Abstract
Weimar Berlin is considered a past haven of queer possibility, but for trans people its permissiveness had clear limits. A close reading of the life of trans woman Gerd R. undermines a simple idealization of Weimar Berlin and addresses continuities and breaks between the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.
How the Nazi state policed trans people is yet to be acknowledged by historians. Thus far, trans people have been subsumed into histories of queer persecution. Yet, if they had ‘Aryan’ racial status and were not considered homosexual, some trans people could avoid the worst of Nazi violence. If they had significant utilitarian value in their ability to perform skilled work, they could even be considered for rehabilitation into the Volksgemeinschaft. R.’s treatment therefore demonstrates the heterogeneous nature of Nazi policy and persecution in practice. Her contradictory and complex position within the Nazi societal matrix serves to undermine the coherence of the racial state paradigm and reasserts the vagueness and malleability of the Volksgemeinschaft model. This microhistorical analysis offers a new perspective on gender and sexuality in Weimar and Third Reich historiography, and foregrounds unexpected ways that trans liminality highlights incoherencies in Nazi state practice.
On the morning of 11 July 1938, Frau Meissner walked out of the front door of 29 Liegnitzstraße, Berlin, to the communal street bins to empty her rubbish. As she raised the bin lid, she stepped back in shock to find a head, covered in ash and debris. She thought she had found a corpse. Disturbed by the intrusion, the dirt-clad body rose out of the bin, emerging fully naked. Frau Meissner now recognized the person to be Gerd R., her neighbour. R. began babbling that she had recently lost her wife and was ‘perverted’, imploring Frau Meissner not to go to the police.1 Frau Meissner retorted that R.’s behaviour was disgraceful, ordering her to go back inside. As Frau Meissner returned to her own flat, she found Fräulein Fuhrmann standing in the doorway. Having seen the whole thing, Fräulein Fuhrmann urged Frau Meissner to alert the police; this was not the first time she had witnessed R.’s soiled and naked body emerging from the communal bins in the early hours of the morning.2 This was an issue of public indecency, a ‘threat to the peace of the Volksgemeinschaft’ (people’s community) and only one peculiarity in a string of non-conformist behaviours from R.3
This vignette may seem bizarre, but it offers a way into the historical and historiographical issues at stake in understanding R.’s life in Nazi Germany. It introduces some of the ways in which continuities and breaks between the Weimar and Nazi eras played into R.’s gendered and sexual selfhood, the heterogeneous persecution she faced, and the surprising ways that trans lives complicate our historical analyses of the Volksgemeinschaft.
Trans history is still largely viewed as an ultra-modern, post-1945 phenomenon, as well as being of marginal interest and value.4 But even if we take a (problematic) medicalized and social-constructionist view of transness, its European existence has a history of over a hundred years.5 This article details early and important developments in that history, and contends with the idea that trans history is of only marginal or specialist interest to historians. Trans lives snag at the uneven edges of social orders, making visible the workings of supposed ‘normative’ and ‘logical’ binaries in cultural, biological and political mechanisms.6 In the context of modern Europe, most histories benefit from critical engagement with how states govern biopolitical, epistemological and ontological systems — although few regimes were as obsessed with these systems as the Nazis.7 Yet, despite the exhaustive body of cultural and social histories on the Third Reich, we still lack a trans analysis.8 Starting with how trans people navigated the preceding Weimar era before focusing on the Third Reich, this article speaks to key debates surrounding the polycratic nature of Nazi dictatorship, the racial state paradigm and its heterogeneous persecution practices, while complicating the binaries of inclusion/exclusion in the Volksgemeinschaft and life/death under National Socialism.
The Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democratic government from 1919 to 1933, saw the formation of a nascent, state-recognized trans identity constructed through medical, legal and cultural mediums.9 The famous ‘Golden Years’ of 1920s Berlin birthed the world’s first trans magazine (Das 3. Geschlecht) in addition to a slew of widely circulated queer print media, and drew international crowds to Berlin’s queer nightlife, especially its transvestite cabaret clubs such as the El Dorado.10 These years saw the proliferation of the Transvestitenschein (transvestite certification) and legal name changes, forms of state-legitimated trans recognition. Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) opened in 1919, offering, among other sexual health services, some of the world’s first medical transitions.11
When the Nazis took power in 1933, most of this infrastructure was destroyed. Hirschfeld’s Institute was attacked by Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) and students as a first port of call in May 1933. Its facilities, archive and library — ‘the first LGBTIQ archive’ — were smashed and burned.12 Hirschfeld himself was already in exile, and many of the staff at the Institute had to either flee or offer their services in other ways to be of use in the Third Reich.
For many years, it was presumed that along with the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute, all source material pertaining to trans existence also disappeared. This partially explains why there are so few histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany that comprehensively address trans people. Stories of trans persecution crop up in histories of homosexual persecution under the Nazis, but these position trans subjects as gay men (an example of how gender variance is so often historically subsumed into sexual variance).13 In the words of the historian Rainer Herrn, ‘there are no systematic studies dealing with [transvestites] and of continuities and breaks from the Weimar to the Nazi era’.14 Yet in fact, there is a vast quantity of source material concerning trans people such as R. (and many others) after 1933 that evidences the possibility of writing such histories.
R. alone is the subject of over four hundred pages of documented evidence from 1938–43: three lengthy police files with letters and personal statements, and an entire medical file including a transcript of a therapy session, along with her birth, death and marriage certificates. Because this research draws on ‘official’ records, it pulls from their pages a consciously mediated picture of what can be gleaned from this source base. But it also dismisses the idealization of ‘truly’ subjective sources as the evidence of experience, which require equal critical engagement as these official sources (themselves in no way unbiased or of a higher register).15 Instead of shying away from the medico-legal discourse, I engage with it ‘to make sense of and challenge scientific and medical authority’, following Jules Gill-Peterson’s lead in ‘reading trans people as complex participants in the production of scientific knowledge’.16 This work therefore contributes to a critical return in trans histories to the clinic and to the dialogic nature of identity formation, as well as an unparalleled record of how trans existence was policed in the Third Reich — while at the same time managing to be spared the worst violence of the regime.
This article also addresses the question of continuities and breaks between the Weimar and Nazi regimes: a common comparison in more traditional histories, but here considered from a trans perspective and through the lens of microhistory. It feels intuitive to read R.’s life, and therefore other trans lives, as fated to misery and death after a golden era of queer tolerance during the Weimar years. However, as Laura Doan powerfully reminds us, historians — especially of queer pasts — must acknowledge ‘the vast domain of historical unknowability’, and instead ‘look through’ the archive to find what remains unknown, reading the past on its own terms.17 The story this article tells challenges the temptation ‘to imagine a lost golden age of acceptance followed by rigid discrimination’ when analysing the Weimar and the Nazi eras together through the lens of queer, but specifically trans, history.18 Popular historical narratives have imbued this temporal moment with a romantic narrative arc that understands Weimar Berlin as having forged a tolerant haven for queerness prior to the tragedy unleashed by Nazism.19 As Anna Clark has posited, the ambiguous implications of ‘toleration’ towards stigmatized sexual acts and identities in past eras can lead to such rosy conclusions.20 This article seeks to avoid such readings, and to remove the weight of political expectation that histories of sexuality and gender so often place on their historical subjects.21 It does this not only by examining state interaction with R., but also by incorporating a more relational reading of R.’s life that sees human relationships, Alltagsgeschichte, emotional experiences and personhood as key to the study of gender and the past.22 In short, it accepts that, both in history and the present, ‘ordinary [trans] life fails to measure up to the political analyses we thrust upon it’.23 In doing so, it blurs the sharp break between the Weimar and Nazi eras, complicating the narrative of a queer haven followed by rigid persecution.
Historians of sexuality have been especially occupied with the concept of persecution in relation to the Nazi state: nuancing the relationship between direct persecutory legislation in the form of the sharpening of the long-standing §175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalized sex between men, and more heterogeneous forms of persecution towards lesbians. Notably, Laurie Marhoefer has adopted the notion of ‘risk’ in relation to gender non-conformity and safety in the Nazi state.24 My research builds on these studies of queer persecution in the Third Reich, but introduces the nebulous quality of trans liminality, a state ‘betwixt and between’ established categories, to understand how R. fared under National Socialism.25 It argues that trans victimization was in no way uniform and was interwoven in a complex persecution system where categories of race and disability trumped so-called sexual and gender abnormality.
