Ep. 9: The Persecution of Transgender and Gay Communities during the Holocaust with Laurie Marhoefer.

The Nazi state was built on persecution and multiple groups in addition to Jews were victimized and killed during the Holocaust.  Today’s podcast looks not only at Nazi persecution of gay and transgender people along with Nazi homophobic thought, but also explores the history of LGTBQ communities in Germany before the war.

We also look at the challenges to doing this historical work as well as the recent assaults on Holocaust history by those aiming to use that past to justify current intolerance.

Laurie Marhoefer is a history professor at the University of Washington.

Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015)

Marhoefer, Laurie. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (2022)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.827)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Wayman Bourne. Um, and today I took sort of the executive decision to, um, front load an episode that I think is really important, um, due to some current events dealing with, uh, the transgender community and it's, uh, persecution by the Nazis in the Holocaust. And, um, because I, every day is a school day for me as well.

I've got one of the premier experts on this topic, Dr. Laurie Marhofer, to come on and talk to us about that. So welcome, Laurie, how are you?

Laurie (00:42.25)
Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm doing okay. Yeah. It's exciting. Exciting couple of days.

Waitman (00:45.687)
Yeah, yeah. So can you tell us? Yeah, yes, it is. Yeah, God. It one of those battles that would be nice not to have to fight. Can you tell us a little about yourself, what you do, how you get into this topic before we start to get started?

Laurie (01:03.294)
Yeah, I'm a historian of Weimar and Nazi Germany. I have a PhD from Rutgers and I am now a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. And I've written a couple of books about the gay and trans rights movement in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. And I'm currently writing a book about transgender people in Nazi Germany. And I got into the topic because I learned when I was in my 20s that Germany had...

the world's first gay rights movement, and I didn't know anything about it, and I got really interested. And then I also found out that they had really early trans politics, probably the earliest anywhere, and a trans community in the 20s in Berlin, and I got excited about that, and then followed it into the Nazi period. So I've been working on that for a number of years, and I'm working on the book now, have an article on it. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

Waitman (01:57.339)
Yeah. And so like this is a great segue because I think that, you know, this is an area like I think a lot of queer history where just because there isn't a lot of scholarship on a thing, perhaps doesn't mean that the thing doesn't exist or didn't exist historically. Right. And I think that's one of the places where, you know, even in

God, in this recent sort of Twitter flare up, I've had all these people be like, oh, yeah, there were trans people in the Holocaust. Well, where are the books on them? I'm like, well, you know, first of all, there are books. And second of all, just because the scholarship may not have caught up to the fact that this is a thing that exists doesn't mean it's a thing that didn't exist. Right. So can you tell us, maybe we'll start from the beginning before we get to the Nazis. Right.

Waitman (02:54.403)
What is the LGBTQ and trans community like in Germany? Because you're right, you bring up a point that ironically, really, you know, one of the places that was sort of the most liberal in a lot of respects when it comes to sexuality was Weimar Germany, obviously before the Nazis, right?

Laurie (03:19.03)
Yeah, yeah, it's so true. Like, transgender history is a really exciting field right now because it's really, it is pretty new. We just hadn't been looking for trans people in the past. A lot of the history profession, there were always people who were, who were doing it, but professional historians were kind of ignoring it. And then it's really thrilling when you start looking for trans people, they're just all over the place. Um, so it's, yeah, there've been a lot of books written on Nazi Germany, but the scholarship on trans people is.

just coming out now and it's kind of exciting to find this, you know, this archive that's been there all along. But yeah, so Germany in the 1920s. So you really got to think before Hitler, okay. So Hitler was he was a politician in Germany in the 1920s, but he was the head of a pretty small party for most of the period, they were pulling down like, four or 5% of the national vote, and things were not looking good for the Nazi Party. Germany was actually very left of center and was democratic and had a parliament and

A lot of people remember that there was a hyperinflation and things weren't so good, but there actually is a long period where things settle out more or less and Germany is a functional democracy. And in that period, gay and also transgender subcultures really flourished. So the first gay rights organization that, or there's actually a couple that we know of in the world were founded in Germany in the 19th century. So way before the period I'm talking about.

