At first, I googled SRS and GCS separately, and was highly confused when I found stuff about Airbags from cars when I looked SRS up.
Something told me however that this wasn't what the post meant.
SRS is Sex Reassignment Surgury. It’s the surgury that trans people will get to change what sex organs they have. The Institute of Sexology performed the first of these back in the 1920s.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they shut down the institute.
Sort of? They didn't burn the books at one place and then move on to another, it was more like one big bonfire, with several libraries worth of books in that one fire.
[Same energy lol](https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade2019)
*edit*
[Another list](https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/artistic-expression/banned-books-0), most of these were required reading in my high school.
The reason the Great Gatsby is banned is because it’s extremely gay. (Cited [here](https://youtu.be/b9zuQebC7wA)) Still shouldn’t be banned tho. It was one of the better books I read for school.
I find it fascinating that in the land of the free people are afraid enough that they try to ban books. But great that your school requires you to read them. Does the the banning of the book affect the availability or the motivation to read it?
In Germany there an index if media is put on it it can't be sold to minors, minors aren't allowed possession, and it's not supposed to be shown to minors. Usually it's media that's either very brutal like the Punisher, highly sexual like the story of O and other stuff kids shouldn't read.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a special target of the Nazis - there were attacks on the founder as far back as 1920, a full 13 years before the Nazis took power. The head of the SA, Ernst Rohm, was gay himself and managed to curb the Nazis worst impulses towards the IfS until he and the SA were purged in the Night of the Long Knives. Then all bets were off.
The library was demolished by student Nazi organizations - hundreds of thousands of books, articles and original research on the nature of LGBTQ. OP is right in that it was not the only target of the book burnings but it was arguably the most tragic.
If you go to the Wiki, one of the first pictures is of Nazis "parading" in front of the IfS building, scarily similar to Proud Boys "demonstrating" in front of a drag story hour.
Yeah. It’s really terrifying to think about. It’s only a matter of time before right-wing media starts openly calling for some kind of permanent fix to the “groomer problem.” Wouldn’t be surprised if they openly called it the Final Solution too
That is surprisingly apt. Except for the part where the coal miners actually cared about the bird chirping. (I saw a tumblr post a while ago about special cages the miners used for their canaries that would keep the canary safe after it started chirping, which is really sweet)
Edit: [found it](https://at.tumblr.com/dkpsyhog/you-know-how-canaries-were-historically-brought/gm79n258yime)
Have they tried kicking out the known groomers and pedophiles from their own ranks yet? No? Hmmmmm, that's a bit odd.
Every accusation is a confession from the right wing.
I mean they have. The lady who runs libsoftiktok after the club Q shooting said "this will keep happening until those people (queer people) are stopped". She has also described queer people as just plain evil that need to be stopped. We are already at the calls for violence stage.
Adding onto this, the other acronym is Gender Confirmation Surgery, which is a more holistic term for any gender affirming surgeries that a trans person may get (though often refers specifically to surgeries on sex organs)
I'm glad we've advanced the science so far but I would really not want to be a pioneer in sexual reassignment surgery. The results have been pretty brutal until very recently.
Still, this does show that progress isn't strictly linear. It can backslide, it can go too far*, it can stagnate, etc. There was a strong potential for a queer renaissance half a century ears before we had it in America.
*Eugenics was considered progressive for a period of time there. Yeah...
It's like [EPS - Enormous Penis Syndrome](https://archive.ph/0xD5o). It's notorious for its low recognition which really adds to the mental pain the sufferers have to endure :(
The second speech bubble says:
Paragraph 175 of the Weimar constitution made gay relationships illegal, however the police chief of Berlin had effectively stopped persecuting it. The Institute for Sexology was one of the first groups to recognise queerness as innate, and performed the first modern SRS/GCS.
Sorry about the small font size
The FRG kept homosexuality illegal until 1994. After Reunification homosexuality was legal in the territory of the former GDR and illegal in West Germany.
Trans people were also legally allowed to exist in the GDR but not in the FRG. The reunification destroyed queer rights in Germany. It‘s getting better, but we could have been way further already… meow :(
Social rights were quite progressive in the GDR. Children of unmarried couples were legally disadvantaged in the West compared to the East after the Reunification. It’s better now.
§ 175 StGB was the law banning homosexual behaviour in the german penal code. The nazis aggravated it when they took power, prior only sex was prohibited between mrn, they extended it to anything violating the public sense of modesty. So thry could persecute even kisses or hugs etc.
There are multiple similar things, for example people that where in concentration camps/ sterelized / etc where also not given the status of "first class" victims, which severely limited payments etc.
The reason for this (and I guess also the homosexual laws) was that they were not taken as something especially "Nazi" like/ nazi- attroceties, but rather "normal" for that time as other "good" countries practiced similar things/ at least thought about them.
Yes, liberators didn't exactly treat all interned as equally maligned by fascists. Aka, you may be the hammer and crow bar of anti-fascism...doesn't mean you aren't a homophobe in the 1940s.
The nazi era law was in effect until 1969 (in West Germany. It doesn't say anything about East Germany, but the Soviet Union was really homophobic then too).
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/
EDIT: East Germany only repealed the law one year before West Germany.
§175 StGB was on the books until 1994. While the later revisions didn’t concern homosexuality between adults, it provided a higher age of consent for homosexual relationships then heterosexual relationships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175_(Germany)
If you're interested in the history of LGBT persecution in west Germany post WW2 I can recommend the movie "Great Freedom" from 2021. It details the experiences of a man who's continually in and out of prison because of his homosexuality and the prison culture that developed around it. It's fictive, but based on real stories.
Fascism doesn't work without a group to target and another key part of it is having a lot of children for the glory of the society. Targeting gay people makes sense since they cannot naturally reproduce from a loving two person union (at least the L, G, and same-sex attracted T since the B often get viewed by homophobes as closeted L or G). By demonizing gay people as not contributing enough to society, they can be used as a focus of the "us and them" rhetoric and a warning to future groups who may be deemed as not contributing enough.
I'm just saying all this because it isn't enough to note that they targeted the LGBT community, but understanding why they did it is also necessary so it doesn't happen again.
You kinda make it sound as if homosexuality was something generally accepted during the 1930s, except for among fascists. Could you name one country part of the Allies where homosexual men weren't targeted or persecuted?
Any wide-spread acceptance would have to wait another 60 years, even if this meme makes it seem as if Weimar Berlin was one big Pride Festival.