R. occupied a liminal position both within the Nazi persecution system and in the Nazi vision of a social utopia: first because she was ‘Aryan’, second because she was not homosexual (by law), and last (but certainly not least) because of her ability to perform skilled work. If R. had been ‘non-Aryan’, that is ‘non-German’, Jewish or otherwise considered racially inferior, she would have been denied the right to life before any acknowledgement of her gender identity was made. Race is central to understanding inclusion and exclusion from the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, and must be applied to histories focusing on sexuality and gender in the Nazi period. However, my work contributes to a recent shift in historiographical thinking that aims not to undermine the role of race in Nazi violence and murder, but instead to argue for ‘just how multifaceted, complex and elusive’ the relationship between ‘race’, the state and Nazism was, as well as how Nazi ideology and practice often diverged.26
While the Nazis borrowed and contorted previous understandings of trans existence, their conceptualization enmeshed sexual and gender difference, making cases where homosexuality was not present confounding. Without a coherent scientific or legal framework for transness, the Nazi state instead assessed R. with their other main measurement of social worth: the ability to perform work.27 Combined, these factors assigned R. the right to life under Nazism, even the possibility to be rehabilitated into the Volksgemeinschaft. However, as will become clear, while R. was granted bare life because she met certain criteria, her life was nevertheless made unliveable. Her death was tragic, and R. deserves to be recognized as a victim of National Socialism. Nevertheless, her contradictory and complex position within the Nazi persecution and social matrix serves to undermine the coherence of the racial state paradigm and reasserts the vagueness and malleability of the Volksgemeinschaft model.28
R.’s story is told as a journey in four parts. The first explores R.’s life and the limited permissiveness for trans people during the Weimar years. The second looks at how this life disintegrated in the course of the Nazi takeover and the heterogeneous persecution R. faced. The third explores R.’s liminal position after she was placed in a psychiatric institute, as well as how she was considered worthy of rehabilitation into the Volksgemeinschaft. The final part explores how the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei, criminal police) reframed R. as a sexual pervert in death. This microhistorical analysis offers a new perspective on gender and sexuality in Weimar and Third Reich historiography, and foregrounds unexpected ways that trans liminality highlights incoherencies in Nazi state practice.
I Crossing
Born as Walter R. on 17 September 1903 in Berlin, R. was granted a Transvestitenschein (transvestite certificate) in 1926 and had her first name changed to Gerd in 1928. In the context of Weimar Berlin, this was not unusual. Doctors in the Weimar Republic applying for the legal gender transition of their transvestite patients routinely utilized two pieces of legal apparatus. The first was the Transvestitenschein, which Dr Magnus Hirschfeld had lobbied for since the early 1900s, alongside his push to repeal the criminalization of sex between men under §175 of the German Criminal Code.29 Under the same code, people caught ‘cross-dressing’ could be imprisoned or fined for ‘gross mischief’ and ‘public nuisance’ (§360/11 and §183, respectively). The Transvestitenschein therefore acted as official recognition that the person carrying it was known to the police to wear men’s or women’s clothing, granting them safe passage. While the Transvestitenschein seems to have existed from 1908 onwards, it was issued with greater frequency during the Weimar period.30Transvestitscheinen were administered at local police level, but were issued only to people who had been assessed by a medical professional such as Hirschfeld.31 While unparalleled in Europe at the time, the Transvestitenschein also solidified the first part of a ‘double dependency’ system — dependent on both legal and medical determination — for trans people seeking to transition.32
To receive a Transvestitenschein, one had to be diagnosed to be within the capacious category of the ‘transvestite’.33 This medical dependency had its roots in the narrative model of the sexological case study, wherein sexually- and gender-variant people who articulated lifelong trans identification (often detailing affinity since childhood with the sex they were not assigned at birth) were documented through medical histories, which formed the basis for nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexological taxonomies.34 Many of these resulting sexological categories were porous, containing within them a multitude of phenomena that are distinct in today’s lexicon. Categories like ‘sexual invert’, ‘third sex’, ‘transvestite’ and even ‘homosexual’ often referred to a spectrum of queer and trans people as well as ‘hermaphrodites’, whom we today would consider to be intersex or to have differences of sex development (DSD).35
In keeping with other contemporary sexological thought, Hirschfeld’s earlier work conflated gender- and sexually variant people as part of a ‘third sex’ (drittes Geschlecht), before developing his theory of ‘sexual intermediaries’ (sexuelle Zwischenstufen).36 In 1910 he published Die Transvestiten, which began untangling gender from sexual orientation.37 However, Hirschfeld’s articulation of transvestism contained within it a plethora of behaviours, experiences and identities, making the historical term ‘transvestite’ similar to today’s use of trans* (with an asterisk, to symbolize diverse possibilities).38 It was not until 1923 that Hirschfeld began separating out his categories even further, this time with Transsexualismus as an ‘extreme’ subset of transvestism.39 Despite this new category describing more accurately many of his patients who wished to obtain a Transvestitenschein, the term ‘transsexual’ did not catch on until after the Second World War, in the United States.40 What remained consistent in legal, medical and even social understandings of gender variance in the inter-war period was the tendency to ground the transvestite category in autobiographical case histories, following the format of medical history as diagnosis.41
Along with the Transvestitscheinen, by the 1920s trans people could apply for a change in first name.42 Arguing that it would promote mental and physical equilibrium in their patients, lawyers and doctors targeted a clause that stated that gender-neutral name changes would be considered on a case-by-case basis. R.’s own name change application whereabouts are unknown; however, another application for a name change to the local district court of Berlin-Mitte in 1928–9 lays out the particulars of this legal loophole:
A decree of the Minister of Justice granting general authorisation to persons of doubtful sex does not exist. According to §2 of the general decree of 21 April 1920 (J.M.Bl.166), the Minister of Justice reserves the right to decide on applications of this kind and makes the approval of the application dependent on the choice of a neutral first name, the suitability of which is decided by the Minister of Justice in each individual case. After he had received several applications from persons with, for example, a female internal sex, but a male external sex with the application to use a male first name, the Minister of Justice took the view that in principle he would have to refuse to make a decision on the basis of medical reports as to whether a person of doubtful sex should be addressed predominantly as a man or predominantly as a woman. However, he has already declared that if the external progress of such persons requires it in individual cases, he will authorise them to use a neutral first name which can designate both their male and female person. (Theo, Alex, Toni, Gerd and others).43
The above statement from the Minister of Justice clearly demonstrates that he did not wish to grant legal transitions that would identify trans people ‘predominantly’ as a man or a woman: that is, in binary terms. This did not follow the dominant medical opinion, unlike the Transvestitenschein. A report accompanying the 1928–9 name change petition from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld and Dr Felix Abraham asserted that a name change would establish ‘mental equilibrium’ for their patient. Said patient presented a case of ‘psychic hermaphrodism’, where the patient felt ‘himself [sic] to be a woman to such an extent, [that] he now also wants to possess the outward signs of his femininity, namely the feminine name, in order to enjoy all the rights of a woman and to assume her duties’.44 A change to the chosen feminine name (or a gender-neutral alternative) would provide not only mental well-being for their patient, but also social assimilation. Medical purview was therefore not absolute in cases of ‘doubtful sex’ in the Weimar era, but it did create a system in dialogue with, and yielding to, the judiciary that ultimately determined access to legal transition. This legal preference for gender-neutral name changes constituted the second dependency on medico-legal determination.
R. was assessed through the same sexological process to access both the Transvestitenschein and a name change. It should be noted that in the context of this article, the medical aspects of R.’s transition refer to her diagnosis of ‘psychic hermaphrodism’/transvestism, which subsequently gave access to social transition and assimilation. Gender reassignment surgeries were performed by Hirschfeld’s team under the aegis of the Institute, but these were experimental and rare, whereas accessing name changes and Transvestitenscheinen post diagnosis was the most common form of transition.45 There is no suggestion that R. underwent any surgical interventions in either the Weimar or Nazi years. Despite differences in medical personnel, there remained an eerily consistent trans autobiographical arc that followed the case-study convention in the medical and legal files on R. in the Nazi period.46 A synthesis of patient self-understanding (through the sexological case-study convention) and a continuation of methods borrowed from Weimar-era practitioners by doctors during the Third Reich likely explains this phenomenon.
Harry Oosterhuis has argued for the ‘dialogical’ nature of sexological case histories, where aspects of the patient’s subjectivity come to the fore in the dialogue between practitioner and patient.47 While the conditions under which R.’s life story and emotions were brought into dialogue must be held in mind, the striking frankness in the sources on R. post-1938 show a continuation of this dialogical practice. As will become clear, this is in part due to the liminality she embodied, as an ‘Aryan’, ‘heterosexual’ transvestite (in the eyes of the law), who was nonetheless a sexual freak. Indeed, R.’s narrative, and what we can learn from its intersecting authors — the subject, the medical practitioner, the law and its enforcement — demonstrates the value of micro-scale histories, for ‘however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness’.48 R.’s case therefore serves to ‘reveal factors previously unobserved’.49 What follows regrettably replicates an (abbreviated) version of the trans biography convention. However, it is also thanks to this practice that we have such detailed evidence of R.’s life across the Weimar and Nazi eras.