And then when Germany finally became democratic after the first world war, they just took off and new organizations were founded. All these magazines started coming out. You could buy them at the kiosks and train stations and at bookstores that were for gay men, lesbians and for transgender people. There were bars and clubs. Berlin was really a hub, but also like Hamburg had a really rocking gay scene. And there were...

gay rights organizations in little towns and cities all around Germany. And now we're also finding out in some cities in Poland. So it may not only be Germany, but also the region had this flourishing, these networks of people and subcultures. And, yeah.

Waitman (05:30.843)
Is this different than, I mean, would this be comparable to France? I mean, is there something specific about Germany that made this different? I'm just asking, because I literally don't know.

Laurie (05:42.206)
Yeah, so somebody wrote on that as Robert Beechey is really good on this, but he looks specifically at France and it's quite different. Germany is really open compared to other countries. So gay people and trans people like existing isn't unique to Germany. And in other countries like France or the US, there would be like very quiet meeting places and there might be quiet networks of people. But what's different in Germany is it's so open and public. And a lot of this has to do with censorship.

that from the 19th century, Germany had been pretty open about not censoring print discussions of gayness, as long as there was some kind of a scientific aspect to it in the interest of science. And then when the Republic came in, they actually lifted censorship entirely. And then they did bring it back, but very limited. So just the fact that you could publish a magazine for and by gay people, there's no other country in the world in the 20s that will let you do that. The government would seize it, but the German government wouldn't. So they could.

openly advertised bars, there were lesbian novels that were published. It was like much easier to find these communities for people and they really grew and thrived. And people actually came from all over the world to, like, if you could afford it and you were gay, you would go to Berlin, right? There's all these like famous Americans, including Elaine Locke, the philosopher, I don't know if people know him, the great African American philosopher came to Berlin to kind of see the gay scene. And of course, Christopher

But yeah, just the publicness and the openness are really unique. And then the political organizations. So other countries would have clamped down on political organizing, but in Germany, there are three major gay rights groups and they advocated for the repeal of the law against men having sex with men. And they were almost successful in getting that repealed. And they were very open about that, about advocating. Yeah, paragraph 175. I mean, I should add that like, it's also really not like...

Waitman (07:26.203)
And this is paragraph 175, right? Yeah.

Laurie (07:34.302)
You know, it's still the 20s. So like no one's out. You would never tell your parents you were gay. They almost can't dream of gay marriage. Like I've seen a couple of references to like, maybe we could get married, but there's, you know, there's kind of no hope that that's ever gonna be legal. Like it's still a pretty repressive, homophobic society that they're dealing with, but.

Waitman (07:49.956)
It's still kind of the, you know, we're roommates kind of, you know, kind of, kind of.

Laurie (07:56.282)
Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, it'd be like, like bringing your quote unquote roommate home to meet your parents. Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that there's a lot of like roommates and but then they would go out to the club together and then all their friends knew they were queer. And you know that the US, the US like in New York, there's a great book called Gay New York about the gay scene in New York in the 20s and 30s. And there are clubs and like people are gay and are have a roommate and then go out to the club and

Waitman (08:01.159)
Yeah.

Laurie (08:25.986)
But in Germany, people are way more open. And I think also have more of a sense that this isn't something wrong, that this is a natural part of humanity, and that they have rights, and that they ought to be represented by their government even if they're not.

Waitman (08:45.787)
Right. Yeah. So we have this permissive sort of environment, right? And then we have this guy, Magnus Hirschfeld, who is an important figure, both in the history and then also in what we'll talk about later in this sort of memory wars piece of it. Can you tell us a little about who he is? You know, what he's up to?

what he's doing and then how that relates both to sort of the queer community but also I guess the LGBT community and the trans community as well.

