In Nazi Germany, transgender people had a variety of experiences depending on whether they were considered "Aryan" or capable of useful work.[1] According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Nazi German government "brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures."[2]

Some male-to-female transgender people and cross-dressers were targeted under Paragraph 175 as part of the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany; Germany's transvestite community had a recognized subcategory (referred to by Magnus Hirschfeld as early as the 1920s as "total transvestites" or "extreme transvestites") that would later be recognized more widely in medical literature as transsexual.[3][4]

Historian Laurie Marhoefer argues that transgender people were a discrete target of Nazi persecution, citing instances of charges for violating Paragraph 183, a law against cross-dressing.[5] Marhoefer also notes that the Nazis shut down several magazines published by transgender people, shut down the Eldorado Berlin nightclubs that some transgender people worked at, and shut down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexology research institute that advocated for transgender rights. Most people who held "transvestite certificates", given to them under the Weimar Republic, had them revoked or German police refused to recognize them. Despite these actions taken against transgender people by the Nazis, there was "little public discussion of trans people" in Germany.[6]

In 2022, the Regional Court of Cologne ruled that denying that trans people were victims of the Nazis qualifies as "a denial of Nazi crimes".[6][7]

See also

References

  1. ^ Nunn, Zavier (2022). "Trans Liminality and the Nazi State". Past & Present. 260: 123–157. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtac018.
  2. ^ "Transgender Experiences in Weimar and Nazi Germany". Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Retrieved 2023-06-19.
  3. ^ Sutton, Katie (2012). ""We Too Deserve a Place in the Sun": The Politics of Transvestite Identity in Weimar Germany". German Studies Review. 35 (2): 348. doi:10.1353/gsr.2012.a478043. JSTOR 23269669 – via JSTOR.
  4. ^ "Paragraph 175 and the Nazi Campaign against Homosexuality". The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved March 12, 2023. Not everyone arrested under Paragraph 175 identified as a man. During the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, Germany was home to a developing community of people who identified as 'transvestites.' [...] Initially, this term encompassed people who performed in drag, people who cross-dressed for pleasure, as well as those who today might identify as trans or transgender.
  5. ^ "Paper: Trans Identities and "Cross Dressing" in Nazi Germany: Trans People as a Discrete Target of State Violence (134th Annual Meeting (January 3-6, 2020))". aha.confex.com. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  6. ^ a b Marhoefer, Laurie (2023-06-06). "Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people". The Conversation. Retrieved 2023-06-19.
  7. ^ "Vollbrecht-Tweet darf als Leugnung von NS-Verbrechen bezeichnet werden". Der Spiegel (in German). 2022-11-11. Retrieved 2022-12-31.

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