From a young age, R. had been drawn to women’s clothing and more typically feminine pastimes, thriving in her handiwork classes and playing with her sisters’ dolls.50 Once she reached puberty, she complained about having chest pains (Brustschmerzen). R.’s mother denied there was anything wrong or abnormal about this, but R.’s doctor prescribed an ointment for the pain. While this ailment had no clear explanation, these incidents all amounted to a certain affinity with the experience of girlhood for R. Once she reached adulthood, people often mistook her for a girl in men’s clothing, or thought she was homosexual. She was often catcalled in the street as a ‘175er’ (referring to §175, a derogatory way of referring to homosexual men), or called ‘sissy’ at work.51 This discriminatory conflation of gender and sexual variance demonstrates the historical interpretive problems of separating out trans from queer experiences.
Although highly skilled, R. was fired from her job as a draughtsman in 1923 because her co-workers were certain she was a ‘woman wearing men’s clothing’. Visible gender non-conformity was still met with prejudice in Weimar Berlin. From then on, she wore women’s clothing in public — not only for her own gender affirmation, but also to create safety in her passable femininity. However, because her Transvestitenschein was not granted until 1926, and with her name change held up in the legal system until 1928, she had to be careful about how she expressed her gender in public and professional spaces. During these five years R. was unable to find work other than with a trapeze act. Bureaucracy and exclusive medical purview stalled the process of legal transition for R. and others, speaking to the demand in Weimar society for such legal protections and to the frustrations and dangers of this double dependency. It was only after 1928 that R. could safely return to her profession as a draughtswoman (Zeichnerin).52
R.’s decision to transition brought some relief from social stigma, but it also collapsed the stability of her home life: R.’s parents kicked her out of their home in 1923. R. had an especially complicated and volatile relationship with her mother, Alice, who continued to try to destabilize her child’s life even after disowning her. R. said that whenever she lost a job, ‘I knew my mother was behind it, I found out later by asking her why I was fired, but she blamed it on someone else and said it was my fault’.53 Throughout the source material it becomes clear that R.’s mother had a significant impact on her sense of worth and happiness. R. was not supported by her parents as a gender non-conforming person, and the anguish and anger from this rejection followed R. throughout her life.
Consequently, R. lived an untethered life in the 1920s, moving around with the trapeze act and potentially staying at Hirschfeld’s Institute. Hirschfeld’s trans patients are known to have lived and worked at the Institute, finding it difficult to find acceptance and paid work elsewhere.54 Since R. faced similar challenges, it is possible she also spent time there. By 1929, R. was staying in a homeless shelter in Berlin, where she met Gertrud Martha G., the woman who was to become her wife. Prior to meeting Gertrud, R.’s sexual relations with others had remained unexplored. While by the age of thirteen she had developed an obsession with masturbation, she claimed that she never fantasized about anybody, feminine or masculine. It was through meeting Gertrud that R. first realized she was sexually inclined towards women, though that attraction may have had more to do with the sexual dynamic between the two of them.
R. and Gertrud married on 23 February 1929, and they had twin boys in the same year. R. ‘had never actually wanted to marry’, but because she and Gertrud were expecting children, marriage provided social security ‘so that they would not become illegitimate’.55 R. wore a dress and was married under the name Gerd, not Walter. While she was not necessarily seen as a woman in the eyes of the law, she was able to marry as a transvestite, wearing women’s clothing and using a gender-neutral name.56
While R. and Gertrud’s relationship contained normative elements, it functioned best when it took on an unorthodox dynamic. To understand the impact this dynamic had on R.’s subsequent behaviour, it is necessary to go into some detail about their sexual relations. They would have ‘normal intercourse’ where R. ‘played the man’s role’, but this provided her with little sexual release. Instead, they developed a sadomasochistic sexual relationship, in which Gertrud would tie R. up, often leaving her constricted the entire night. Sometimes R. also liked her whole body to be paddled whilst being bound. R. gained greater sexual satisfaction from this than ‘normal’ intercourse and would be able to reach climax without being touched. R. described herself as ‘a masochist since the time of my sexual maturity. To find any mental balance at all, I feel the need to be laced up’ (schnüren). When she had ‘normal’ sexual intercourse, this would not satisfy nor ‘mentally balance’ R., and she described how, after a few days, ‘a nervousness set in, and I had the desire to be tortured’ as a means of achieving mental equilibrium.57 R. had been experimenting with tying herself up since she was 21, improvising with common household items in order to find a source of sexual pleasure and release that did not involve masturbation. This masochistic drive came to fruition in her marriage, with Gertrud equally enjoying their role-play.
This dynamic eventually developed beyond the confines of the bedroom. One day when R. went to put out the rubbish, Gertrud suggested R. should be put in the bin, saying ‘You are dirt — I’m going to put you in the rubbish bin’ (bist ja selber Dreck, werde dich in Müllkasten werfen [emphasis mine]). Once it got dark outside, they both went out to the communal bins, where R. climbed in and Gertrud threw dirt and rubbish on her, telling her that this was where she belonged. R. stayed this way until the early hours, when she snuck back into the house. This experience made R. feel (pleasantly) like Gertrud’s ‘slave’ (Sklavin — the ‘in suffix denotes the feminine ending). R. did not speak about how the married pair together understood their sexuality, but she did refer to herself as a ‘masochist’, itself a sexological category. Alongside sexual and gender variance, sexologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pathologized sexual practices that became clinically known as ‘sadomasochism’.58 Hirschfeld’s 1910 study of transvestites found that masochism functioned in ‘no way as the original motive of the drive to cross-dress’, but that ‘in the case of our transvestites, almost all characteristics, which impress us at first as being masochistic, easily lead back to the wish for effeminisation’.59 While Hirschfeld’s earlier study would not have included data from R., she may have had discussions with Hirschfeld about her sexual preferences. We could read R.’s submission to her wife as a potential extension of her feminine gender, in a flat reading of sexuality mapping onto gender — but she also practised so-called masochism by herself, as part of her sexual exploration from puberty. Following Anna Clark’s call to understand sexuality as not simply constituted through acts and identities, but also to include ‘desire’, we can formulate that R. found a sexual compatibility with Gertrud, more complex than a singular identity, that fitted with R.’s sexual preferences since puberty.60
The two retained their new couple’s ritual for years, repeating the bin scenario under cover of darkness, always making sure not to be discovered. This was until their marriage began to disintegrate, which coincided with the moment in 1936 when R. was forced by the Gestapo to stop living as a woman. We know little about this incident, other than that R. had her hair forcibly shortened and her name change rescinded. From that moment, Gertrud refused to have sex with R. and would seek out that pleasure from men, with R.’s knowledge. For the last year of their marriage, they were not sexually involved with each other, and the bin ritual was the only intimate activity they still shared as a couple. The significance of their ritual had shifted away from desire, solidifying into a set of rigid roles and becoming a routine that did not require sexual pleasure. By 1938, the ritual had taken on a distinctly different tone by comparison to its origins.
The disintegration of the couple’s sexual intimacy signalled the end of their marriage. On 27 May 1937, R. was interned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp under protective custody. On 5 February 1938, R. and Gertrud were divorced. R. was released from Sachsenhausen six weeks later, on 22 March 1938, and by October that year Gertrud had remarried.61
R. believed that Gertrud was the one to denounce her to the Gestapo, a deep betrayal that had landed her in Sachsenhausen.62 According to R., Gertrud told the Gestapo that she knew nothing of R.’s gender non-conformity, claiming a narrative of ‘deceit’ that would have been familiar to the authorities.63 Up until this point in history, gender-crossing behaviours were often linked to espionage and theft. Claiming deceit would protect Gertrud from accusations of adultery and would legitimize her divorce and re-marriage.64 Gertrud’s actions are less shocking when contextualized within the climate of fear in Nazi Germany, in which wider society functioned as an unofficial branch of the Gestapo, with neighbours and even loved ones denouncing those who did not belong in the Volksgemeinschaft.65 Gender non-conformity constituted a heightened ‘risk’ category in terms of drawing negative attention to visible queerness, and the practice of alerting gender non-conforming people to the police in Nazi Germany was common, even within queer circles.66
However, before 1936, Gertrud had accepted R.’s gender identity. She had fallen in love with R. as a woman, and told R. countless times, ‘I like you best in the little red dress’.67 The dynamic of their marriage hinged in part on R.’s legal ability to live as a woman. When that gender stability came into flux, it had a ricocheting effect on their partnership.