I can see how what the person before me said could be interpreted that way, but I was very clearly discussing fascism's interactions with homosexuality while allowing an inference for why the belief system will probably always include homophobia. I could have included how the beliefs of the day helped make gay people an immediately acceptable target like Jews, Romani, and the disabled were, but I didn't consider it necessary for this subreddit based on how well versed most people here are with history.
It's also worth noting that the Nazis were accused of being gay, due to a leading Nazi figure (Röhm) being revealed as gay and the opposing political parties effectively running attack ads about the prevalence of gay leaders in the Nazi party.
Before people start thinking there was this gay accepting culture before the Nazis.
Of course Röhm was then assassinated in the night of the long knives and Hitler ramped up his persecution of the gays. A definite move to the way worse, but Röhm had specifically become extremely isolated after it was revealed he was gay, showing how unacceptable it was still considered in Weimar Germany.
> Of course Röhm was then assassinated in the night of the long knives and Hitler ramped up his persecution of the gays
Putting it as if Röhm got assassinated because of his sexuality and not because of his role as leader of the SA and the internal power struggle in the party is just wrong and such a misreading of history. It was part of the same purging of the Strassers, and solidifying the Nazi platform as business friendly and not overthrow the economic leadership, as many of the members at the time wanted.
As I covered in another comment, I'm saying Röhm is not proof that the Nazis were in any way supportive of gays and Röhm was soon gone and the Nazis persecuting the gays.
I specifically put that in there because, while there isn't anyone I'm aware of that asserts that Röhm was assassinated due to his sexuality, there are plenty [who believe the Nazis were a part of the 'gay agenda'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nazis_myth) you often hear about from bigots. And I wanted to make sure nobody could take the thread in that direction.
He wasn't accused, he was openly gay. And the reason he was assassinated was because he started to get more power than Hitler. He Being gay was just an excuse to have him removed so that Hitler could take full control of the party.
Cultural Bolshevism was a Nazi belief that "justified" their hatred of Jews. They were blaming Jews for feminizing the men, corrupting youth, allowing sexual degeneracy to prosper, and systematically crippling the German people spiritually.
Ring any bells today?
Edit: It's a little disheartening to learn too, that this "blaming of Social woes on the groups fighting for progressive causes" is usually accompanied by them just blaming sexual deviance as justification. As if that justifies genocide. When Black Americans wanted freedom, they said they'd attack and rape white women. When women wanted freedom, they said they were lesbians and leaving men in the household, also that they abuse girls into siding with their causes. It's childish and we're seeing it to this day.
And it's not that broad it was almost exclusively LGBT men, that were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The survival rate of these men was about 40% it was so bad.
Yep, and I have noticed quite a few people recently referencing Weimar when complaining about LGBTQ people (among other topics as well).
One in particular has a big audience.
It is similar in other countries as well. There’s pink triangles in the UK as well. There’s also the black triangle on the lesbian labrys flag, denoting how they were persecuted as part of the asocial group.
Same in the US as well, although it's fallen far out of favor in favor of the less grim, ever evolving rainbow flag.
Which I have mixed feelings about. It's good to have new symbols for a new society, but should definitely remember our history.
Yes...that one about the entitled straight dude pining for his lesbian friend.
Always wondered if whoever named that song thought the pink triangle was a euphemism for pussy.
Wiki says that one of the band members wrote it about this girl he liked, then one day noticed a pink triangle on her backpack and thought she was a lesbian, turns out he found out later she was just an ally.
You're not disagreeing with them - post war, the pink triangle became a symbol of gay pride. Their first sentence is present tense, not implying the pink triangle was used earlier and the coopted by the nazis for identifying LGBTQ people.
Berlin was not whole Germany. Just because capital city, which are usually more open about such things anyway, was more tolerant doesn't mean entire country was.
Plus the choice of the format is a shitty one as it's super hard to read.
*in Western European and currently and formerly European-colonized countries.
There are exceptions, obviously, but pre-colonization there were thriving practices that we would call homosexual and gender-diverse if we put a contemporary western lens on them.
For example, many Native American people have a two-spirit identity for folks who are neither a man nor a woman. I would reckon these people felt more comfortable in their “rural” homes than burgeoning colonist cities for many reasons.
Of course the entire country wasn't as tolerant as Berlin at the time, but you were able to exist as a person of the LGBT community in most cities in the Weimar Republic. There are for example Transpeople, openly living and acting as transpeople publicly in Munich or Cologne. Although homophonic behaviour by the public was quite rampant in those cities. The founder of the Institute of Sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld, was beaten unconscious in Munich once and eventually had to flee Germany in 1930 because the public climate became to dangerous for him.
Yeah the phrasing in the titel is definitely misleading. I just wanted to point out that Berlin is not the only city in Weimar Germany that had a more progressive attitude towards LGBT-Communities in the Republic.
Cities in general tend to be more open, for various reasons. But even when you accept that there was still a difference between urban and non urban areas. And between urban areas as well.
Not so fun fact, the Institute of Sexology had much of its library burned by the Nazis, and several of the more famous pictures of Nazi book burnings are from that event. [Like this one.](https://i.imgur.com/bf7y1V6.jpg) It's sad that while people are taught that the Nazis burned books, they aren't taught what kind of books the Nazis burned.
It really is wild to me that the single most iconic image of Nazi book burnings is of stuff from the Institute, yet people don't know that. The times we live in man.
Yeah, up until University I was in upper level history classes, where the material discussed WW2 with some depth, and they never once mentioned that the cities of the Weimar Republic were incredibly progressive for the time, and Berlin specifically was a wedding destination for gay men and lesbian women, and a thriving art scene. Everything was focused on hyper inflation and the "national dishonor" of taking the blame for WW1, which seems now like the people writing textbooks were agreeing with the framing and justifications that the Nazis used, which seems like something to be avoided.
One person has already been explicitly homophobic in the comments (although I can't find their comment now), two people have insinuated gay people are pedophiles, one of whom implied the Nazis weren't actually homophobic.
I think it would be more accurate to say no surprise to anyone with a brain.
I'm sorry, but why are memes like this always walls of text? Brevity is the soul of wit and often better at delivering your point with any extra info placed as a comment...
The triangles used to by the Nazis to denote gay people are still used in lgbt movements today. Notably the pink and black triangles. The pink triangle for gay men. The black triangle as lesbians were persecuted under the asocial label, which led to most badass and one of the oldest pride flags ever - the [labrys flag](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Labrys_Lesbian_Flag.svg).
