- cross-posted to:
- history@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- history@hexbear.net
The first scholarly publications on transgender people under [German Fascism] argued that they were not persecuted. To be more specific, one foundational essay argued that they were not persecuted, and another argued that some trans women were, but only insofar as officials mistakenly believed them to be cisgender gay men.⁸ This, however, is not accurate.
Newer research shows a more complex and more violent situation. The newer scholarship also makes the case that racial status and other factors mattered when trans people ran into trouble with the [Third Reich]. Trans people were at risk. The risks they ran varied according to other things in their lives. Not all trans people suffered violence. Yet there is a pattern of state hostility and police harassment of trans people, particularly trans women. In some cases, it ended in murder.
This change in the literature is due to the growing number of scholars working on the topic, to changes in how we conceptualize [Fascist] violence more broadly, and to changes in how scholars conceptualize transgender people. It also owes to the digitization of archival records, which has made police files easier to find.
[…]
Like “Aryan” gay men, if trans people had “Aryan” status, they were not subjected to a systematic round‐up such as what the [Third Reich] carried out against German Jews. They did, however, face state hostility, harassment, and violence because they were transgender. [Fascist] officials generally had negative views of transgender people.
In what may be the only [Fascist]‐era book on the topic, the 1938 Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Transvestitismus (Marburg: Hermann Bauer), Hermann Ferdinand Voss writes: “Their asocial mindset, which is often paired with criminal activity, justifies draconian measures by the state.”¹⁴
Prior to the [NSDAP’s] “seizure of power,” not enough could be done about trans people, he wrote, but happily now, “There is the possibility of putting the people in question in protective custody or possibly having them castrated or, via temporary ‘appropriate detention (entsprechende Internierung)’ to impress upon them that they must put their inclination on hold.”¹⁵
In 1933, Hamburg officials wrote, “Police officials are requested to observe the transvestites, in particular, and as required to send them to concentration camps.” ¹⁶ (Historians now recognize that the category “transvestite” corresponded very closely to our modern concept of “transgender.”)
[…]
[Fascist] officials did not simply think trans women were gay men. They recognized trans women as different from gay men in ways that mattered. [Fascist] officials had a concept of “transvestitism” as distinct from, though related to, homosexuality. To quote Voss’s 1938 book: “By transvestites we generally mean those persons who have the wish to primarily wear the clothing of the other sex and to act more or less as the opposite sex.”
In all of the cases I have examined, state officials refer to the accused people as “transvestites,” even when they also identified them as homosexual (which they did not always do). Officials often claimed that transvestitism was an aggravating factor, something that made the case more dire, the accused person more deserving of a heavier sentence.
(Emphasis added.)
Click here for events that happened today (June 8).
1938: German businessman John Rabe sent a letter, a detailed report, and a roll of film (shot by U.S. missionary George Fitch) to Adolf Schicklgruber in the hopes that Berlin would be able to influence the Empire of Japan to cease the brutal mistreatment of the Chinese population. The Gestapo unexpectedly threatened Rabe several days later, warning him to keep quiet on this topic.
1939: Franken launched at the Deutsche Werke Kiel shipyard in Kiel.
1940: Leonardo da Vinci set sail from Naples for exercises at 0745 hours, returning at 1820 hours, and Emden arrived at Swinemünde. Anticommunism’s 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions crossed the Seine River in France, and the troops of the 5th Panzer Division captured the city of Rouen. To the east, the 14th Panzer Corps broke through at Amiens, but the 16th Panzer Corps continued to be held down in Péronne by hedgehogs manned by troops of the French 7th Army. During Operation Juno, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau opened fired on British carrier HMS Glorious and her escorts HMS Acasta, HMS Ardent, HMS Acheron, HMS Highlander, and HMS Diana about 170 miles west of Narvik, Norway at 1627 hours.
1941: The Third Reich experienced the largest RAF bombing raid thus far, and after two Axis air raids on Alexandria, Egypt, which had killed four hundred people, forty thousand residents evacuated from the city.
1942: Axis submarine I‐24 fired 10 shells at the Sydney Harbor Bridge in Sydney, Australia shortly after 0000 hours, scoring no hits on the bridge but destroyed one house nearby. Leonardo da Vinci fired two torpedoes at Danish freighter Chile, which she had been pursuing since the previous date, in the Atlantic Ocean at 0005 hours. Both torpedoes hit the freighter on the port side, sinking her, and five of the 44 aboard died. At 0215 hours, I‐21 surfaced near Newcastle, Australia and fired thirty‐four shells, damaging a house near the BHP steelworks; as the coastal guns at Fort Scratchley fired at I‐21 (which caused no damage), this became the only time where Australian land‐based guns would fire at an Imperial ship in the war. Axis submarine U‐135 sank Norwegian ship Pleasantville northwest of Bermuda at 0316 hours; two died but forty‐five lived. Axis submarine U‐83 sank Egyptian ship Said with her deck gun fifteen miles southwest of Jaffa, Palestine at 0511 hours; five died while nine did not. Axis submarine I‐10 sank British ship King Lud in the Mozambique Channel at 0953 hours with torpedoes, killing all aboard. In the same area, I‐16 sank Greek ship Aghios Georgios IV with her deck gun and I‐18 sank Norwegian ship Wilford with her deck gun. In the middle of the Indian Ocean, I‐20 sank Greek ship Christos Markettos. Axis submarine U‐128 sank Norwegian tanker South Africa four hundred miles east of Trinidad at 1419 hours, leaving six dead but thirty‐six alive. At 2330 hours, U‐83 struck again, sinking Palestinian sail boat Esther with her deck gun ten miles off Sidon, Syria–Lebanon. Lastly, Hans‐Joachim Marseille became the permanent commanding officer of the squadron 3 Staffel I./JG‐27.
1943: Mutsu suffered an explosion due to unknown cause at 1213 hours about three kilometers north of Oshima Island in Japan. One thousand one hundred twenty‐one men died; several hundred survivors underwent treatment at military hospitals in the Empire of Japan and then shipped off to various garrisons in order to maintain secrecy of this accidental explosion. As well, Axis submarine U‐758 took a hit in the Central Atlantic.
1944: The Axis lost Civita Castellana, aircraft facilities at Rennes‐Saint‐Jacques, and two Ki‐43 aircraft to the Allies.
1945: Jozef Tiso came under arrest.
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Like “Aryan” gay men, if trans people had “Aryan” status, they were not subjected to a systematic round‐up such as what the [Third Reich] carried out against German Jews.
It’s wild how much shit always comes back to race. Like sometimes I’ll be wondering “why is x thing like this” and it comes back to race as the bottom line.
Anyway not a lot has changed in this regard. At least here in the US, trans people of color face more violence than our white counterparts.