While interned in Sachsenhausen, R. continued to experience betrayal. Her mother, Alice, wrote letters to the Youth Welfare Office, who took R.’s children away from her. While her mother ‘did not care’ for the children emotionally, she gained custody of them when the state deemed both R. and her wife incapable of looking after them. Alice also cleared out all items from R.’s flat, removing her economic security and, according to R., pushing R. to ‘lose interest in life’.68 R. would later reflect on ‘what moves the woman to want to get rid of me’, because Alice ‘continued to work against’ R. after 1936.69
Despite her forced de-transition, R.’s mother continued to spurn her — the sharp break between the Weimar and Nazi eras blurred by the continuity in familial rejection. There is no downplaying the crushing reality of the post-1933 world. But for R. the significant watershed was 1936. The greatest losses were her gender and her closest relationships. Released from Sachsenhausen in March 1938, R. was now childless and partnerless. Yet she did not attempt to avoid repeat offences or reinternment after her stay at Sachsenhausen. As will become clear, R. suffered over the course of the ensuing years, but her life cannot be captured with the simple juxtaposition of a queer haven destroyed by the unyielding brutality of Nazi violence.
II Detainment
I invite the reader to cast their mind back to the vignette that opened this article. R. had been out of Sachsenhausen for three and a half months when Frau Meissner found her in the communal rubbish bin on 11 July 1938. Re-enacting the humiliation of being consigned to the bin, but without Gertrud, she perpetuated the ritual from her marriage, but with key differences. First, this activity was no longer shared: while there had already been a shift in the ritual’s significance while R. and Gertrud had been married, once R. was alone, it said more about R.’s relationship with herself than it did about her relationship with her former wife. Second, it was done without caution. R. would often enter the bin intoxicated and was caught on multiple occasions. Her masochism had never been a result of low self-worth. Nevertheless, there was a complex interplay between R.’s sense of self and her sexuality. The bin ritual had morphed into a compulsive action of distress, which in turn led directly to R.’s heterogeneous persecution over the following years.
After being caught by Frau Meissner, R. was brought to court for public indecency.70 On 15 July 1938, R. was detained and tried at the Berlin district court. She was found guilty of public indecency and was charged with two years’ imprisonment with hard labour before being transferred to Berlin-Tegel prison on 25 November. Over the following two years, she was transferred to the Amberg prison in the Upper Palatinate, and the Straubing prison and Nuremberg prison in Bavaria. Her final transfer was to the St Georgen prison and work camp in Bayreuth, from which she was released on 21 September 1940. It would have been reasonable to assume that these internments would have acted as deterrents to R.’s non-conformist behaviour.71 However, within a year of release, she was in trouble with the law again for the same offence.
On 27 August 1941, R. was charged with two cases of public indecency. She was seen exposing herself in the early hours outside her new flat in the Hagelbergerstraße, emerging naked — barring a washcloth wrapped around her head and rubbish debris clinging to her body — from the communal bins. It was the neighbours’ second sighting of R. in the bins in a matter of months.72 This was almost an exact replica of the 1938 incident. During her 1941 interrogation, R. told the Kripo how lonely she had felt in the basement flat without her wife and children. When lonely, she would drink and get into a ‘state of oppression’, where she would recall the words said to her by the Gestapo officer who arrested and brought her to the concentration camp: that she was ‘nothing more than a pile of dirt’.73 These words echoed those uttered by her former wife. But instead of being uttered in a playful and erotic context, they came in the form of jeers under oppressive conditions. When R. got into these states, she ‘had to follow the inner urges to go to the bin’ where she felt she ‘belonged’.74 Her feelings found expression in familiar actions, the symbolism of which turned her body into a vessel of ‘worthlessness’, something that could be discarded and treated like dirt. Just as her former lover’s words had curdled in the mouths of police officers, so the bin ritual became a form of self-flagellation. Instead of finding intimacy and safety in a state of play, R. now literally saw herself as worthy of being compared to dirt.
A fuller picture of R.’s subjectivity begins to form when we understand R.’s forced de-transition as central to how the bin ritual morphed from a playful couple’s activity to an expression of R.’s distress. As Lyndal Roper has argued, moving ‘beyond discourse’ is necessary when examining embodied subjectivity in relation to gender.75 That is, looking beyond the linguistic turn’s understanding of the world as primarily constructed through language, we can consider a more kinaesthetic understanding of what ‘moves us’: that which can better be understood as body language. R’s forced de-transition reaches somatic significance in the transition of the bin ritual. The same gendered/sexual repetitions manifested into two vastly different internal processes. The way people spoke to R., the way the state recognized her (as a woman or as a public nuisance), the acts she herself engaged in — her experience of them hinged on her understanding of whether she was seen as human. During her medical assessment as part of the 1938 criminal proceedings, R. told the doctor, ‘I believe I can only be seen as a full human being in women’s clothes’.76 This alone speaks volumes. But when paired with R.’s body language when Frau Messner found her in the bins in 1938, it speaks louder.
To rephrase Michael Roper, gender ‘is still viewed, by and large, more as a matter of social or cultural construction than as an aspect of personality’.77 For R., much of her personhood and self-worth was linked to her being allowed to live as a woman. Through her de-transition, she had suffered a profound deprivation of humanity. It also signalled a change in her personality and personal relationships. While the Nazi state heterogeneously persecuted R. from this point onwards, her de-transition evoked greater personal and interpersonal damage than direct forms of punishment and incarceration. R.’s emotional state in 1941 was bleak: not only could she no longer live as the gender that gave her the most self-worth, but she was also alone, plagued by voices that buttressed her sense of worthlessness, abusing alcohol to stem the feelings she could not bear, without the resilience necessary to prevent herself acting on self-destructive behaviours.
In the eyes of the court, repeated imprisonment and internment had not altered R.’s behaviour, indicating the need for alternative measures to be taken. The judge overseeing R.’s prosecution in 1941 therefore saw no use in further carceral punishment, and instead sent for her to be psychologically assessed so that she might be sent to a psychiatric institute. The presiding judge for her previous offence had also had R.’s ‘state of mind’ assessed. In 1938, Dr Frommer had produced a highly detailed report, which concluded that R. was a transvestite and a masochist.78 Dr Fommer noted that R. had an ‘abnormality of the sex drive’, but she was ‘certainly not a dangerous moral offender in the sense of the relevant provisions of the penal code’.79 This was Dr Frommer’s way of absolving R. of accusations against §175 while still acknowledging her unorthodox sexual tastes.
The conclusions that Dr Wittenburg reached after R. was assessed in 1941 were the same as those of Dr Frommer. R. was a ‘sensitive psychopath’ who was ‘weak-willed’, but ultimately she was a transvestite and masochist who needed ‘special treatment’.80 That the sexological categorization of the transvestite and masochist persisted in the medical lexicon of Doctors Frommer and Wittenburg is demonstrative of the fact that medical practitioners in the Third Reich were still highly influenced by these taxonomies. It also speaks to R.’s own dialogic epistemological contribution to her assessments in 1938 and 1941. The conventions of the case study are present in both reports, and while both doctors may have followed a similar line of questioning, R. was well versed in articulating trans autobiography.
While there was some muddling of categories, the rubric of clinically diagnosable sexual abnormalities from the earlier era remained. R. therefore embodied two pathologized sexual categories. But both Dr Wittenburg and Dr Frommer distinguished these abnormalities from homosexuality. In the context of the Third Reich, then, R. was a sexual freak, but one who, confusingly, did not pose a threat to the Volksgemeinschaft. Therefore, instead of re-imprisonment, it was decided that R. should be sent to an asylum to be ‘healed’.81
Historian Geoffrey Cocks exploded the myth that the Nazis regarded all mental illness as evidence of a racial-biological defect.82 ‘Aryans’ could be found to be mentally unwell, and despite this largely being seen as a weakness of character, when found amongst the purest of the ‘Aryans’, it could be afforded treatment. Certain cases of homosexuality were also seen as worthy of treatment, although usually only when present amongst the sacred ranks of the Schutzstaffel (SS). To protect the virility and purity of these men, homosexuality was sometimes seen as an ailment that could be cured, although this hinged strongly on whether such men had engaged in ‘active’ or ‘passive’ homosexual acts.83
R. was not a prized Volksgenosse (member of the people’s community) of the SS ilk, nor homosexual, but she was ‘Aryan’ and unstable. Indeed, these characteristics played a central role in her treatment. Jennifer Evans’s work has shown that transvestism was of ‘the worst kind’ when perceived as an act of homosexual prostitution.84 But the contrast of this with R.’s case confirms Jane Caplan’s hunch that there was no decisive and uniform response to transness from the Nazi state.85 This mirrors Samuel Huneke’s formulation of the ‘heterogeneous persecution’ lesbians were subject to in the Third Reich, wherein how lesbians were treated differed greatly depending on the categories additional to ‘lesbian’ that were assigned to them.86 R. occupied a liminal place in the Nazi carceral system. She was not clearly criminal (homosexual), but was a public nuisance to the Volksgemeinschaft; she had an ‘abnormal sex drive’ and was a Transvestit, but she was worthy of medical care and treatment, and given a chance to re-establish her place in Nazi German society.