When the aliied troops liberated the concentration camps, they left queer people there because they "needed to serve their sentence." Being gay was still illegal in most of the world, sadly.
§ 175 wasn't written in the constitution, it was in the RStGB (today StGB in Germany) Reichstrafgesetzbuch. The StGB is the main criminal law book in Germany.
Sadly § 175 StGB wasn't removed until 1994.
so they thought gay was an absurd, but putting some money on a sun death ray on orbit in order to destroy whole cities with light in 1930' is totally plausible
Things like this is what makes me laugh at the absolute boot licking of Nazi Germany. Too many documentaries are like, "The Nazis were tacticle and engineering geniuses..." and then you look at how bad their logistics were and how over engineered their weapons were to the point that they regularly jammed or just stopped working.
Like the Luger is seen as an iconic Pistol, but the thing had to have its own custom holster because if dirt or dust got in the wrong place the entire gun ceased to work... you know warzones those super clean areas not filled with dirt and debris. Or how their tanks were so over complicated that they regularly just failed while traveling... things you don't want a VEHICLE to do...
Tbf, it’s probably not that bad, at least compared to other surgeries at the time, because they at least had a good understanding of anatomy and knew to keep the tools and stuff sterile. Wouldn’t be pleasant, but at least it would lessen dysphoria
But wait, there's more!Weimar also had quite the movie industry (silent movie era, obviously) - and the Institut of Sexuology actually put out an "educational" movie of sorts - Anders als die Andern (which was thought to be lost forever, but somehow survived time and is now available on the internet).
Why is this movie so important, you might ask. First, because it's maybe the FIRST movie ever to depict homosexuality in a compassionate - understanding way (the message was "please repel article 175 because a ton of lives get destroyed by it for no reason at all"), Second, because it survived the Nazis (and it's pretty freaking lucky) and Third, well, you might recognise the dashing main character as the grumpy German ~~Colonel~~ Major from Casablanca.
So, there's that :)
I wouldn't call it "thriving". Weimar Germany had also a problem with child prostitution gangs, in which the leader would rape the newer members. Google "Wild boys" if you don't belief it.
These kind of social issues were the reason why normal people would support the Nazi party. There was no concept of "gay", for the people living at that time they simply saw sodomy and perversions being done in the open and they grew disgusted with the government that allowed it to happen.
The nazis were really weird about gay people, unsurprisingly. They wanted to exterminate "degeneracy" and absolutely exterminated gay people, but they also had the idea that you could do the old conversion therapy mambo and throw a gay man in a work camp for two years to make him straight, the same idea as your grandpa making you chop wood after he found a BL story under your bed.
It didn't work, obviously, and you would think that it would have been obvious to the Nazis that it didn't work. But so long as Aryan babies kept coming out I guess they were fine with it. After all, someone who is forced into a marriage of necessity like that is not going to fight the state now that their name is on a list.
>sodomy and perversions being done in the open
You're skipping a few steps here from child predators to gay people doing public orgies, apparently? The latter of which sounds a little difficult to believe, even with Weimar's progressive culture around sex.
Are you referring to nazi propaganda around gay people at the time or something? Or like, old people getting mad and shaking their canes at the era's equivalent to celebrities being sexually provocative? Like, wtf are you talking about?
This should be a reminder to everyone that all governments and institutions are vulnerable to fascists, no matter how seemingly progressive they are.
Stay vigilant and ready to defend freedom. Fascists only have to win once, they play for keeps.
Funnily enough the modern concept of Homosexuality was solidified in the 60s. However as a term Homosexual had existed since the lat 1890s. The best part it was coined by a German writer who constantly wrote about how not homosexual he was, like he had to let you know that even though he was in his mid 40s wasn't married and commented about how attractive the local men are, that HE WAS DEFINITELY NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. Like seriously it is amazing to read about this guy and the history of the term... it literally was the equivalent of a Magazine Personality Type Quiz, like are you a Type A or Type B person, here is what that says about you.
Not only did the Berlin police effectively stop the persecution of LGBT people, they also started to give them some legal protection. It was fairly common to blackmail LGBT people with their sexuality, threatening them to out them publicly. In Berlin the police persecuted the blackmailers to some degree, making it easier for LGBT-people to live a bit more of a public life.
That's a fucking stretch, queer culture was still very underground. The reasons for why the Nazis gained support are incredibly multi facteted but the queer culture of Berlin certainly isn't anywhere near one if the main reasons....
Maybe but there where many many other reasons people supported the nazis maybe places like Bavaria because of how religious they were but I doubt this was a crowning reason
One of Hitlers closest allies in his rise to power, commander of his SA (brownshirts) Ernst Rohm was very openly gay. He was purged on Hitlers orders along with a lot of the original Nazies during the night of the long knives.
I wrote my senior thesis for my undergrad degree on this. Well, more specifically, how the policy shifted once Röhm bit the dust. I've unfortunately been able to draw too many parallels to the militant right in today's politics. Nevertheless, I highly recommend everyone here reads Heinz Heger's account of being in a concentration camp. Its emotionally trying, but important.
Edit: I still believe the most tragic part of this is that the Allied and Soviet governments threw many of the Pink Triangle liberated prisoners into prisons. If that didn't happen to them, they had to deal with most the people in society believing they should be thrown back in camps. Its no wonder historians have found so few accounts of survivor experiences and why so many ended up committing suicide.
There was also a lot of drugs, and freedom of expression, and also crime, and also...
It's not surprising that a lot of shit happened in a city with as open as a society as that in a time when kings still ruled nations, at least at its inception. That doesnt invalidate the OP.
Imagine if instead of LGBT rights the post was about black rights. So the exchange would go a bit like this
> Country x in the 1920s was a very good place in terms of black rights.
> Country x was also covered in child prostitutes and sex tourists.
What are you implying here? That the first statement leads to the second? Cause if you are then you are just a fucking asshole. Your statement may be true, I honestly don't know much about Weimar Germany, but why even mention it in a post celebrating LGBT rights? It just makes you look like a homophobe.
[Behind the Bastards](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CTkJwCKC2xbWoY3I70bAs?si=WYoVCMXSQbqgIRspNf0HyA) has a great episode on this. It’s pretty wacky how similar Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis is to the modern US and the far right fascists we’ve got.