Laurie (09:22.794)
Yeah, so Magnus Herschel was this guy who's like a younger child in a large Jewish family in a German city. His father was a doctor, grew up to be a doctor, and he was gay. And he struggled with that. And he talks, he writes about being in medical school and how in medical school, nobody ever said anything about sexuality at all, really, except there was one day when the professor mentioned homosexuality and

and the things that he said about it were just horrible. This is a period when people thought, at best, being gay was a mental illness that could maybe be cured. So Hirschfeld just, I mean, he's kind of a remarkable guy. Like, he reacted against that, and he had a real sense of social justice, and he decided he was gonna dedicate his career to defending the idea that being gay was natural, that you were born with it.

that it wasn't an illness and that people shouldn't tell you to change and that you had rights just like anybody else. And he also writes about being inspired by the suicide of somebody he knew who was queer, who died by suicide, which was not uncommon in that day. I mean, still a problem today. So he set up a practice and he started publishing on this idea. And then I think people, so he's one of the first people to publish that.

that you're born gay, it's not an illness, and you shouldn't have to change. One of the first people to publish that from a scientific perspective, he had this whole scientific theory. And then gay people started to gravitate to him, including gay people who had money. And then he was like, I'm gonna start an organization. And he and some other people co-founded what we think is the first gay rights organization in the world in Berlin, called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. This was in the late 19th century.

So he became like the center of this network of activism and he continued to publish. And he went on to have a career as a scientist of sexuality. He never came out. He was definitely gay. He had a number of boyfriends, including this guy, Lei Siu-Tung, who I also wrote a book about, who was a Chinese Canadian guy. It was super interesting. But all those relationships were like definitely on the, you know, not public.

Laurie (11:47.566)
And Hirschfeld also had like other interests. So he published on birth control and sexology and eugenics and did all kinds of other stuff too. He went on to found a scientific institute after the first world war in Berlin. So this moment when Berlin is so tolerant and open is really like a heyday for Hirschfeld. And he was a big advocate for gay rights and traveled all over the world giving speeches, was internationally famous by the end of his career.

So when he was like a young doctor and he was at the center of this network, lots of people reached out to him, lots of like gay people. And some of the people who reached out to him were like, we're not actually gay. What we are is we are like, we were born men, but really we are women and we are living our lives. You know, we can't live in public as women, but we live privately in our homes with our families as women. And

this situation sucks like crazy for us. And like, is there anything you can do? And also like some people who are like, yeah, I was born a woman, but actually I'm a man. And I'm like thoroughly a man in all these different ways and I'm living as a man and my situation sucks. Can you do something for me? And at first he thought those people were gay and then, or homosexual in his terms. And then he writes that he came to understand that they were this different thing.

was the other thing. Okay. So he published a book in 1910 where he coined a term which is transvestites and he was like these people are transvestites. There's so we maybe we'll talk about this later there's like this whole debate about like is it transgender or not but basically if you read his book it's wonderful because it includes really long passages of like interviews he did with people or descriptions of his conversations with them with these people and you and it's like

these are trans people. These aren't people who are cross-dressing for fun or something. Not to throw shade on that, like right on cross-dressing for fun, but, or for other reasons, but it's like these are people who, again,

Waitman (13:49.587)
But there's a difference. I mean, like, there is a fundamental, there's a difference between cross-dressing behavior and, you know, being, being transgendered.

Laurie (13:58.698)
Yeah, I mean, for me, what kind of nails it is like, they'll say, I am a woman, like my identification is I'm a woman and I've always felt this way. And I live this way as much as I can, but unfortunately I can't go out in public as a woman and it's hugely distressing to me. Like they'll describe, they'll be like, I have to go to work dressed as a man and it's such a relief to me when I come home and put on women's clothing again and like.

Waitman (14:07.344)
Right.

Laurie (14:26.09)
And they're open with their families are supported. They're married to women. Some of them have kids, which is like so sweet to me because I have a kid. Like this one woman describes her relationship with her daughter and like the daughter is, you know knows about her gender and is fine with it. Like, and there's a community of people like he found these people. I think it's important to say that because it's, I think some people think Hirschfeld created this or something, but like.

trans people were there and he found them. And he's partially like making his career by writing about them. He was very proud of the fact that he had coined this and he was the first person to say like, these aren't gay people, these aren't homosexuals, they're this other thing. Like he was very proud of that as a scientific discovery, but he wasn't transgender. But yeah.

Waitman (15:08.571)
And of course the, of course the, the reason it's important that you point out that he didn't obviously create these people is that in fact, I think is often part of the Nazi propaganda about Jews in general, right? As if you go down the Jews as sort of sexual perversion, you know, spreaders, vein of Nazi propaganda, like that's part of it, right? So like

You know, he is sort of doubly cursed in that regard because he's both Jewish and, you know, gay and that's, you know, and he's at the center of this network. Right. So.