Ultimately this undermines what Burleigh and Wipperman have termed the ‘comprehensiveness’ of Nazi policy — the social and racial cleavages of which were, according to them, ‘indivisible’ — wherein Jews, Sinti, Roma, the ‘hereditary ill’, ‘community aliens’ and queers were persecuted ‘for the same reasons’.87 Burleigh and Wipperman’s ‘racial state’ paradigm stipulated that the Nazis pursued a coherent policy for excluding and eventually exterminating those ‘elements’ that they deemed racially inferior, ‘unfit’ or ‘alien’ from their social utopia.88 Yet R. was not violently excluded from that social world, despite embodying multiple pathological categories and demonstrating continued patterns of antisocial behaviour. Instead, she was to be given medical care, with the eventual aim of reintegration into Nazi society. R.’s treatment demonstrates the heterogeneous and incoherent nature of Nazi policy in practice, and suggests the necessity of rethinking the cohesion of the racial state model.
III Liminality
On 10 November 1941, R. was transferred to the Berlin-Wittenau Medical Centre to begin her treatment (see Plate). In letters from the medical centre to the district court of Berlin, she was described as ‘a hard-working, willing and skilled worker’.89 Indeed, the Wittenau director, Dr Weatzoldt, wrote countless letters to the court requesting they take the ‘current shortage of trained specialist workers’ into account before considering R.’s release.90 Dr Weatzoldt was not the only one seeking R.’s in-demand skills. From the moment the court decided R. was to be placed in a sanatorium, a lawyer named J. Weltzein insisted R. receive treatment from a specialist so that she could immediately ‘become a functioning member of the Volksgemeinschaft’.91 This lawyer was paid for by R.’s former employer, Mr Martin Barthels, an electrical and mechanical engineer.92 Weltzein demanded the expertise of Dr Göring, director of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (or the Göring Institute as it became known in this period), since the medical system at institutions such as Wittenau did not have the correct knowledge and support to treat patients. The Göring Institute was where homosexual SS men were treated, but Weltzein was careful not to implicate R. as a homosexual. Instead, he was invested in proving R.’s worth as working member of the Volksgemeinschaft. R.’s ability to work would have been highly prized by the Nazi state, as their measurement of someone’s usefulness to the Volksgemeinschaft hinged on their ability to work. The emphasis on usefulness was threaded throughout Weltzein’s letters:
The accused can therefore, if he [sic] now receives proper medical treatment (he has certainly been corrupted by the wrong treatment of Dr Hirschfeld) and is cured by psycho-therapeutic or hypnotic-medical treatment of his pathological ideas, which have triggered his abnormal action, soon become a useful member of the community again.93
Weltzein was keen to disassociate R. not only from homosexuality but from Hirschfeld and his status as a persona non grata of Jewish heritage. Despite her ability to work, R. would have had to hold significant enough worth in the eyes of the Nazis to warrant treatment and reintegration into the Volksgemeinschaft. Too much ‘contamination’ in the form of Jewish acquaintances and homosexual tendencies would make this challenging.
In a letter from 17 March 1942, R.’s former employer went one step further, offering to ‘provide [R.] with the costs for medical treatment in advance’ (by offsetting them against the current wage payments).94 This tug-of-war to keep a gender non-conforming person in employment is unparalleled in the literature on persecution in Nazi Germany. Both the Wittenau director and R.’s former employer were determined to hang on to her, at the height of Nazi terror against sexual non-conformity and of the Holocaust. This demonstrates the polycratic nature of power dynamics under National Socialism, in which professionals could bring about specific outcomes. In this instance, these desired outcomes were driven by utilitarian and economic social needs.
Herwig Czech’s work has argued for how combined economic and racial factors affected who was spared from eugenic murder. His synthesis highlights the crucial role work performance (Arbeitsleistung) had on euthanasia killings.95 Likewise, R. was not only granted life — despite being deemed mentally unfit — but she also held significant value inside and outside the Wittenau, because she provided skilled work that, as the war effort escalated, became increasingly coveted. This continues to complicate our wider narrative of trans lives in this period: skilled workers of a favoured racial profile did not instantly or uniformly face violent persecution, and might be protected for their labour value by powerful individuals.
After months of Weltzein’s and Barthel’s insistence, R. was assessed by the Göring Institute on 8 July 1942. Despite a lengthy assessment (she was sent back in August), the Institute thought she was incurable. Dr Kalau vom Hofe concluded R.’s discharge in a letter:
We have come to the conclusion that it is not expedient to initiate psychotherapeutic treatment, because the prospect of success is too small. In the case of R., there is undoubtedly, in addition to the neurosis, a very considerable neglect from later puberty onwards, and there is probably no serious will to cure. It is also unlikely that he [sic] would have sufficient understanding for the method of psychotherapy.
There is no point in trying the psychotherapeutic method of treatment on such stalled cases, while other more promising cases can be treated. We can give no guarantee to any authority that R. would have a chance at being liberated from his criminal tendencies through treatment.96
Dr vom Hofe’s assessment of R. did not align with previous doctors’ assessments that saw R. as capable of recovery. Her rapport with R. also contrasts with that of the medical staff at the Wittenau, with whom R. enjoyed amiable relationships. Strikingly, R. spoke at length about this assessment with vom Hofe once she had returned to the Wittenau. This evidence survives in the form of a hastily typed transcript from 9 January 1943. Why R. was given the space by an unnamed doctor to discuss her experience of the assessment, and why this was documented in such detail, remains unclear. That this occurred after the Göring Institute had labelled her mentally ill, and at the height of wartime, is in itself exceptional. The war did not feature at the forefront of R.’s experience at the Wittenau, but its effects can be seen in the background, especially in relation to the increased need for skilled work. In this way, the war ‘exacerbated inconsistencies and contradictions within Nazi ideology/practice’, making a ‘complicated conceptual and policy landscape even more complex’.97 R.’s status as a liminal case continued to signify her as worthy of medical attention — at least in the eyes of Wittenau staff preoccupied with her particular expression of transvestism, where homosexuality was notably absent, and because she provided skilled labour.
From the transcript, we learn that according to R., she and Dr vom Hofe were at odds throughout the Göring assessment. Dr vom Hofe told R. that she was ‘neglected’ (presumably by her mother, her wife, society, or all of the above), and predicted that R. would ‘take action against this’ after being discharged. R. said this was an ‘insult’ and worried about how it would play out on her report, because ‘when someone else reads this, they get a completely different picture of the reality’. Presumably because of Dr vom Hofe’s insinuation that R. would seek retribution, R. felt defensive and incapable of being vulnerable during the assessment. Dr vom Hofe held a pejorative view of R.’s gender — according to R., the doctor blamed her marriage failure on her gender non-conformity.
R. commented that she felt that the doctor did not understand the pain she had gone through, because Dr vom Hofe ‘didn’t recognise the dark side of my wife, she [vom Hofe] stood by the female sex’.98 In the transcript, this passage ends with a remark from R. to the doctor carrying out the session on 9 January: ‘That’s how women work!’ R.’s hostility to the women in her life who had betrayed her and caused her so much hurt manifested in her conviction that vom Hofe had a gender bias, siding with the women in R.’s life against R. From these interactions it is clear that R. felt Dr vom Hofe was incapable of understanding her experiences. Vom Hofe, in turn, felt R. to be unyielding, resentful and perhaps atypical to a degree that she could not empathize with. Ultimately, R. felt that Dr vom Hofe’s questions were ‘too private’, and she refused to open up to the doctor, unlike in her other assessments.99
Indeed, the contrast between how R. spoke to Dr vom Hofe and how she spoke to the other (male) doctors during her time at Wittenau is telling. R. was able to assert her gender with seemingly little to no fear of repercussion while at Wittenau, and most of her interactions with staff resulted in highly gendered remarks from her handlers that, though medicalized, refrained from being pejorative. For example, Dr Strauchmann made note of how R. ‘almost looks like a girl’ and that ‘in men’s clothing, he [R.] had the feeling of not being free, of not being able to participate’ in society.100 Dr Strauchmann perceptively noted that R. ‘actually loves himself [sic] as a woman. He also gets by much better in the world as a woman. He sees the world much more freely in a woman’s clothing’.101 These observations mirror the conclusions Dr Frommer reached in 1938, when R. declared that ‘I believe I can only be seen as a full human being in women’s clothes’.102 While R.’s gender was never explicitly validated at the Wittenau, her thoughts and feelings regarding her gender were thoroughly documented.
