Transgender people in Nazi Germany

In Nazi Germany, transgender people were prosecuted, barred from public life, forcibly detransitioned, and imprisoned and killed in concentration camps. Though some factors, such as whether they were considered "Aryan", heterosexual with regard to their birth sex, or capable of useful work had the potential to mitigate their circumstances, transgender people were largely stripped of legal status by the Nazi state.
Under the German Empire (from 1871 to 1918) and Weimar Germany (from 1918 to 1933), laws such as Paragraph 183 existed which were used to prosecute transgender individuals; however, these laws were inconsistently enforced, often leaving transgender people vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions of individual police officers. In 1908, thanks to the advocacy of Magnus Hirschfeld, Germany instituted the ability for transgender people to obtain transvestite passes, which shielded them from legal consequences for being publicly transgender. From the end of World War I until 1933, transgender people enjoyed previously unprecedented freedoms and rights. Large leaps were made in transgender medicine through the Institute for Sexual Science, and transgender culture flourished in Berlin.
Following the 1932 Prussian coup d'état and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, transgender movements, gathering places and institutions, such as the first homosexual movement, the Eldorado nightclubs, and the Institute for Sexual Science were dissolved, often by force. Both trans men and trans women were targeted under renewed enforcement of Paragraphs 175 and 183, and their transvestite passes were revoked or simply ignored. Books and texts relating to transgender experiences or medicine were destroyed as "un-German".
Transgender people were imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps, though the exact number killed is unknown. According to historian Laurie Marhoefer, "The Nazi state reserved its worst violence for trans women." According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the German government "brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures."
The term transgender, an English-German cognate, was not coined until 1965 and not widely accepted as a universal term until the 1990s. The German word transsexualismus (lit. 'transsexualism', adapted into English as the term transsexual) was first coined in 1923 by Magnus Hirschfeld, but would not enter widespread use until 30 years later with the work of Harry Benjamin. Before these terms, in German the term transvestit (lit. 'transvestite', masculine) was used to refer to transfeminine individuals, and the term transvestitin (lit. 'transvestite', feminine) was used to refer to transmasculine individuals. In part because no alternative term was widespread, most Western transgender people of this time period self-identified as "transvestites". Modern literature on the subject largely uses the term "transgender" to refer to these individuals as a more accurate description of their gender identity. According to Joanne Meyerowitz and other scholars of the topic, it is difficult if not outright impossible to know what pronouns transgender or transvestite people in these times would have preferred, and as such it is common practice to simply use the pronouns which align with what is known of their gender presentation (i.e., he/him for individuals who present masculine, and she/her for individuals who present feminine).
In the Weimar Republic, the government which ruled Germany from the end of World War I in 1918 until Adolf Hitler seized power in 1933, transgender people gained rights and freedoms unprecedented in Europe at the time, and much early progress was made in transgender medicine. The key figure in these advancements was Jewish-German physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded both the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897—the main organization devoted to the decriminalization of homosexuality—and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in 1919. Other notable transgender rights activists of the period include Friedrich Radszuweit, a publisher and author who founded the Bund für Menschenrecht (Federation for Human Rights) to advocate for gay and transgender rights in 1920, and Max Spohr, a publisher among the first to print LGBT media.
Under the German Empire before World War I, there was no law which explicitly outlawed being transgender, unlike how Paragraph 175 explicitly outlawed male-male homosexuality. Paragraph 183 outlawed public crossdressing, which along with Paragraph 360 (a public nuisance law) was sometimes used against transgender people; however, these laws could only be applied if a public nuisance was determined to have occurred. Additionally, in practice these laws could not be applied to transgender people who were able to pass as their preferred gender. These qualities often led to uneven enforcement of the laws, and openly transgender or gender-queer people in Germany lived under constant threat of legal charges at the whim of individual German police officers. In 1908, Hirschfeld discussed the matter with the Berlin Police, and convinced them to allow transgender people to obtain transvestite passes to avoid legal consequences for cross-dressing, one of the earliest known examples of legal recognition for transgender people.