Laurie (15:48.278)
Yeah, absolutely. The Nazis will eventually be like, he's corrupting German masculinities, feminizing German men, and they're corrupting the race. The Jews are trying to destroy the birth rate. They blamed all this on Hirschfeld. Yeah.

Waitman (16:02.191)
Sorry, I don't want to interrupt, you were going on about his network that he's created.

Laurie (16:09.502)
Yeah, so he was able to help the trans people who reached out to him. He was able to work with the Berlin police. There was a guy on the Berlin police force in the period of the First World War. I mean, this actually happened before the First World War, which is incredible. So under the Kaiser, who was very friendly to Hirschfeld and probably was himself gay, who...

helps the Berlin police to like lay off of gay men. So not enforce the, by the Weimar period, they're only enforcing paragraph 175 pretty infrequently. And then another thing that they did was Hirschfeld helped them to develop the system of issuing police certificates to people to allow them to quote unquote cross-dress. So if you got a doctor's letter, it didn't have to be from Hirschfeld and there were other...

doctors who did this, but you could get a doctor to write that you had this thing, transvestiteism, and that you were actually less of a disturbance to society if you were allowed to wear the clothing that you wanted to wear. I mean, they will argue, they'll be like, and I'm going to use their language for a second. So they would write about a person who I would say is a transgender man, but they would be like, she is so masculine, that if she goes out in women's clothing, people freak out because they think she's cross-dressed.

So we should let her wear men's clothing because she has less of a disturbance to society. So like Hirschfeld would do physical exams of people and like interview them and then write up these letters. And then you could take that to the Berlin police and they would issue a certificate to you with your picture on it. That's in case you were stopped by the cops because Germany had a law against quote unquote cross-dressing as did a lot of American states. There were a lot of laws in different countries to prohibit like wearing the clothing of the sex that wasn't.

the sex you were assigned at birth. So that was kind of a big deal. It wasn't super easy to get these certificates. And like, I mean, what we have today is much better. You know, we have legal transition, but it's certainly like the beginning of legal transition. And I think it may be the first such legal institution in any country.

Waitman (18:24.655)
And so basically it would allow you to, if you were stopped by the police, they wouldn't have to ask questions about how come you don't match, you know, sort of the card that everybody else carries around.

Laurie (18:37.686)
Right, yeah, so your ID papers might not match. That was a big problem. You could change your legal name under, so after the First World War, the Interior Ministry, Xavier Nunn is the person who's written about this. People should look up his work, but there was a case-by-case procedure where you could apply to have your first name changed, but you couldn't legally change your sex. And the name change procedure was pretty hard.

So yeah, like incongruence and paperwork, or if they, you know, the police are like, wait, you don't look like you should be wearing those clothes. Like, I mean, I don't think trans people probably got stopped very often. There are some surviving pictures of trans people from Weimar, and they look fabulous, you know, and yeah. I'm like, those people probably were not getting stopped by the police, but yeah, yeah.

Waitman (19:24.665)
Great.

Waitman (19:30.887)
Well, it brings up a good point, though, like, if we're thinking about the pre-Nazi era, because certainly already I've learned something, is it was a misconception that I had about Paragraph 175 and the more or less oppressiveness of it. To what extent is the police in Germany policing gay people? I mean, does it skew towards gay men?

Um, you know, is there, when do you fall a foul of the law, I suppose?

Laurie (20:05.502)
Yeah, so paragraph 175 was a law against, like, quote unquote sodomy. And it dates back to the medieval period, though all of those laws have medieval roots in the medieval Catholic Church, and the prohibition on quote unquote sodomy. But then in the 19th century, so most European countries had sodomy laws.

after the French Revolution, France actually repealed them on the grounds and a lot of the lands that were conquered by Napoleon repealed them on the grounds that they were religious laws. So in the 19th century, it's kind of a patchwork, but Germany still had it, the Czech lands still have it, like Austria still has this law. The United States had sodomy laws until 2003 when the Supreme Court struck them down. A lot of former colonies of Britain had them for a long time. So...