No concrete conclusions can be drawn as to why R. was given preferential treatment at the Wittenau. Yet these pieces of evidence buttress a wider shift in historiography that analyses the polycratic nature of the Nazi state through new research into subjectivities in the Third Reich — here exemplified through drastically differing institutional responses to R.103 They also continue to demonstrate how trans liminality can unexpectedly underscore the incoherent and heterogeneous ways in which Nazi policy was put into practice.
Another theme that came to the fore in R.’s medical interactions was a consistency in how R. experienced and re-experienced familial and societal rejection. She experienced her gender non-conformity as a specific form of social isolation and rejection, because she was ‘looked at differently, everywhere’, by everyone.104 R. also felt slighted by the constant suggestion of homosexuality, not only because it was stigmatized and criminalized, but because it invalidated her gender identity. An extract from a medical note taken by a nurse on 5 March 1942 reads:
Patient R. has cried for about 2 minutes early in the morning. Asked about the cause, he [sic] said, ‘my honour is taken away from me here, there is so much gossip. Most people think that I have a different disposition because I do not care for women, which is certainly not the case, you and the other nurses know that’.105
Another nurse’s note from 12 April 1942 exemplifies R.’s insistence at having her gender identity correctly recognized, with the statement ‘[R.] does not gloss over his [sic] pathological disposition but admits it openly. He insists that he is a girl and that he is wrongly treated as a man’.106 The note continued, R. ‘prefers to wear his hair quite long, like a girl, and is annoyed when it is forcibly shortened. He prefers to wear an apron, but when this is taken off him, it makes him very angry’. Dr Strauchmann also highlighted how her ‘overall behaviour is still quite unstable, insecure and changing in mood’. R. demonstrated a routine expression of anger at having control wrested from her, especially in the form of control over her gender expression.107
Other emotions, especially those regarding R.’s mother’s behaviour towards her, were captured with Freudian overtones in the same medical notes. Dr Strauchmann wrote that R. had ‘not given up his [sic] previously expressed ideas of impairment [that R. is a woman], which are mainly directed at his mother’.108 Ten days later, he noted that R. ‘still has a prejudice against his mother, who in his [sic] opinion has damaged him and wants to destroy him … She [Alice] only works to his detriment, incites other people against him. She is a bad mother’.109 This sentiment was solidified in the transcript of 9 January 1943, which identified R.’s mother, Alice, as ‘the original enemy’. Here R. stated that ‘unfortunately, my own mother is the person who I have believed all these years’, demonstrating she had internalized her mother’s shameful treatment of her gender to the point where she felt worthless because of it.110 In a twisted turn of events, through receiving medical treatment at Wittenau, R. was able to process some of the psychological and emotional scarring that she had endured from her wife, society and her mother.
Despite the rejection letter from the Göring Institute, in September 1942 Weltzein continued to canvass ways to return R. to the civilian world. He had already begun arranging for R.’s release by approaching R.’s elderly neighbour, Frau Anna Jacknus. According to Weltzein, Jacknus was willing to let R. stay with her on her release so that she could be properly supported in her reintegration into society and would be able to start working promptly. While the doctors at the Wittenau felt that R. was not yet ready to be released, an update was sent to the Berlin district court stipulating that upon her release, Frau Jacknus had offered to house R.111 The Wittenau director stated that R.’s potential release was not due to be reviewed until 11 November 1943, over a year later. Barring the director’s stalling, the Nazi court system deemed R. fit for reintroduction into the Volksgemeinschaft. Utilitarian needs not only trumped ‘social hygiene’ in this instance, but also contributed to transforming R., who had previously been characterized by her liminal and confounding status, into a concrete subject characterized by her Arbeitsleistung. Not only was the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft ‘notoriously vague’, its social practice was too.112 Because of this vagueness, ‘the status of every [Aryan] individual within Nazi society could be reversed’, and someone who should have been excluded from that social utopia could be deemed worthy of re-inclusion.113 However, this never came about. On the morning of 12 March 1943, R. was found hanging in one of the toilet cubicles in the Wittenau.114 The subsequent report stated that R. had committed suicide the night before and was found that morning by the caretaker.
IV Terminus
Upon receiving the news of R.’s death, the Kripo investigated for foul play. They concluded it was suicide; however, they left open the possibility that it might have been accidental due to ‘the strange way in which the act was carried out’.115 The Kripo’s assessment included R.’s history of masochistic tendencies, concluding that ‘the death of R. . . . excludes any external fault’.116 Their report, which contains upsetting details, is transcribed below.
In a strange way, he [sic] tied a curtain cord around his neck . . . which slipped off his ears when he lowered himself from the basin. The strangulation marks over the larynx to halfway down the pelvis show deep impressions which then run towards the ears. It does not seem impossible that he did not initially intend to commit suicide by this experimentation, but that unconsciousness occurred immediately because of the strangulation of the carotid artery, and then death by asphyxiation occurred due to his body weight. It can even be assumed that he wanted to satisfy himself sexually.117
Beyond absolving themselves of any fault, the Kripo went as far as to suggest that the ‘way in which the crime was carried out’ demonstrated R.’s ‘abnormality’. R.’s history of masochism and transvestism positioned her as reprehensible in death. Just as her trans liminality had allowed her to be reintegrated into the elastic boundaries of the Volksgemeinschaft, so too did it lead to this being reversed once her utilitarian value had ceased.
Her death may have been accidental. The 1941 Kripo police file on R. included a statement in which a witness reported that they had seen R. create a pulley system in her yard where she hung from a washcloth, in not too dissimilar a fashion from the description above.118 Concurringly, the Wittenau post-mortem report concluded that R.’s death was not a suicide attempt, because the ‘patient has never expressed suicidal intentions and has not been depressed in any way recently’.119 Nevertheless, this report was likely attempting to absolve the Wittenau of patient negligence — R. had struggled with suicidal ideas throughout her life.120 There was a significant passage in the 9 January transcript, following R.’s descriptions of familial and societal rejection, where she said, ‘if a person constantly suffers fateful blows, then . . . he thinks he’s expendable, and wants to commit suicide’. R.’s use of the third person did not make this any less personal or confessional.121
Another telling example comes from one of R.’s many psychiatric sessions at the Wittenau. R. told Dr Strauchmann that when the Gestapo cut her hair and forced her to stop living as a woman, this was her great Knacks, the moment that caused her to crack. For R., the chronological turning point was not her arrest in 1938 — let alone in 1941 — but what happened in 1936. What is striking is that in the same session, the doctor documented that ‘truly, [R.] feels neither like a woman nor a man [now]’ (Er fühle sich eben in Wirklichkeit weder als Frau noch als Mann).122 R.’s gendered sense of self had tentatively found validation in the form of womanhood and femininity before 1936. But since that world had been flattened with the Nazi takeover, she could no longer inhabit it. Perhaps R. could no longer find a sense of place in the world or self within the gender binary, so she untethered herself from it. This can be interpreted as her letting go: a signal of her intentions in March 1943. If she could never see a future in which she could live again as a woman, she would be neither man nor woman — she would become nothing.
While R. may not have been ‘depressed’ in the doctor’s eyes, she had been prone to feeling worthless. These feelings had manifested ever since her family had rejected her in 1923, compounding each time she experienced severe loss: her gender in 1936, her wife shortly after as well as her children, her freedom in 1938 and 1941. The Nazi courts may have granted her bare life in 1941, but sometime after 1936 her life became unliveable. Most notably, when interrogated in 1941 she admitted she was afraid of ‘lacing [herself] up’ in case she would ‘commit suicide in an excited state’.123 Given this foreshadowing, it is entirely likely that R.’s death lies somewhere in the grey area between accident and intention.
The Kripo’s final analysis does no justice to R.’s life. However, it does serve to underpin a core conclusion of this microhistory: namely, that Nazi policies toward trans people were inconsistent, heterogeneous and incompatible with an image of the Nazi racial state as comprehensive in its ability to demarcate the boundaries of its social utopia.124 Because R. was ‘Aryan’, and never charged with §175, her trans liminality disrupted Nazi legal frameworks for categorizing social exclusion from the Volksgemeinschaft. While homosexuality is absent in R.’s case, we must historicize her treatment by the Nazi state within the wider context of the complex and heterogeneous persecution queer people faced in the Third Reich. In the process, R.’s case nuances our current historical understanding of Nazi persecution practices towards queer people, demonstrating a hierarchy of criteria in which sexuality, race and ability to provide utilitarian value impacted how sexually- and gender-variant people were treated by the state.