In large part due to the less restrictive laws and LGBT-friendly culture of 1920s Berlin, known as the 'Golden Years', transgender culture began to flourish in the city, and Berlin became known as the queer capital of the world. In 1930, the world's first transgender magazine, Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Gender), was published by Friedrich Radszuweit's publishing company in Berlin, as was Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), a lesbian magazine which would often publish articles for transgender women. In response to the advocacy of Hirschfeld and others of the first homosexual movement, the Weimar Republic even went so far as to permit legal name changes for transgender people.
Berlin was also notable in this period for its queer nightlife and transvestite cabaret clubs, the most recognized of which were the Eldorado clubs, but less famous venues such as the Mikado were also popular places to watch transgender performers. Eldorado was the name of at least five known clubs in Berlin which featured transgender performers, and were a popular gathering spot for Berlin's LGBT community, though heterosexual patrons were also welcome and common. The first of these clubs was opened in March 1924 by Ludwig Konjetschni, who went on to own three locations under the Eldorado name, at least two of which are known to have catered to gay audiences specifically. The Eldorado clubs were noted worldwide and drew international tourism to the city. Though the clubs were heavily concentrated in Berlin, other similar clubs featuring transgender performers are known to have existed in most major German cities during this period:
In addition to more widespread cultural acceptance, Berlin also became a hotbed for research into transgender medicine. The Institute for Sexual Science, located in Berlin, performed some of the first academic studies of transgender medicine, and is credited with performing some of the first gender affirming care, including hormone replacement therapy. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, Erwin Gohrbandt and other surgeons associated with the Institute performed gender affirming surgery, including early versions of facial feminization surgery and sex reassignment surgery on trans women, as well as facial masculinization surgery, chest masculinization 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."
The Institute collected extensive data on the transgender condition through interviews, surveys and clinical studies, and its research was some of the first to differentiate gender identity from sexual orientation. 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 Institute was also one of the only employers who would hire openly transgender people, and would often hire transgender people in need of work as receptionists or maids; both Toni Ebel and Dora Richter are known to have found employment with the Institute in this way.
The homosexual movement and Institute for Sexual Science were frequent targets of conservatives such as the Nazi Party and both Catholic and Protestant churches, who accused the movements of "degeneracy", going against family values and promoting "un-German" ideas. A particular target of conservative ire were LGBT publications and magazines, which were grouped with pornographic magazines as "filth literature". Laws such as the 1926 Harmful Publications Act were pushed through by conservative movements to attempt to limit or regulate the contents of these publications.
Hirschfeld himself was also 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." In 1929, Der Stürmer depicted him in a cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht and attacked him for his ideas on sex, as well as his sexuality and Jewish background.
The beginning of the end for the Golden Years of Berlin occurred on 20 July 1932, when Franz Von Papen orchestrated the 1932 Prussian coup d'état and took control of the Free State of Prussia as Reich Commissioner. Berlin was located in Prussia, and Papen, a conservative Catholic, began more strictly enforcing Paragraph 175 and other anti-homosexuality and anti-transvestitism laws in the region. Papen's government attempted to shut down presses printing "filth literature" altogether, though the courts were unwilling to cooperate with any attempted convictions, and the effort to shut down the publications was temporarily halted.
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, came to power as Chancellor of Germany. His government cracked down on gay and trans movements within Germany. On 6 May 1933, a group of students belonging to the National Socialist German Students' League, accompanied by a brass band, marched to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. After failing to find Hirschfeld, who was abroad, the students proceeded to shout "Brenne Hirschfeld!" ("Burn Hirschfeld!") while ransacking and vandalizing the Institute, tearing pictures from the walls, pouring inkwells onto carpets, and destroying exhibitions while the band played outside. Some students posed for propaganda photos amidst the destruction. That afternoon, the Sturmabteilung (SA) arrived and systematically confiscated the Institute's materials, including thousands of books and documents from its library and archive. The only documents spared were the thousands of medical questionnaires collected by Hirschfeld, either because the Institute's staff managed to convince the SA that the documents were simple medical profiles, or because there were physically too many to carry out of the Institute. Dora Richter was long believed to have been murdered in the attack until a paper trail of her life after 1933 was unearthed.