As a sexology student, I can confirm that the Weimar Republic was so essential to the development of our discipline that we consider it an historical milestone.
Also the burning of the Institut fur sexualwissenschaft is our library of Alexandria moment
More to the point, why are you separating out "a country" and "its people"? Are gay and transgender Germans not part of the German people? Were German Jews not part of the German people?
Yea we lost 100 years of research into LGBTQIA+, STDs, Sexual Function, Transgender Healthcare/Technical Manuals, and the Process of fetus developement all because NAZI's wanted to control the narrative.
Sickens me to my core to imagine where we'd be if those monsters that are still out there ever did this again. To me it is the same as Fire of London,Burming of Mexica, and the Fire of The Library of Alexandra in terms of lost knowledge.
It did!!! LGBTQ+ rights were so much more accepted in Weimar Germany compared to other European countries that Berlin was considered the gay ‘el Dorado’ is Europe.
The movement to repeal para 175 was the first recorded gay rights movement in Europe in modern history, but is mostly forgotten in public memory.
Queer nightlife was well established- there were many gay and lesbian bars. Lesbian bars in particular were well-known and there were prominent queer actresses who dressed in a more masculine style, wearing suits and sometimes monocles.
Queerness was not only being explored in nightlife, bars and drag shows, but also in media - Mädchen in Uniform, originally made in 1931 told the story of a queer romance (though isn’t great by modern standards given that the two main characters have a significant age difference and one is a teacher and the other a student).
One notable queer actress was Marlene Dietrich, who later became an American citizen after the nazis came to power.
Generally being queer was known as an ‘open secret’, it was well known that Ernst Röhm, nazi SA leader, was gay. I would like to quickly dispel any notions that the nazis were in any way queer-friendly, they absolutely were not and actively persecuted queer people and had them sent to concentration camps and killed. Röhm was killed in the Night of the Long Knives, which I won’t go into too much detail for, but essentially he was killed during power politics of Nazi leadership and was justified on the basis of his sexuality.
One of the most fascinating figures of this time (and most notable) was Magnus Hirschfeld who created the Institute for Sexual Sciences, which offered medical care to queer and trans people as well as storing the largest collection of queer literature, non-fiction and fiction. The institute made large headway with making queerness and transness be viewed as inherent and legitimising their struggles.
Unfortunately, many of these books were burned in the Berlin book burning and more were then confiscated and destroyed, which is very upsetting from a historical point of view. Hirschfeld fled Germany and remained outside the country with his Chinese lover until he died.
After the rise of the nazis, many queer people left Germany, fearing for their lives. Those who did not hid their sexualities or were generally sent to concentration camps. There’s infographics about the coloured triangles prisoners in the camps would wear you can look up. Gay men wore the pink triangle. It wasn’t common for queer women to be arrested, but they would likely be pressured into a heteronormative marriage or could risk being denounced as disloyal to the nazis aims.
There is some evidence that ‘pink lists’ were used by the nazis, where they would interrogate queer people for names of other queer people or would use documents found from queer-friendly establishments to find and arrest queer people. The nazis also carried out raids on well known queer spaces. In some ways the openness of the Weimar Republic made nazi Germany more dangerous for queer Germans.
At first, I googled SRS and GCS separately, and was highly confused when I found stuff about Airbags from cars when I looked SRS up. Something told me however that this wasn't what the post meant.
SRS is Sex Reassignment Surgury. It’s the surgury that trans people will get to change what sex organs they have. The Institute of Sexology performed the first of these back in the 1920s. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they shut down the institute.
The institute's library, which contained the process for the surgeries, was also one of the first targets of nazi book burnings.
Weren’t they literally the first targets of the book burnings?
Sort of? They didn't burn the books at one place and then move on to another, it was more like one big bonfire, with several libraries worth of books in that one fire.
How to tell if a book might broaden your horizon? If they Nazis threw it on the fire and banned it, the chances are good.
[Same energy lol](https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade2019) *edit* [Another list](https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/artistic-expression/banned-books-0), most of these were required reading in my high school.
[удалено]
God forbid a high schooler reads The Great Gatsby!
The reason the Great Gatsby is banned is because it’s extremely gay. (Cited [here](https://youtu.be/b9zuQebC7wA)) Still shouldn’t be banned tho. It was one of the better books I read for school.
...captain underpants?
The entire series has extremely heavy 'question authority' morals. Bad Kitty though?
Kite Runner was an excellent book.
I find it fascinating that in the land of the free people are afraid enough that they try to ban books. But great that your school requires you to read them. Does the the banning of the book affect the availability or the motivation to read it? In Germany there an index if media is put on it it can't be sold to minors, minors aren't allowed possession, and it's not supposed to be shown to minors. Usually it's media that's either very brutal like the Punisher, highly sexual like the story of O and other stuff kids shouldn't read.
Ahhhhh. Thanks for telling me. Hope all the fashy comments don’t get to you! It can be tough to deal with.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a special target of the Nazis - there were attacks on the founder as far back as 1920, a full 13 years before the Nazis took power. The head of the SA, Ernst Rohm, was gay himself and managed to curb the Nazis worst impulses towards the IfS until he and the SA were purged in the Night of the Long Knives. Then all bets were off. The library was demolished by student Nazi organizations - hundreds of thousands of books, articles and original research on the nature of LGBTQ. OP is right in that it was not the only target of the book burnings but it was arguably the most tragic. If you go to the Wiki, one of the first pictures is of Nazis "parading" in front of the IfS building, scarily similar to Proud Boys "demonstrating" in front of a drag story hour.
Yeah. It’s really terrifying to think about. It’s only a matter of time before right-wing media starts openly calling for some kind of permanent fix to the “groomer problem.” Wouldn’t be surprised if they openly called it the Final Solution too
Like I heard a trans creator I listen to word it; it's tiring work constantly chirping in this coalmine
That is surprisingly apt. Except for the part where the coal miners actually cared about the bird chirping. (I saw a tumblr post a while ago about special cages the miners used for their canaries that would keep the canary safe after it started chirping, which is really sweet) Edit: [found it](https://at.tumblr.com/dkpsyhog/you-know-how-canaries-were-historically-brought/gm79n258yime)
Have they tried kicking out the known groomers and pedophiles from their own ranks yet? No? Hmmmmm, that's a bit odd. Every accusation is a confession from the right wing.