Indeed, R.’s heterogeneous persecution and treatment by medical institutions highlights a wider hierarchy of value systems in the Third Reich that became increasingly utilitarian after 1939. Her confounding lack of criminality in the form of homosexuality coupled with her ‘Aryan’ status allowed for R.’s inclusion in the Volksgemeinschaft to be determined by her ability to perform skilled work. R.’s life was therefore measured by the same value system that she was subject to in death, since she was recast as a social freak once her work value ceased. Hereby, social, economic and racial factors were inextricably linked in an incoherent process aimed at establishing an ‘economy of life itself’.125 This prompts us to re-evaluate the role of utilitarian need in how Nazi policy was practised, which in R.’s story served to blur the distinctions between life/death and inclusion/exclusion that Burleigh and Wipperman have positioned as clear binaries.126
Moreover, the process of R.’s transition in the 1920s sheds light on the particulars of some of the earliest gender transition practices. The hamstrung bureaucratic nature of accessing legal name changes and a Transvestitenschein describe an everyday history of life in Weimar Berlin, which contained both ordinary and extraordinary elements. R.’s struggles at home and the double dependency on medico-legal processes undermine an idealization of Weimar Berlin in queer histories, and also point to the categorization of transness that this era produced. While in no way comparable to the crimes committed against humanity by the Nazis, the details of R.’s transition shed a sceptical light on Hirschfeldian measurements of transness: itself a value system to which trans people had to conform.
The emotive detail disclosed in the source material was a by-product of the trans biographical convention that first developed in dialogue with late-nineteenth-century sexology and carried through to the Nazi era. Paying close attention to R.’s feelings and actions alongside the chronology of the Weimar and Nazi eras indicates how histories of emotion must, when possible, account for how the body speaks: sometimes in unison with, but often beyond, language. Trans studies, like gender and feminist scholarship, has always centred embodiment in its analyses.127 Likewise, new research into subjectivities in the Third Reich has shifted the scale from macro discursive interpretations of Nazism to histories that foreground individuals and experience, reorienting where and how we look for historical meaning.128 Building on this scholarship, I have argued that ‘micro’ aspects of this history, such as R.’s bin ritual, communicate clear and significant meaning, rather than needing to be discarded as bizarre anomalies or to be flattened into a reading of R. as incomprehensible and sexually disturbed. The bin ritual alone contains within it the continuities and breaks between the Weimar and Nazi eras, the importance of embodiment to R.’s gender, her complex relationship to sexuality, her heterogeneous persecution, varied social stigma, and the difficulties of clearly demarcating inclusion/exclusion to the Volksgemeinschaft: a perfect example of how the micro can illuminate the macro.
R.’s story by no means accounts for the total, or even perhaps the typical, trans experience under National Socialism. But her microhistory opens up new avenues in modern German histories of sexuality and gender, since her case alone provides detailed insight into the particulars of trans life in Weimar Berlin vis-à-vis queerness, and the unexpected ways in which Nazi policing of sex and gender looks different when we focus on trans identities. In 2016, Jennifer Evans persuaded us to queer German history.129 Attention to trans figures and trans analyses within the modern German historical canon has been long in coming. This microhistory is but one wave in the current surge in new, challenging scholarship. But R.’s story clearly steers us along the current that is taking the discipline in new directions.
R. at the Wittenau Heilstätter, taken in December 1941. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Acknowledgements
My warmest thanks for comments and suggestions on drafts of this work to Dan Healey, Alice Raw, Emily Rutherford and Nick Stargardt. I also wish to thank fellow historians working on queer and trans histories, particularly Jen Evans and Laurie Marhoefer, who continue to inspire me. I am indebted to the archivists at the Landesarchiv Berlin, especially Martin Luchterhandt. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number: AH/R012709/1).
Footnotes
R. is abbreviated for data protection purposes. Given that ‘Gerd’ was not her requested new name (she had to pick from a list of gender-neutral names), I refer to her as R. throughout rather than using a forename. Additionally, a respectful adoption of R.’s preferred pronouns are used (she/her), despite her being referred to as he/him throughout the source material.
Kripo witness statement from Frau Frieda Meissner, 11 June 1938, Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter LAB), A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723. All translations my own unless otherwise stated.
Berlin District Court Chancellor, 31 Oct. 1941, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
For detailed discussions pertaining to temporality and chronology, see two special issues in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly: Emmett Harsin Drager and Lucas Platero (eds.), ‘The Transsexual/Transvestite Issue’, TSQ, viii, no. 4 (2021), and M. W. Bychowski et al., ‘ “Trans historicities”: A Roundtable Discussion’, TSQ, v, no. 4 (2018). For trans history’s continued marginalization, see Regina Kunzel, ‘The Flourishing of Transgender Studies’, TSQ, i (2014). For a recent overview, see Rebecca Hickman, ‘What Is “Trans History”, Anyway?: Historiographical Theory and Practice in a Flourishing Field’, Midlands Historical Review, v (2021), at <http://www.midlandshistoricalreview.com/what-is-trans-history-anyway-historiographical-theory-and-practice-in-a-flourishing-field/> (accessed 16 Apr. 2022).
See Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC, 1995), and Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York, 2013) as examples of ultra-modern, techno-deterministic analyses; and Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (Minneapolis, 2018), 59–96, for a rebuttal of these arguments.
For a lengthier argument, see Susan Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies’, in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader (London, 2006), 3: ‘Transgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statutes that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood’.
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 1991), 306; see also all the essays in ‘Part 1: Comparative and Historical Perspectives’, in Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman and Richard F. Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2017), 31–143. On biopolitics, see Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York, 2003), 239–63. For an application of Foucault’s biopolitics to Nazi state practice, see Herwig Czech, ‘Nazi Medical Crimes, Eugenics, and the Limits of the Racial State Paradigm’, in Pendas, Roseman and Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State, 213–38.
Currently only two articles include transvestitism and/or gender non-conformity in their analyses of the Third Reich: Laurie Marhoefer, ‘Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943’, American Historical Review, cxxi, no. 4 (2016); and Jennifer Evans and Elissa Mailänder, ‘Cross-Dressing, Male Intimacy and the Violence of Transgression in Third Reich Photography’, German History, xxxix (2021).
My use of ‘trans’ functions as a shorthand and an umbrella that refers to all the identities in the (trans)gender spectrum. It can be understood as a ‘trans analytic’, much in the same way that Susan Stryker uses it in her Transgender History to refer to anyone who moved away from the gender/sex they were assigned at birth. It is used interchangeably with historically specific terms such as ‘transvestite’ or ‘transsexual’, although I use specific historical terms when pertinent to the context.
On queer print media and subcultures, see Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto, 2015), and Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York, 2014).
Nowadays referred to as gender-affirming surgeries, medical transitions in the 1920s and 1930s were called ‘sex-changes’, and included early attempts at mastectomies, orchiectomies and vaginoplasties. See Raimund Wolfert, Charlotte Charlaque — Transfrau, Laienschauspielerin, ‘Königin der Brooklyn Heights Promenade’ (Berlin, 2021), for the most up-to-date research on these historical surgeries.
Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, 2017), 84.
Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz: die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Paderborn, 1990); Cornelia Limpricht, ‘Verführte’ Männer: das Leben der Kölner Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Cologne, 1991); Bernhard Rosenkranz, Ulf Bollmann and Gottfried Lorenz, Homosexuellen-Verfolgung in Hamburg, 1919–1969 (Hamburg, 2009).
Rainer Herrn, ‘Transvestitismus in der NS-Zeit — Ein Forschungsdesiderat’, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, xxvi (2013), 331.
Joan W. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, xvii (1991), 777.
Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 9, 11.
Laura L. Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (Chicago, 2013), 4, 90.
Anna Clark, ‘Twilight Moments’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, xiv (2005), 145.
Beachy, Gay Berlin, xviii.
Clark, ‘Twilight Moments’, 144.
For studies dealing with queer history’s relationship with politics and its own past, see Kadji Amin, ‘Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, xliv (2016); Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (London, 2007).
On Alltagsgechichte, see the forum ‘Everyday Life in Nazi Germany’, German History, xxvii (2009), 560–79; Michael Wildt, ‘Die alltagsgeschichtliche Wende der Zeitgeschichte in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren’, in Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (Hamburg, 2011), 42–54. On subjectivity, gender and relationships, see Michael Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal, no. 59 (2005), 62–70. On the history of emotions, see Rob Boddice, ‘The History of Emotions’, in Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (eds.), New Directions in Social and Cultural History (London, 2018), 45–64.
Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager, ‘After Trans Studies’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, vi (2019), 113.
Günter Grau and Claudia Schoppmann (eds.), Hidden Holocaust?: Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–45 (London, 1995); Anna Hájková, ‘Between Love and Coercion: Queer Desire, Sexual Barter and the Holocaust’, German History, xxxix (2021); Samuel Clowes Huneke, ‘Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State’, Central European History, liv (2021); Marhoefer, ‘Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State’, 1169.
Clark, ‘Twilight Moments’, 149; Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, 1969), 94.
