got into trouble with the police, they would be accused of 175. Although they were women, the [Fascist] police refused to sex them as women, and if they were having relationships with [cis] men, then those would be construed as gay relationships and they could be charged.

[…]

Let me talk through just a number of cases that I’ve found, to kind of show you the level of violence, but also the kind of twists and turns that could happen. The first is a case of a woman, […] her name was H. Bode, she lived in Hamburg, she had had a transvestite certificate under Weimar. When the [Fascist] state came in they no longer respected that certificate, and she had a number of arrests and convictions for… um, or in charges for crossdressing and also for having sexual relationships with [cis] men.

The arrest that lead to her murder took place when one night she went out to a bar with her aunt. Bode was dressed [in women’s clothes] and passed as a woman at the bar. They got chatting with some soldiers who had just come back from the war in Poland—this is […] in [1939]—and they were all having drinks together at a table, and then suddenly one of the soldiers jumped up and said, ‘Oh wait, you’re not a woman, you’re a man dressed in a woman’s clothing!’, and the soldiers grabbed her and brought her to a police officer who was walking ab[ou]t, and she was arrested.

And she was eventually charged under paragraph 175, and they also brought a crossdressing charge against her. She had several convictions already, so the police decided to escalate her case, they called in a medical examiner, the medical examiner wrote […] this horrible report where he finds that she’s a ‘transvestite’ and a ‘homosexual and a ‘psychopath’ and all kinds of bad things. And they start using this kind of language in her file, which is always a really bad sign for people.

So […] at one point they wrote in her file, quote—this is the police writing about her—‘It cannot be denied that a man going about in women’s clothing is not in keeping with prevailing concepts of discipline and morality. Under the current state, a state of manly outlook, it is not permissible that a man counterfeit the other sex by wearing women’s clothing.’

So, to me as a historian, this was really interesting because they’re referring directly to the fascist state here, the state of ‘manly outlook’. In fascism, […] male dominance and masculinity were really important, so what they’re saying is like, look, we have fascism, we can’t have this kind of stuff—behavior going on, we can’t have a trans woman, it’s in direct violation of what fascism is, so we have to do something about her.

And indeed they…decided to send her to a concentration camp. They sent her to Buchenwald, where she was murdered in 1943.

See also: Transgender Experiences in Weimar and Nazi Germany and Trans Liminality and the Nazi State.