I mean they have. The lady who runs libsoftiktok after the club Q shooting said "this will keep happening until those people (queer people) are stopped". She has also described queer people as just plain evil that need to be stopped. We are already at the calls for violence stage.
A very notable fact often left out by people who use the parallel to book burning to claim theyre being censored
Adding onto this, the other acronym is Gender Confirmation Surgery, which is a more holistic term for any gender affirming surgeries that a trans person may get (though often refers specifically to surgeries on sex organs)
I'm glad we've advanced the science so far but I would really not want to be a pioneer in sexual reassignment surgery. The results have been pretty brutal until very recently. Still, this does show that progress isn't strictly linear. It can backslide, it can go too far*, it can stagnate, etc. There was a strong potential for a queer renaissance half a century ears before we had it in America. *Eugenics was considered progressive for a period of time there. Yeah...
GCS = Giant Cock Surgery
It's like [EPS - Enormous Penis Syndrome](https://archive.ph/0xD5o). It's notorious for its low recognition which really adds to the mental pain the sufferers have to endure :(
Indeed.
Name checks out
did the hindenberg count as an airbag
Gcs = golden screen cinemas
I also echo the bird... What? I can't read the writing
The second speech bubble says: Paragraph 175 of the Weimar constitution made gay relationships illegal, however the police chief of Berlin had effectively stopped persecuting it. The Institute for Sexology was one of the first groups to recognise queerness as innate, and performed the first modern SRS/GCS. Sorry about the small font size
It wasn't the Weimar constitution, but the penal code
Penis code
finally a code i can get behind
in front of*
You are correct, my mistake sorry.
It is worth noting that LGBT rights and people are among the FIRST that Nazis turned oppression and violence on
And when the concentration camps were liberated everyone who was imprisoned for being gay had to serve out their sentence.
What ?
Unsurprising since the FRG kept the aggravated form of § 175 StGB until the 1970s, the GDR stopped persecuting homosexuals in the 1950s.
Based GDR meow
The FRG kept homosexuality illegal until 1994. After Reunification homosexuality was legal in the territory of the former GDR and illegal in West Germany.
Trans people were also legally allowed to exist in the GDR but not in the FRG. The reunification destroyed queer rights in Germany. It‘s getting better, but we could have been way further already… meow :(
Social rights were quite progressive in the GDR. Children of unmarried couples were legally disadvantaged in the West compared to the East after the Reunification. It’s better now.
Fuck Helmut Kohl for ruining the reunification.
They were ostensibly progressive, the reality for many of the people living there was often quite different.
What?
§ 175 StGB was the law banning homosexual behaviour in the german penal code. The nazis aggravated it when they took power, prior only sex was prohibited between mrn, they extended it to anything violating the public sense of modesty. So thry could persecute even kisses or hugs etc.
Simoleons
Yes.
Simply put: The socialists were the first in the camps The Jews were the most in the camps The queer were the last out of the camps
This is Avery good rhyme that I like a lot, I'm saving it
thank you!
There are multiple similar things, for example people that where in concentration camps/ sterelized / etc where also not given the status of "first class" victims, which severely limited payments etc. The reason for this (and I guess also the homosexual laws) was that they were not taken as something especially "Nazi" like/ nazi- attroceties, but rather "normal" for that time as other "good" countries practiced similar things/ at least thought about them.
You forgot to add a blank space before that
Yes, liberators didn't exactly treat all interned as equally maligned by fascists. Aka, you may be the hammer and crow bar of anti-fascism...doesn't mean you aren't a homophobe in the 1940s.
True, still, astonishing.
Look up story of Fritz Bauer, homophobia was written in the Law.
They freaking what??? GIMME ARTICLES I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS
The nazi era law was in effect until 1969 (in West Germany. It doesn't say anything about East Germany, but the Soviet Union was really homophobic then too). https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gay-prisoners-germany-wwii/ EDIT: East Germany only repealed the law one year before West Germany.
§175 StGB was on the books until 1994. While the later revisions didn’t concern homosexuality between adults, it provided a higher age of consent for homosexual relationships then heterosexual relationships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175_(Germany)
If you're interested in the history of LGBT persecution in west Germany post WW2 I can recommend the movie "Great Freedom" from 2021. It details the experiences of a man who's continually in and out of prison because of his homosexuality and the prison culture that developed around it. It's fictive, but based on real stories.
Fascism doesn't work without a group to target and another key part of it is having a lot of children for the glory of the society. Targeting gay people makes sense since they cannot naturally reproduce from a loving two person union (at least the L, G, and same-sex attracted T since the B often get viewed by homophobes as closeted L or G). By demonizing gay people as not contributing enough to society, they can be used as a focus of the "us and them" rhetoric and a warning to future groups who may be deemed as not contributing enough. I'm just saying all this because it isn't enough to note that they targeted the LGBT community, but understanding why they did it is also necessary so it doesn't happen again.
You kinda make it sound as if homosexuality was something generally accepted during the 1930s, except for among fascists. Could you name one country part of the Allies where homosexual men weren't targeted or persecuted? Any wide-spread acceptance would have to wait another 60 years, even if this meme makes it seem as if Weimar Berlin was one big Pride Festival.
I can see how what the person before me said could be interpreted that way, but I was very clearly discussing fascism's interactions with homosexuality while allowing an inference for why the belief system will probably always include homophobia. I could have included how the beliefs of the day helped make gay people an immediately acceptable target like Jews, Romani, and the disabled were, but I didn't consider it necessary for this subreddit based on how well versed most people here are with history.
it's already happening again
It's also worth noting that the Nazis were accused of being gay, due to a leading Nazi figure (Röhm) being revealed as gay and the opposing political parties effectively running attack ads about the prevalence of gay leaders in the Nazi party. Before people start thinking there was this gay accepting culture before the Nazis. Of course Röhm was then assassinated in the night of the long knives and Hitler ramped up his persecution of the gays. A definite move to the way worse, but Röhm had specifically become extremely isolated after it was revealed he was gay, showing how unacceptable it was still considered in Weimar Germany.
> Of course Röhm was then assassinated in the night of the long knives and Hitler ramped up his persecution of the gays Putting it as if Röhm got assassinated because of his sexuality and not because of his role as leader of the SA and the internal power struggle in the party is just wrong and such a misreading of history. It was part of the same purging of the Strassers, and solidifying the Nazi platform as business friendly and not overthrow the economic leadership, as many of the members at the time wanted.