Anyway, that's sort of the global context. But in Germany, when the new penal code came in 18th, no, actually it's before that. In the 19th century, they reformed the Prussian penal code and the law before that is gender neutral. So it just says unnatural, you know, like unnatural intercourse or unnatural fornication, which was understood to cover both men having sex with men.

and women having sex with women. And there's actually a case from the 1700s in Germany that's very well preserved of a person who was assigned female at birth who was executed for sodomy. So like there are, it does sometimes apply to women. Austria's law applied to women and men into the 1970s. And there are women in the Nazi period in Austria who are prosecuted. And there's a couple who ended up in the camp system. It's really unusual, but there are some. But the German law was made gender.

specific to men. And it was also like very specific in what acts were covered. It was like it covered intercourse basically. So it didn't cover oral sex. It didn't cover like, you know, hanging out or whatever. And like it was pretty like and so invite like people are charged under that law and like people do live in fear of it. And I mean, Hirschfeld writes about how the work the worst problem was actually blackmail that there were people who would

Waitman (22:13.008)
Alright.

Laurie (22:27.746)
hook up with you and then be like, if you don't pay me, I'm going to the police, that was a worse problem than the police. But they, I mean, as you probably know, they kept really good national statistics on prosecutions and convictions in Weimar, and I think in the Kaiserreich too, and in the Nazi period. And the conviction rate in Weimar is very low. There are cases though. I-

You know, I've always assumed that they were probably cases of, like, multiple charges in a case of assaulting a minor. So if a man assaults a male minor in the Nazi period, they'll often charge under the law against assaulting a minor or pedophilia and charge under the sodomy law because they just want to pile the charges on.

So I've always kind of assumed that a lot of the Weimar cases are that, but that's an, that actually is not something I've verified. The one Weimar case I know of was a gay activist who they went after in Munich. Munich was like more conservative.

Waitman (23:34.407)
So there can be a political piece to this as well. And I think you sometimes see that, again, I've only delved into this a little bit when I wrote this book chapter. And I include LGBT people, but it's folks in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. And so you will sometimes see prosecutions, but often there's some level of grudge settling as well.

where the fact that you did something gay may not have been the primary thing, but we can get you on that. So we're gonna get you on it.

Laurie (24:15.198)
Yeah, and there's, I think that's probably like, I mean, there's just so few Weimar cases and actually they didn't preserve those files. Jen Evans has actually a really good story, but yeah, so the Nazi files are much better preserved. But I mean, basically, they don't seem to be enforcing the sodomy law in a meaningful way in Weimar, because if you look through the gay press, like the big problem is blackmail, really. Not.

And the Berlin police, if you were being blackmailed, you could just go to them. They would not charge you with sodomy. Yeah, the Berlin police are really clear. There was a horrible case actually where a person died of suicide that I wrote about, where the Berlin police afterwards were like, this is really tragic. Everyone should know if you're being blackmailed, we're not gonna charge you. Yeah. And then they went after the blackmailer. So it's...

Waitman (24:50.617)
Oh, wow. Yeah.

Laurie (25:14.87)
It's pretty, when we get to talking about the Nazi period, it's just so different. You know, they take the same law, they make it much harsher, and they just go after people. Like, the conviction rate is really high.

Waitman (25:24.291)
Yeah, I mean, that's something that's sort of where we're going next, right? Is is and before we get there, you know, is it would. I don't know. Would your average German be aware of that there was such a thing as a transgender person or would they would they see it as see someone as a cross dresser or just as gay or like how I mean, I know that maybe asking maybe asking you to sort of.

speak for people that you know you made it to speak for but I think it's I think it will become relevant.

Laurie (25:59.342)
I think, yeah, so my sense is probably not every German had a sense that I think I can say that probably pretty much everyone in Germany by the 1930s knew that some people had sex with people of the same sex and they had a variety of opinions about that. But I don't think there was anyone who was just completely unaware of that unless they were really.

living out in the mountains by themselves. But for people, there's, I would say like, you know, 30 at least, I mean, this is like roughly guessing, but like, I would say at least 30% of the German population and maybe 50% of the German population knows that there are people who are changing their sex or that it's possible. I mean, they really use this language of sex change, which like we don't use, but...

Waitman (26:30.514)
Right.