Pendas, Roseman and Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State, 24.
Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany, c.1900–1945 (Cambridge, 1994).
Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (eds.), Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford, 2014), 13.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) struck off §151 in 1989, which had replaced §175 in 1968 and criminalized sex between men over 18 and boys below the legal age of 18. West Germany did not strike off the code completely until 1994, but reformed the code in 1969 to refer to sex with a man less than 21 years old, homosexual prostitution, and the exploitation of a relationship of dependency.
Katie Sutton, ‘ “We Too Deserve a Place in the Sun”: The Politics of Transvestite Identity in Weimar Germany’, German Studies Review, xxxv (2012), 337–8.
In a brochure by the Hamburg police chief inspector Rudolf Förster, it says: ‘On application, transvestites . . . can be issued a certificate without hesitation, stating that it is known to the authorities that the person in question wears clothing of the opposite sex. The granting of this certificate is always made dependent on a medical report from a public health officer, from which the transvestite disposition of the applicant can be seen’ (Förster 1932, p. 36). Herrn, ‘Transvestitismus in der NS-Zeit’, 333.
I borrow the term ‘double dependency’ from Herrn, ‘Transvestitismus in der NS-Zeit’, 332.
The spectrum of transvestism by Hirschfeld’s definition was so capacious that it spanned from female impersonation (i.e. drag) to what we today would call binary trans identification.
Katie Sutton, ‘Sexological Cases and the Prehistory of Transgender Identity Politics in Interwar Germany’, in Joy Damousi, Birgit Lang and Katie Sutton (eds.), Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge (London, 2015), 89.
For more on how sexology procured nascent trans identities, see Katie Sutton, ‘From Sexual Inversion to Trans: Transgender History and Historiography’, in F. Mildenberger et al. (eds.), Was ist Homosexualität? Forschungsgeschichte, gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen und Perspektiven (Hamburg, 2014), 181–203.
Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin, 1905); Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1899–1833; Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914).
Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Transvestiten: ein Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Berlin, 1910); Beachy, Gay Berlin, 170.
Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, 2008), 17. For trans*, ‘the asterisk is used . . . to open up transgender or trans to a greater range of meanings’: A. B. Tompkins, ‘Asterisk’, Transgender Studies Quarterly, i (2014), 26.
Magnus Hirschfeld, ‘Die intersexuelle Konstitution’, in Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, xxiii (1923), 3–27.
Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 91.
Sutton, ‘Sexological Cases and the Prehistory of Transgender Identity Politics in Interwar Germany’, 85–103.
Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft (Giessen, 2005), 134–40.
Dr Walther Niemann (a Berlin lawyer), Geschlechtberichtigung in der modernen Gesetzgebung [Gender Correction in Modern Legislation] in the book, Sexualreform und Sexualwissenschaft [Sexual Reform and Sexology], ed. Dr A. Weil (Stuttgart, 1922), 180; quoted in a letter from Walther Niemann to the Berlin-Mitte court, 13 May 1929, LAB, A Rep. 341-04 Nr. 50085.
Medical report from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 23 Dec. 1928, LAB, A Rep. 341-04 Nr. 50085.
See Wolfert, Charlotte Charlaque, for information on trans patients who underwent these surgeries as part of their transition. To clarify, the administration of synthetic hormones for transition purposes did not occur before the late 1930s. For more, see chapters 1 and 2 of Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child; Joanne J. Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
Sutton, ‘Sexological Cases and the Prehistory of Transgender Identity Politics in Interwar Germany’, 95–7.
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000), 85.
Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, Journal of American History, lxxxviii (2001), 133.
Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, PA, 2001), 101; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, History Workshop, no. 9 (1980), 27.
Dr Frommer, 9 Sept. 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
Dr Strauchmann, 1 May 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Dr Frommer, 9 Sept. 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723. R. had requested a specific feminine name, Käthe, but was made to choose one of the listed gender-neutral names. R.’s name change application is missing; however, her birth certificate contains a note dated 5 June 1928, wherein it states her name was legally changed to Gerd from Walter by the Justice Minister of Berlin on 7 May 1928, see LAB, P Rep. 805 Nr. 1068, GU 1267/1903.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Wolfert, Charlotte Charlaque; Bauer, Hirschfeld Archives, 87; Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts, 203–4.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Dr Strauchmann, 1 May 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552; LAB, P Rep. 501 Nr. 315, HU 83/1929, their marriage certificate.
R. personal statement to police, 12 July 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (1886); Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905).
Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader (London, 2006), 33, 32.
Clark, ‘Twilight Moments’, 143.
LAB, P Rep. 501 Nr. 315, HU 83/1929. Gertrud’s second marriage was on 15 Oct. 1938, to Karl Heinrich Georg S. who was a ‘worker’, LAB, P Rep. 510 Nr. 864, HU 1164/1938.
Handwritten ‘Lebenslauf’, 11 July 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Marhoefer, ‘Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State’, 1181.
Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990).
Marhoefer, ‘Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State’, 1170–2; LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19622; LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 27986.
Dr Strauchmann, 1 May 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Ibid.
LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
See Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven, 2004), esp. 90–111, and 227–56.
27 Aug. 1941, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
R. criminal record, 6 Oct. 1941, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Ibid.
Lyndal Roper, ‘Beyond Discourse Theory’, Women’s History Review, xix (2010), 311, 316.
Dr Frommer, 9 Sept. 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
M. Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View’, 57.
Dr Frommer, 9 Sept. 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
Ibid.
‘Psychopathy’ refers to R.’s character as unfit for inclusion in the Volksgemeinschaft. Dr Wittenburg, 14 July 1941, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Berlin District Court, 31 Oct. 1941, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute (Oxford, 1985).
Geoffrey J. Giles, ‘The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler’s SS and Police’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, xi (2002).
Evans and Mailänder, ‘Cross-Dressing, Male Intimacy and the Violence of Transgression in Third Reich Photography’, 60.
Jane Caplan, ‘The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany’, History Workshop Journal, no. 72 (2011), 171–80.
Samuel Huneke, ‘Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State’, Central European History, liv (2021), 300.
Burleigh and Wipperman, Racial State, 3–4, 305.
Pendas, Roseman and Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State, 1.
Dr Weatzoldt, 7 Dec. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Ibid.
J. Weltzein letters, 9 Oct., 10 Oct., 7 Nov. 1941, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
People persecuted under §183 and §175 who could afford lawyers had much greater chances of acquittal, making much of the heterogeneous persecution of gender non-conforming people contingent on class or labour value.
J. Weltzein, 9 Oct. 1941, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
J. Weltzein, 17 Mar. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Czech, ‘Nazi Medical Crimes, Eugenics, and the Limits of the Racial State Paradigm’, 218–19.
Göring Institute report, 29 July 1942, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Pendas, Roseman and Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State, 23.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Ibid.
Dr Strauchmann, 1 May 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Ibid.
Dr Frommer, 9 Sept. 1938, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 116723.
See Peter Fritzsche, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011); Nicholas Stargardt, ‘Beyond “Consent” or “Terror”: Wartime Crises in Nazi Germany’, History Workshop Journal, no. 72 (2011); Moritz Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, 2013).
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Medical notes, 5 Mar. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
12 Apr. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Dr Strauchmann, 2 Apr. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Ibid.
12 Apr. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
J. Weltzein, 25 Oct. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328; Wittenau Medical Centre letter to Berlin district court, 26 Oct. 1942, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Steber and Gotto, Visions of Community in Nazi Germany, 15.
Ibid., 21.
LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 143173.
Kripo report, 20 Apr. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 143173.
Kripo report, 14 Apr. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 143173.
Ibid.
LAB, A Rep. 358-02 Nr.19328.
Post-mortem medical report, 12 Apr. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Ibid.
Medical session transcript, 9 Jan. 1943, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
Dr Strauchmann, 1 May 1942, LAB, A Rep. 003 04 04 Nr. 8552.
R. criminal record, 6 Oct. 1941, A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 19328.
Burleigh and Wipperman, Racial State, 3–4, 305; Pendas, Roseman and Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State, 1.
Czech, ‘Nazi Medical Crimes, Eugenics, and the Limits of the Racial State Paradigm’, 220, 226–34, esp. 231.
Burleigh and Wipperman, Racial State, 304–7.
Some key examples: Susan Stryker, ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, i (1994); C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis, 2017); Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London, 1993); Hil Malatino, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Lincoln, NE, 2019).
Fritzsche, Turbulent World of Franz Göll; Nicholas Stargardt, ‘The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II’, German History, xxviii (2010); Stargardt, ‘Beyond “Consent” or “Terror” ’; Moritz Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge, 2013); Elizabeth Harvey et al., Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2019).
Jennifer Evans, ‘Introduction: Why Queer German History?’, German History, xxxiv (2016).