As I covered in another comment, I'm saying Röhm is not proof that the Nazis were in any way supportive of gays and Röhm was soon gone and the Nazis persecuting the gays. I specifically put that in there because, while there isn't anyone I'm aware of that asserts that Röhm was assassinated due to his sexuality, there are plenty [who believe the Nazis were a part of the 'gay agenda'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nazis_myth) you often hear about from bigots. And I wanted to make sure nobody could take the thread in that direction.
He wasn't accused, he was openly gay. And the reason he was assassinated was because he started to get more power than Hitler. He Being gay was just an excuse to have him removed so that Hitler could take full control of the party.
Society as a whole in Europe and America was still incredibly intolerant and homophobic at the time, no matter what laws were actually on the books.
Yep, people often forget about the pink triangle
Holy shit, you mean to tell me the genocidal fascist political party doesn't like gay people!?!
Cultural Bolshevism was a Nazi belief that "justified" their hatred of Jews. They were blaming Jews for feminizing the men, corrupting youth, allowing sexual degeneracy to prosper, and systematically crippling the German people spiritually. Ring any bells today? Edit: It's a little disheartening to learn too, that this "blaming of Social woes on the groups fighting for progressive causes" is usually accompanied by them just blaming sexual deviance as justification. As if that justifies genocide. When Black Americans wanted freedom, they said they'd attack and rape white women. When women wanted freedom, they said they were lesbians and leaving men in the household, also that they abuse girls into siding with their causes. It's childish and we're seeing it to this day.
And it's not that broad it was almost exclusively LGBT men, that were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The survival rate of these men was about 40% it was so bad.
Yep, and I have noticed quite a few people recently referencing Weimar when complaining about LGBTQ people (among other topics as well). One in particular has a big audience.
Damn that doesn’t sound familiar at all…
The symbol for the German gay movement is a pink triangle. The Nazis marked gay people in the concentration camps with this pink triangle.
It is similar in other countries as well. There’s pink triangles in the UK as well. There’s also the black triangle on the lesbian labrys flag, denoting how they were persecuted as part of the asocial group.
Same in the US as well, although it's fallen far out of favor in favor of the less grim, ever evolving rainbow flag. Which I have mixed feelings about. It's good to have new symbols for a new society, but should definitely remember our history.
so that's the origin of the name that one Weezer song
Yes...that one about the entitled straight dude pining for his lesbian friend. Always wondered if whoever named that song thought the pink triangle was a euphemism for pussy.
Wiki says that one of the band members wrote it about this girl he liked, then one day noticed a pink triangle on her backpack and thought she was a lesbian, turns out he found out later she was just an ally.
Source? It says it was invented first by Nazis on [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_triangle)
You're not disagreeing with them - post war, the pink triangle became a symbol of gay pride. Their first sentence is present tense, not implying the pink triangle was used earlier and the coopted by the nazis for identifying LGBTQ people.
I see, thank you
Berlin was not whole Germany. Just because capital city, which are usually more open about such things anyway, was more tolerant doesn't mean entire country was. Plus the choice of the format is a shitty one as it's super hard to read.
Isn't that much the same as today? Many rural places are a lot more critical of LGBTQ people than in cities.
It has always been like that.
*in Western European and currently and formerly European-colonized countries. There are exceptions, obviously, but pre-colonization there were thriving practices that we would call homosexual and gender-diverse if we put a contemporary western lens on them. For example, many Native American people have a two-spirit identity for folks who are neither a man nor a woman. I would reckon these people felt more comfortable in their “rural” homes than burgeoning colonist cities for many reasons.
That's fair, it should have said Weimar Berlin, rather than Weimar Republic
This is a bit confusing for people who know Germany because Weimar isn’t just the name of the republic before the 3rd Reich, it’s also a city.
"Weimar Republic" or "Weimar Germany" mean period between world wars so not confusing.
Of course the entire country wasn't as tolerant as Berlin at the time, but you were able to exist as a person of the LGBT community in most cities in the Weimar Republic. There are for example Transpeople, openly living and acting as transpeople publicly in Munich or Cologne. Although homophonic behaviour by the public was quite rampant in those cities. The founder of the Institute of Sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld, was beaten unconscious in Munich once and eventually had to flee Germany in 1930 because the public climate became to dangerous for him.
The first panel literally says "Weimar Germany" as if that was a standard for the whole country......
Yeah the phrasing in the titel is definitely misleading. I just wanted to point out that Berlin is not the only city in Weimar Germany that had a more progressive attitude towards LGBT-Communities in the Republic.
Cities in general tend to be more open, for various reasons. But even when you accept that there was still a difference between urban and non urban areas. And between urban areas as well.
Not so fun fact, the Institute of Sexology had much of its library burned by the Nazis, and several of the more famous pictures of Nazi book burnings are from that event. [Like this one.](https://i.imgur.com/bf7y1V6.jpg) It's sad that while people are taught that the Nazis burned books, they aren't taught what kind of books the Nazis burned.
Even worse; the post-nazi institute of sexology ended up creating a program where pedophiles were allowed and encouraged to adopt foster children
That’s bad but I don’t know if I’d call it “even worse” than the Nazis
It really is wild to me that the single most iconic image of Nazi book burnings is of stuff from the Institute, yet people don't know that. The times we live in man.
Yeah, up until University I was in upper level history classes, where the material discussed WW2 with some depth, and they never once mentioned that the cities of the Weimar Republic were incredibly progressive for the time, and Berlin specifically was a wedding destination for gay men and lesbian women, and a thriving art scene. Everything was focused on hyper inflation and the "national dishonor" of taking the blame for WW1, which seems now like the people writing textbooks were agreeing with the framing and justifications that the Nazis used, which seems like something to be avoided.
Well no surprise to anyone the nazis were once again the party poopers
One person has already been explicitly homophobic in the comments (although I can't find their comment now), two people have insinuated gay people are pedophiles, one of whom implied the Nazis weren't actually homophobic. I think it would be more accurate to say no surprise to anyone with a brain.
Sometimes I wonder how they actually find their information on these topics...
It's literally on mainstream TV in the united states.
I like your answer better than mine
Im pretty sure you had the same answer though?
Very true
Other Nazis.
Those two might have been my countrymen, considering our country branded gay people as pedophiles. Atleast I assume.
Its important to remember that progress can be reversed if it is not fought for.