Laurie (26:56.734)
There are, you know, there's three different movies that came out about changing your sex. In the teens and 20s, there was like a very popular memoir by a guy who was intersex, but who changed his sex in his 20s and wrote really beautifully about it. That was actually made into a movie.

When hormones were discovered, there was a movie about how now they were changing the sex of rats. And there's a section in that movie about sex change operation on people. And there are these three women who are absolutely heroes now of the transgender internet. But there are these three women who knew Hirschfeld and who benefited from early trans medicine, who are in the movie.

So yeah, I think there's more awareness of it than we probably think. Oh, let me just say one more thing. This is one of my favorite pieces of evidence and I completely found by accident, but at one point the Berlin police went to the press and said, this is in the 20s, and they were like, can you please get the word out that people on the street, if they are cross-dressed, they are transvestites. Okay, they are not spies.

because people are reporting them because they're spies, and we just want people to know that there are transvestites, and they are not dangerous, and they're just on the street, and they're not doing espionage. I later found that probably one of the reasons that was happening is that there was a whole flurry of German publications in the 20s trying to retroactively justify the invasion of Belgium, and the occupation of Belgium, and the war crimes in Belgium that

And one of the themes in there is that they had to kill Belgian civilians because the Belgians, the men were dressing in women's clothing and attacking the Germans. And that's just like this super weird, but there's a longstanding problem that trans people have that people think we're deceptive or we're in disguise to do crime or something.

Waitman (29:11.663)
Well, there's also, when I was doing the background research for this, um, for this revised edition of my book, um, you know, I, when I was reading about sort of the, the LGBT side of things, you know, there's also this, this homophobic propaganda piece that, that gay people are conspiratorial, right? And, and also, and that there is this sort of, they're almost inherently tricky spy.

espionage kind of people, right? So like that maybe that's part of that as well, you know that

Laurie (29:44.734)
Yeah, totally. That's like, that's like one of the themes in Nazi homophobia. Yeah, they're the gay men are like a secret society. Like, yeah. Oh, I forgot to say there, there are these European celebrities in the period before the Nazi power who had surgeries. It's it's kind of like this early period of surgery. I mean, surgery probably goes back way before, you know, some of the surgeries are.

known in the ancient world. So it's not like they suddenly figured out how to do this. But some of the surgeries, they did figure out how to do them in the 20s because there's a big boom in plastic surgery after the First World War. But yeah, there's like a British Olympian named Mark Weston who had surgery and really publicly transitioned. And then Lily Elba. And there's another Olympic athlete whose name is escaping me, but I think there's a book coming out on this.

Waitman (30:24.987)
Right. Yeah.

Laurie (30:42.154)
Yeah, so there are these like high profile international, quote unquote, sex change celebrities in the 30s. A lot of people think of Christine Jorgensen in the 50s, but there was a whole earlier moment in the 20s and 30s of this. So I think like there's pretty wide awareness of it. And there's absolutely not the kind of panic around it that you see today. Like it's just sort of a, people are interested and like they don't always associate it with homosexuality and it's kind of like.

Look at this, you know, modern medicine or whatever, like, yeah.

Waitman (31:17.347)
Yeah. I mean, again, I mean, I just want to reiterate, I think it is very important to think about, you know, the fact that, um, this was not this like unheard of thing, even at the time, you know, that, that it's, it's not a question of, because this, and we'll talk more, I'm sure, you know, I'm going to try not to get too ranty about it, but, you know, this isn't a case of like woke left wing academics pushing back onto the past, you know,

things that were only invented in the 2000s. Right. I mean, like, this is a thing that existed, but not only did it exist, it's something that people knew existed. You know, it wasn't like a giant secret that we have to sort of go back and unearth, you know, painstakingly that we do. Right. But more because nobody had been doing it, not because it wasn't a phenomena. Right. But maybe we should talk, I suppose, about move into the Nazi period a little bit. You know, what?

What is the Nazi ideological position vis-a-vis both the LGBT community, the gay community, as well as the trans community, if they have a perspective on both?