The Institute was closed, and would never reopen. Four days later, on 10 May 1933, as many as 25,000 of the institute's books, many of which contained unique insights into transgender history and medicine, were burned nearby in Bebelplatz Square. Hirschfeld remained in exile in France until his death in 1935, rather than return to Germany to face persecution as a gay, Jewish man. His image would be subsequently widely reproduced for use in Nazi propaganda, citing him as a prototypical Jew. Following the closure of the Institute, some of its staff, such as Ludwig Levy-Lenz (who was also Jewish), fled Germany for the safety of exile. However, a few of the Institute's former personnel, including Erwin Gohrbandt, turned to collaboration with the Nazi regime. Gohrbandt in particular joined the Luftwaffe as a medical advisor, and later contributed to human experimentation in the Dachau concentration camp, where transgender people like the ones he once treated are known to have been held as prisoners and murdered.
Generally, Nazi ideology considered transgender, non-binary or other gender-non conforming identities as mental illnesses which could (and should) be cured. One social goal of the Nazi government was to restore and enforce traditional conservative gender roles within German society compared to the more open Weimar Germany, which meant suppressing transgender identities as well as gender non-conforming ones such as butch lesbians and effeminate gay men. Within the legal system, transvestism or having a transgender identity was often considered an aggravating factor in a homosexuality case, causing transgender women to face even harsher sentences than if they had simply been considered homosexual men, though transgender people could face persecution even if Nazi authorities did not consider them to be homosexual.
Though transgender women in Nazi Germany were treated as crossdressing men under the law and by law enforcement, and were often arrested tried under the same Paragraph 175 as homosexual men, Laurie Marhoefer notes that "Nazi officials did not simply think trans women were gay men." Bodie Ashton, a professor of German and LGBT history at the University of Erfurt, has called the Nazi government's understanding of transgender people "broadly inconsistent", and says that the Nazi government generally did not make attempts to understand transgender individuals beyond base assumptions about them.
On 10 October 1936, the Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und der Abtreibung (Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion) was created by decree of Heinrich Himmler to establish guidelines on prosecuting homosexuality, and coordinating the prosecution of transgender people was generally also considered within its jurisdiction. However, the Gestapo's homosexuality department also retained some authority on the area of transgender people as well. Specifically, the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion designated responsible by the Nazi government for "collaborating in the design of the security police's treatment of sexual degenerates", such as "transvestites, fetishists, and others."
According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Nazi government "brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures." Transgender people (in particular male-to-female individuals) were often persecuted under the same Paragraph 175 which was widely used to target homosexuals, although there exist known instances of individuals being charged under Paragraph 183 alone, a public indecency law which was used as prohibition of cross-dressing. The Nazi government shut down several magazines published by transgender people, though some such as Das 3. Geschlecht had already ceased by 1933 following Friedrich Radszuweit's death in March 1932. Under Franz Von Papen's orders, in the summer of 1932, a series of raids had been carried out against gay, lesbian and transgender bars, and it was announced that these places would no longer be able to acquire dance permits. By early 1933, the Eldorado nightclubs are believed to have all shut down. Under Nazi rule, the vast majority of transvestite passes given to transgender people under Weimar rule were revoked, or in many cases simply ignored by the police.