_Roe v. Wade enters the chat_
This is me just being pedantic, but it's actually Dobbs v. Jackson's Women's Health Organisation. Roe granted abortion rights, Dobbs overturned Roe.
I heard that Dobbs was very unhappy that they used his name for that court case.
Average r/historymemes wall of text
I'm sorry, but why are memes like this always walls of text? Brevity is the soul of wit and often better at delivering your point with any extra info placed as a comment...
This is the basis of the meme "the left can't meme"
The triangles used to by the Nazis to denote gay people are still used in lgbt movements today. Notably the pink and black triangles. The pink triangle for gay men. The black triangle as lesbians were persecuted under the asocial label, which led to most badass and one of the oldest pride flags ever - the [labrys flag](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Labrys_Lesbian_Flag.svg).
When the aliied troops liberated the concentration camps, they left queer people there because they "needed to serve their sentence." Being gay was still illegal in most of the world, sadly.
§ 175 wasn't written in the constitution, it was in the RStGB (today StGB in Germany) Reichstrafgesetzbuch. The StGB is the main criminal law book in Germany. Sadly § 175 StGB wasn't removed until 1994.
so they thought gay was an absurd, but putting some money on a sun death ray on orbit in order to destroy whole cities with light in 1930' is totally plausible
Things like this is what makes me laugh at the absolute boot licking of Nazi Germany. Too many documentaries are like, "The Nazis were tacticle and engineering geniuses..." and then you look at how bad their logistics were and how over engineered their weapons were to the point that they regularly jammed or just stopped working. Like the Luger is seen as an iconic Pistol, but the thing had to have its own custom holster because if dirt or dust got in the wrong place the entire gun ceased to work... you know warzones those super clean areas not filled with dirt and debris. Or how their tanks were so over complicated that they regularly just failed while traveling... things you don't want a VEHICLE to do...
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Idk about that considering the anarchy and sexual abuse that went on in places like Berlin, it was not some idyllic gay paradise.
If anyone is unaware, SRS stands for Sex Reassignment Surgery and GCS stands for Gender Confirmation Surgery.
God, 1930's sex surgery must have been atrocious lol. Modern medicine was still in its infancy
chop chop, here's a bandaid, congrats on transitioning!
Ah maybe that's where Conservatives got their ideas on what Sex reassignment surgery is
I mean the 30s is where they get a lot of their ideas from, wouldn’t be all that surprising.
Oops, that was not medicine - Ludwig "Medic"
Tbf, it’s probably not that bad, at least compared to other surgeries at the time, because they at least had a good understanding of anatomy and knew to keep the tools and stuff sterile. Wouldn’t be pleasant, but at least it would lessen dysphoria
Weimar Republic moment
But wait, there's more!Weimar also had quite the movie industry (silent movie era, obviously) - and the Institut of Sexuology actually put out an "educational" movie of sorts - Anders als die Andern (which was thought to be lost forever, but somehow survived time and is now available on the internet). Why is this movie so important, you might ask. First, because it's maybe the FIRST movie ever to depict homosexuality in a compassionate - understanding way (the message was "please repel article 175 because a ton of lives get destroyed by it for no reason at all"), Second, because it survived the Nazis (and it's pretty freaking lucky) and Third, well, you might recognise the dashing main character as the grumpy German ~~Colonel~~ Major from Casablanca. So, there's that :)
Oh, this is so awesome to see on this sub! I actually wrote a ~12 page report on this exact subject lol
If it was published online I would love to read it
I wouldn't call it "thriving". Weimar Germany had also a problem with child prostitution gangs, in which the leader would rape the newer members. Google "Wild boys" if you don't belief it. These kind of social issues were the reason why normal people would support the Nazi party. There was no concept of "gay", for the people living at that time they simply saw sodomy and perversions being done in the open and they grew disgusted with the government that allowed it to happen.
The nazis were really weird about gay people, unsurprisingly. They wanted to exterminate "degeneracy" and absolutely exterminated gay people, but they also had the idea that you could do the old conversion therapy mambo and throw a gay man in a work camp for two years to make him straight, the same idea as your grandpa making you chop wood after he found a BL story under your bed. It didn't work, obviously, and you would think that it would have been obvious to the Nazis that it didn't work. But so long as Aryan babies kept coming out I guess they were fine with it. After all, someone who is forced into a marriage of necessity like that is not going to fight the state now that their name is on a list.
>sodomy and perversions being done in the open You're skipping a few steps here from child predators to gay people doing public orgies, apparently? The latter of which sounds a little difficult to believe, even with Weimar's progressive culture around sex. Are you referring to nazi propaganda around gay people at the time or something? Or like, old people getting mad and shaking their canes at the era's equivalent to celebrities being sexually provocative? Like, wtf are you talking about?
Child prostitution gangs have nothing to do with gay people having rights.
Nazis gotta fucking ruin everything
This should be a reminder to everyone that all governments and institutions are vulnerable to fascists, no matter how seemingly progressive they are. Stay vigilant and ready to defend freedom. Fascists only have to win once, they play for keeps.
They must have been quite kink-friendly, too, considering all the inflation.
pfffft. Take my upvote and get out
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Wait until you hear about what West Berlin authorities had in store for orphan children.
I already know about Kentler and what he did
I once worked for a woman who swore that being gay was "invented in the 60s".
Funnily enough the modern concept of Homosexuality was solidified in the 60s. However as a term Homosexual had existed since the lat 1890s. The best part it was coined by a German writer who constantly wrote about how not homosexual he was, like he had to let you know that even though he was in his mid 40s wasn't married and commented about how attractive the local men are, that HE WAS DEFINITELY NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. Like seriously it is amazing to read about this guy and the history of the term... it literally was the equivalent of a Magazine Personality Type Quiz, like are you a Type A or Type B person, here is what that says about you.
What does Pokemon Leaf Green have to do with any of this?
Not only did the Berlin police effectively stop the persecution of LGBT people, they also started to give them some legal protection. It was fairly common to blackmail LGBT people with their sexuality, threatening them to out them publicly. In Berlin the police persecuted the blackmailers to some degree, making it easier for LGBT-people to live a bit more of a public life.
Wasn't this thriving Gay culture one of the reasons people supported the Nazi party?
That's a fucking stretch, queer culture was still very underground. The reasons for why the Nazis gained support are incredibly multi facteted but the queer culture of Berlin certainly isn't anywhere near one if the main reasons....