Laurie (32:33.482)
Yeah, the Nazis are really profoundly homophobic, particularly about gay men. So before they came to power, they prominent Nazis and their press talked about murdering gay men, because they see queerness as like a Jewish plot to corrupt the race and to destroy the birth rate. And then they also.

have these concerns about like gay men are the secret society who are gonna undermine the state and undermine masculinity. Fascism's really, really profoundly focused on masculinity and a certain kind of masculinity and also on bonding between dudes. The fascist ideal is an all-male political system and lots of all-male organizations and really.

profound, tight bonds based on race between the guys in those organizations. And they see eroticism as just a total poison to that. So they're really, yeah, really homophobic and really upfront about that. They're not crazy about women being with women either, but part of the Nazi worldview is just a disinterest in women in general. So.

sort of flows out of that misogyny that the discussions they have about lesbianism, it's not certainly not something that they're they want to promote in any way, but they're also not as concerned about it.

Waitman (34:07.511)
Is there also the idea, I feel like I've come across this someplace, that lesbians aren't the same threat to sort of the Nazi racial state that men are because, and this is going to sound awful, but because they can still have children. Regardless of their proclivities or their orientation, they can still procreate, whereas gay men are sort of able to withhold that from

Laurie (34:25.538)
That... yeah...

Waitman (34:36.92)
sort of the Nazi racial community.

Laurie (34:39.634)
Yeah, there's a high level ministerial discussion in the mid, before the war started, but in the Nazi regime, about whether they should revise paragraph 175 to cover women and we the minutes of that meeting survive or a pretty detailed record of it survives Claudia shopman is the person who like wrote about this, but one of the people in that meeting said exactly that. Yeah. I mean,

In one way, that's really creepy because it kind of legitimates sexual assault. But it's also true that most gay people did get married and have children. A lot of people are living a double life, men and women. I mean, why they think that's OK for women and not for men, I don't know that gets kind of creepy. But.

Waitman (35:31.739)
Well, I mean, I think I think what you've already mentioned, though, is gets to the heart of it, is that. Men, men, loving men, gay men challenges. Nazi ideology in a way that women don't, because it challenges the normative masculine sort of ideal of the Aryan Nazi man in a way that I think you actually expressed it really well that they just don't care so much about.

Laurie (35:47.138)
Yeah.

Waitman (36:00.751)
what women think, feel or are up to as long as they're able to be mothers and, and be in the home, you know, you know, and so that what they do, you know, behind closed doors doesn't, isn't as challenging. And of course, you know, I was, I was smiling as you were describing sort of fascist closeness, right amongst comradeship, right? Because there is this amazing sort of irony.

If you watch like Triumph of the Will or like, it's these like shirtless, good looking dudes, like wrestling with each other and like running around. But Himmler is like deeply obsessed with that there shouldn't be any gay people in my organization. And yet the organization is sort of an intensely homoerotic one on its face. Right?

Laurie (36:53.95)
I like, yeah, I always, I show Triumph of the Will parts of it in my class. And we just talk about those scenes where it's like, oh my God, this is so, like, it's like, they have to be really strict about, like, not allowing gay people because like, they are wrestling shirtless, like, they're all topless. They're all wrestling. Like, it's like, they're the bonding and the frivolity and the like, or they're riding on each other's backs and stuff. And you're like,

Oh my gosh, like this is really, yeah, that tension between male bonding and like, is this, is this gay? Like, and of course some, I mean, gay people hold all different variety of political views. So of course, like some right wing gay people were like, this is great. I'm definitely going to join the SS, you know, like that's, and then.

Waitman (37:41.423)
Well, I mean, this is the thing that I think we should mention as well, right? Which is that there is this whole the when that mean that I'm not going to start characterize the essay as an organization as sort of gay friendly, but Ernst Ruhm is gay, you know, and there is a large section I would I guess. And you can crack me because you're the expert, but it seems like there is a large section of the Nazi state, certainly pre Knight of the Long Knives for at least for whom at least gayness isn't an issue.

in the same way that it is for the other side. And how does the Nazi state deal with that?

Laurie (38:15.896)
Yeah.

Okay, so I really looked at this because I was really curious about, particularly about the essay and Röhm and the Nidalee Knights. So this is what I found. Some of this is based on Goebbels' diary, but also on other internal documents. So Röhm was the head of the stormtroopers and an important top Nazi. He was gay. He was actually outed before they came to power. There was a big scandal.

