Fancy dress party at the Institute for Sexual Science
Magnus Hirschfeld was sitting in Paris in 1933 watching a newsreel. On 10 May student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings.
The largest bonfire was in Berlin, where 40,000 people heard the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, pronounce that “Jewish intellectualism is dead”. A large proportion of the books on the fire were from the library of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science.
In 1897 Hirschfeld had founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Germany. This linked the defence of homosexuality to scientific investigation and a political campaign for the repeal of repressive laws. Adolf Hitler called Hirschfeld “the most dangerous Jew in Germany”.
It was supported by the Social Democratic Party and later by the Communist Party. At the end of the First World War the outbreak of revolution in Germany meant Hirschfeld found space to open the Institute.
Hirschfeld argued some people were born with characteristics that did not fit into heterosexual or binary categories, and supported the idea that a “third sex” existed. Hirschfeld said people acted “in accordance with their nature,” not against it. It wasn’t an unproblematic analysis, but was an important shift.
The institute declared itself a place of “research, teaching, healing, and refuge”. Unable to change the reactionary laws, Hirschfeld got legally accepted “transvestite” identity cards for patients, to help them not be arrested for dressing as the opposite sex.
One person arrested repeatedly was Dora Richter. From a poor farming background she used her birth name, Rudolph, working as a male-presenting waiter in posh hotels during the summer. The rest of the year, she’d live as a female.
A judge released Dora into the care of Hirschfeld, and the Institute where she lived and worked as a servant. In 1922, Dora had the first of a number of surgeries. In 1931 she became the first person to have what was then referred to as a “sex-change” operation.
The period after the German Revolution of 1919 until the rise of the Nazis saw a mass movement of sexual liberation. It had three strands.
Hirschfeld and the Social Democratic leadership of the movement fought for better understanding and law changes. At the same time there was a huge growth of alternative lifestyle bars and clubs. Here gathered those who thought it was better to achieve a real and vibrant sub-culture than a struggle for an emancipation that was often only formal and legalistic.
The third strand was around the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich had opened free sex clinics in working class districts of Vienna.
He also had a mobile centre, from which he lectured on “the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism”, warning of the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the family. The clinics provided contraception and arranged illegal abortions. In 1930, Reich moved to Germany and set up the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics—Sex-Pol. Crowds of up to 20,000 would attend Sex Pol events
Discussions on the class nature of society followed from discussions on the social, financial and practical restrictions on sex. The Communists were unhappy with his views on the family and his success, so accused him of trying to turn the Communist youth associations into brothels—which was a lie.
In 1932 they expelled him from the party. In 1934 he was expelled from the International Society for Psychoanalysis for being a Marxist—which was true.
On 6 May 1933, The Nazis stormed the Institute. Dora Richter was probably killed in the attack, although it is possible she died in custody later. The records of her treatment and the story of her life, as well as her life itself, were destroyed.
The Nazis crushed both the left and the right of the movement. The books and research documents of the Institute were irreplaceable. It is not known how many people the Nazis murdered after they took the institute’s files.
The Nazis escalated their persecution. In total, at least 50,000 were jailed under these draconian laws. Some 15,000 were deported to concentration camps.
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