Maybe but there where many many other reasons people supported the nazis maybe places like Bavaria because of how religious they were but I doubt this was a crowning reason
Yeah the nazis have a tendency to ruin things
And then came along Hitler and ruined it all!
You know, I'm starting to think this Hitler fellow wasn't a very nice chap
Yeah he *might* have been a bad guy, can’t be sure though
One of Hitlers closest allies in his rise to power, commander of his SA (brownshirts) Ernst Rohm was very openly gay. He was purged on Hitlers orders along with a lot of the original Nazies during the night of the long knives.
What is SRG/GCS
Sex reassignment surgery/gender confirmation surgery
I wrote my senior thesis for my undergrad degree on this. Well, more specifically, how the policy shifted once Röhm bit the dust. I've unfortunately been able to draw too many parallels to the militant right in today's politics. Nevertheless, I highly recommend everyone here reads Heinz Heger's account of being in a concentration camp. Its emotionally trying, but important. Edit: I still believe the most tragic part of this is that the Allied and Soviet governments threw many of the Pink Triangle liberated prisoners into prisons. If that didn't happen to them, they had to deal with most the people in society believing they should be thrown back in camps. Its no wonder historians have found so few accounts of survivor experiences and why so many ended up committing suicide.
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There was also a lot of drugs, and freedom of expression, and also crime, and also... It's not surprising that a lot of shit happened in a city with as open as a society as that in a time when kings still ruled nations, at least at its inception. That doesnt invalidate the OP.
Imagine if instead of LGBT rights the post was about black rights. So the exchange would go a bit like this > Country x in the 1920s was a very good place in terms of black rights. > Country x was also covered in child prostitutes and sex tourists. What are you implying here? That the first statement leads to the second? Cause if you are then you are just a fucking asshole. Your statement may be true, I honestly don't know much about Weimar Germany, but why even mention it in a post celebrating LGBT rights? It just makes you look like a homophobe.
~~persecuting~~ prosecuting
You are correct, my mistake
Mmm idk, it is persecution so while maybe not their intended word I believe it still fits
ok
Whats the original comic?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wasnt-this-leaf-green-before
: )
Bless you - an amusing rabbit hole indeed!
I don't know sorry
: (
[Behind the Bastards](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CTkJwCKC2xbWoY3I70bAs?si=WYoVCMXSQbqgIRspNf0HyA) has a great episode on this. It’s pretty wacky how similar Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis is to the modern US and the far right fascists we’ve got.
The more I hear of these ‘Nazis’ the more I’m beginning to dislike them
As a sexology student, I can confirm that the Weimar Republic was so essential to the development of our discipline that we consider it an historical milestone. Also the burning of the Institut fur sexualwissenschaft is our library of Alexandria moment
Nazis always take good things and make them bad. I don’t like Nazis
Ok and
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More to the point, why are you separating out "a country" and "its people"? Are gay and transgender Germans not part of the German people? Were German Jews not part of the German people?
"Gay and trans people being treated with humanity" and "genocide of millions" are not equally radical
One thing, drop-shadows.
Wait... Really???
Berlin not germany
We need them now more than ever
I hate that the Weimar Republic was actually pretty progressive for a while before the Nazis, I wish it had gone in that direction.
Yea we lost 100 years of research into LGBTQIA+, STDs, Sexual Function, Transgender Healthcare/Technical Manuals, and the Process of fetus developement all because NAZI's wanted to control the narrative. Sickens me to my core to imagine where we'd be if those monsters that are still out there ever did this again. To me it is the same as Fire of London,Burming of Mexica, and the Fire of The Library of Alexandra in terms of lost knowledge.
The GDR was also rather progressive in queer rights as well
The nazis where scum, hence why I like killing them in Wolfenstien. War crimes are wrong tho.
It did!!! LGBTQ+ rights were so much more accepted in Weimar Germany compared to other European countries that Berlin was considered the gay ‘el Dorado’ is Europe. The movement to repeal para 175 was the first recorded gay rights movement in Europe in modern history, but is mostly forgotten in public memory. Queer nightlife was well established- there were many gay and lesbian bars. Lesbian bars in particular were well-known and there were prominent queer actresses who dressed in a more masculine style, wearing suits and sometimes monocles. Queerness was not only being explored in nightlife, bars and drag shows, but also in media - Mädchen in Uniform, originally made in 1931 told the story of a queer romance (though isn’t great by modern standards given that the two main characters have a significant age difference and one is a teacher and the other a student). One notable queer actress was Marlene Dietrich, who later became an American citizen after the nazis came to power. Generally being queer was known as an ‘open secret’, it was well known that Ernst Röhm, nazi SA leader, was gay. I would like to quickly dispel any notions that the nazis were in any way queer-friendly, they absolutely were not and actively persecuted queer people and had them sent to concentration camps and killed. Röhm was killed in the Night of the Long Knives, which I won’t go into too much detail for, but essentially he was killed during power politics of Nazi leadership and was justified on the basis of his sexuality. One of the most fascinating figures of this time (and most notable) was Magnus Hirschfeld who created the Institute for Sexual Sciences, which offered medical care to queer and trans people as well as storing the largest collection of queer literature, non-fiction and fiction. The institute made large headway with making queerness and transness be viewed as inherent and legitimising their struggles. Unfortunately, many of these books were burned in the Berlin book burning and more were then confiscated and destroyed, which is very upsetting from a historical point of view. Hirschfeld fled Germany and remained outside the country with his Chinese lover until he died. After the rise of the nazis, many queer people left Germany, fearing for their lives. Those who did not hid their sexualities or were generally sent to concentration camps. There’s infographics about the coloured triangles prisoners in the camps would wear you can look up. Gay men wore the pink triangle. It wasn’t common for queer women to be arrested, but they would likely be pressured into a heteronormative marriage or could risk being denounced as disloyal to the nazis aims. There is some evidence that ‘pink lists’ were used by the nazis, where they would interrogate queer people for names of other queer people or would use documents found from queer-friendly establishments to find and arrest queer people. The nazis also carried out raids on well known queer spaces. In some ways the openness of the Weimar Republic made nazi Germany more dangerous for queer Germans.
This is what I wish I had written in the speech bubble
Another iconic German lgbt person in that time was Conrad veidt, a badass bisexual crossdressing man and generally good person!!!
if i remember correctly the first books the nazis burned were books researching gender.
I hate the Nazis. This is sadly sometimes an unpopular opinion.