Race also played a role in how transgender people were treated under the Nazi regime. According to historian Zavier Nunn, trans people could be spared the worst of the Nazi's violence if they were considered Aryan and not considered homosexual (i.e., they were exclusively attracted to the opposite of the sex assigned to them at birth). Furthermore, their circumstances could be mitigated if they were capable of useful work. Nunn provides of a particular case study of a transgender lesbian known as R., who the Nazis considered to be Aryan, non-homosexual and a good worker, who was arrested in 1938 but was released after two years in prison on the assumption that she would detransition. R. reneged, continuing her non-conformist behaviors, and in 1941 she was re-arrested. On 10 November 1941, R. was transferred to the Berlin-Wittenau Medical Center to undergo conversion therapy so she could "become a functioning member of the Volksgemeinschaft". She remained in Wittenau until her death by suspected suicide on 12 March 1943.
Due in part to the inherent difficulty in identifying transgender people who can pass as their preferred gender, as well as identifying gender non-conforming people who may conform when in public, the Nazi government relied heavily on reporting by private citizens (often neighbors) in order to persecute transgender people. A widespread belief in Germany at this time held that transgender people were inherently deceitful, as they lived their lives "in disguise", which provided motivation to some Germans to denounce transgender people to the Nazi government. During the First World War, this belief was so ubiquitous that transgender organizations urged their members to wear clothes associated with their birth sex for the sake of their personal safety. However, many Germans were simply motivated to denounce queer and transgender people due to their personal belief in Nazi ideology and desire to make the idealized Nazi state a reality.
Many transgender people were imprisoned and murdered in Nazi concentration camps, though it is unknown exactly how many were killed or died as a result of their mistreatment. In particular, as straight transgender women were viewed by the Nazis as a subset or variation of homosexual men—a sexuality whose manifestations in Germany the Nazis aimed to completely suppress—they were particularly targeted. Even in cases where transgender individuals were not killed or imprisoned in concentration camps, they were, with few exceptions, barred from being transgender in public life, and there is at least one recorded case of a transgender German being driven to suicide due to their forced detransition. Individual precincts and districts are also known to have taken specific action against transgender people; for example, on 11 November 1933, the city of Hamburg issued a specific order to its police department to "observe the transvestites in particular, and as required to send them to concentration camps".
Historian Laurie Marhoefer, when discussing the persecution of trans people by the Nazi regime, noted that "the Nazi state reserved its worst violence for trans women." A gay prisoner and survivor of the Lichtenburg concentration camp named Kurt von Ruffin recalled that camp officials often treated trans people with particular contempt. Incoming transgender women to the camp would be "stripped out of their women's clothes and then humiliated, insulted and beaten." Von Ruffin recalled hearing of one occasion when a transgender woman was forced to undress, then had her head forcibly shoved into a dirty latrine until she drowned.
Lucy Salani was the only known Italian transgender person known to have survived imprisonment in the concentration camps, including the Dachau concentration camp. She died in 2023. At least one Austrian trans woman, referred to as Bella P., is known to have been imprisoned in a concentration camp after a sentence under a law targeting "unnatural fornication". Another trans woman, known only as "H. Bode" is known to have been killed in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
In one notable example, German transgender woman and sex worker Liddy Bacroff submitted a request for a 'voluntary' castration on 4 April 1938, following an arrest for crossdressing and being on a date at a restaurant with a man. A repeat offender of German anti-homosexuality and anti-prostitution laws, including Paragraph 175, Bacroff requested "to be cured of my sick passion which has led me onto the path of prostitution". She was examined by Wilhelm Reuss, a medical examiner from the Hamburg Health Department, who concluded that "H. is a transvestite to his [sic] core. Accordingly his [sic] entire habitus is feminine and infantile, the voice eunuchoid". He further speculated that castration would only embolden Barcroff, as she was never the penetrating partner in her sex work. Reuss's report was effectively a death sentence. Bacroff was subsequently remanded to prison, and in late 1942, she was transferred to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, where she was killed on 6 January 1943.
Transgender men are also known to have been targeted in Nazi Germany, though their treatment differed in some regards from transgender women, and some were even able to continue their lives publicly. One trans man, known by the masculine nicknames "Kleener" and "Dicker", was arrested for crossdressing in August 1940, but was released after promising to wear women's clothing in public. A postal worker known as Gerd W., who was a transgender man, petitioned in 1940 to have his transvestite pass restored after being unhappy attempting to live as a woman. Although his transvestite pass was not restored, he was given permission to dress as a man so long as he did not have sexual relations with women. Another transgender man, Gerd Kubbe, had his transvestite pass revoked in 1933. He was arrested in January 1938 for crossdressing into "protective custody" on the orders of Reinhard Heydrich and imprisoned at the Lichtenburg concentration camp. However, in October 1938, he too was released, his transvestite pass restored, and he was even granted special permission from the Gestapo to continue wearing men's clothes and using a masculine name; though he was barred from using public restrooms or baths while wearing men's clothing.
There exist many open questions about the imprisonment of transgender people in Nazi concentration camps. It is unknown, for example, exactly how many transgender people were killed in the concentration camps. Some records pertaining to the transgender people sent to the concentration camps are vague and open ended. In the case of German trans woman and club proprietor Toni Simon, her file's final document calls her a "danger to youth" and recommends sending her to a concentration camp as "absolutely necessary", without any further information on her fate. Fritz Kitzing, an individual who was assigned male at birth but presented as both female and male at different points in their life, was denounced by one of their neighbors in 1935 as transgender and was imprisoned without trial in Lichtenburg and later Sachsenhausen after being labeled "a transvestite of the worst kind" by the Gestapo. They were briefly released in 1938, but were rearrested on a charge of "atrocity propaganda" for sending a letter detailing their experiences in the concentration camps to a friend in London, after which no further records of them are known to exist.
"Transgender" became widely recognized as an identity beginning only in the late 20th century, and the fight for legal recognition and rights for transgender people is an ongoing movement. In 2023, historian Laurie Marhoefer noted, "Up until the past few years, there had been little research on trans people under the Nazi regime." As such, it was not until the 2010s and 2020s that transgender people began to be recognized as victims of the Nazis and the Holocaust.
On 23 June 2017, the German Bundestag voted to compensate victims of Paragraph 175. Those affected by the law had their convictions rescinded, and were given reparations of €3,000 ($3,350 in USD) plus an additional €1,500 ($1,675 in USD) for each year spent in prison.
On 27 January 2023, the German government dedicated its annual Holocaust memorial commemoration to lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender victims of the Holocaust. This marked the first time the German government had granted official recognition to transgender people as victims of the Holocaust. In a speech given at the commemoration, German Bundestag President Bärbel Bas stated "For our remembrance culture, it's important that we tell the stories of all victims of persecution, that we make their injustice visible, that we recognize their suffering." Transgender people have also been recognized or commemorated as victims of the Holocaust by the Human Rights Campaign, Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the United Nations.
In 2022, the Regional Court of Cologne ruled that denying that transgender people were victims of the Nazis qualifies as "a denial of Nazi crimes", which in Germany may be prosecuted as a crime. The ruling was an outcome of the civil libel suit of German biologist Marie-Luise Vollbrecht, who alleged libel against the German Society for Trans Identity and Intersexuality over their response to comments she made calling transgender people not "true victims" of the Holocaust. The court ultimately ruled that she had to accept the response made to her comments labelling her as a denialist. Laurie Marhoefer gave an expert statement on the case that was not ultimately presented to the court, writing "though there is a bit of variation and disorganization, and race matters, we see a pattern of state violence and oppression here, motivated by a hostility specific to transgender people."
On 13 March 2024, author J.K. Rowling tweeted a series of responses to an anonymous critic, who argued that Rowling was upholding Nazi ideals for her viewpoints of transgender rights, in which Rowling contended that transgender people were not targeted in the Holocaust. These tweets caused some, including civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo, to accuse her of Holocaust denial. On 14 March 2024, Rowling responded to the accusations in a post on her personal website, calling them "baseless and disgusting" and stating that she had "always been a staunch supporter of the Jewish community".