And then right after they came to power in 1934, Hitler had him assassinated along with a lot of other people. And then the Nazi press said that he was assassinated because Hitler had just found out he was gay and was shocked and was shocked. And if you look at the Sopada reports, what Germans said to that was, well, that's a bunch of malarkey because we've known he was gay for years. How could Hitler have not known? Like, so I was really curious about like how many gay Nazis were there.

Waitman (39:05.702)
Yeah.

Laurie (39:12.082)
So what it seems like is that Rome was for sure gay. And I think that his close lieutenants, probably some or all might've been gay. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few gay guys in the leadership of the SA, but they were really quiet about it. And they were really careful about it because most Nazis were really homophobic. Goebbels had no idea. And Goebbels' reaction is like,

Rome was outed by the social Democrats and that's how Goebbels found out. He was shocked and he kind of was like he should kill himself. Like this is a disaster. Apparently this also we only have on hearsay but apparently Hitler was kind of like yeah he was in you know he was in the tropics and that happens to people when they're in warm climates so we should maybe not like Hitler wasn't.

But again, I wasn't able to find that in a document that I was like, I can categorically trust this. That's the story that was told.

Waitman (40:08.339)
But this is an interesting thing too that, you know, the Nazi conceptions of homosexuality are, I think, I've come across it in some areas, in some areas they're weirdly forgiving in precisely that sort of way of like, you know, well this is a thing that happens. And so it's kind of like, you know.

Laurie (40:12.359)
Hehehe

Waitman (40:35.447)
if you aren't what they would consider to be sort of a habitual or a recruiter kind of scenario. You know, I came across this, you know, many, many years ago in the Wehrmacht and there's a guy who wrote a book on sex crimes in the Wehrmacht and there's a section on prosecution of gay men. But there were so many examples of this guy who was basically like, you know, the archetypal, you know, defendant who was like, I was just really horny.

on the Eastern Front. And so I did gay stuff, but I'm not really gay. And they'd be like, okay, as long as you don't do it again, like we understand that and it's fine. But if you're sort of like an older guy who like, not coerced, but sort of seduced somebody into it, then you're in a different sort of category.

Laurie (41:27.07)
Yeah, okay, that's a really good point. I just want to say, like, to kind of wrap up the thing about Ernst Röhm, like, so what I concluded is, like, yeah, there were some, there were for sure some, there were gay people in the Nazi party, there were gay men, and particularly in the essay, it seems like there was a little group of them around him. But I don't, when they were found, like, that was kind of the end. They kept them around, but then they got rid of them.

Waitman (41:34.13)
Yeah, yeah.

Laurie (41:56.555)
I don't think, I would say like if you looked at.

Waitman (41:59.079)
So not a tolerant wing of the Nazi party. Yeah.

Laurie (42:02.766)
No, I think if you were a gay Nazi, you had to really keep it quiet and be careful. Like it was not a safe space. Like, and you're right, Himmler was seems to have really been worse than Hitler, but was really a homophobe. But so I think so.

You know, talking about like other victims, so like gay men are in the other victim category. But the thing about the other victims is like some of them were persecuted because they were like, I mean, Jewish people, it was about race, Roma people, it's about race, right? It's like a hard and fast thing. Gay men, it's much more complicated. The dominant view in the world, not just in Germany, but everywhere.

was not that you were born gay in the 40s. Like there's a small group of activists who are saying that and like nobody agrees. I mean, even in Weimar, like Hirschfeld would be like, you're born gay and it's not your fault. And like even the social Democrats would be like, no, it's a mental illness. You know, we don't think you should go to jail, but it's definitely a mental illness. Like the idea that there are some people who are just gay and there are other people who are not is like not widely accepted. So.

The Nazi perspective is very similar to the perspective you see in other countries, which is that this is something that people kind of fall into, and there may be some people who kind of have a predisposition, and they tend to like rope other people into it. And then it totally, this is totally homophobic idea, but it's like, it's basically pedophilia, you know, you're like recruiting and like, and those are the people we should really go after, they tend to be like more gender nonconforming and like they're, they could probably be fixed, but like, we

you know, why try like and then there are people who are kind of, you know, just situationally have gay sex and those people it's, you know, we should be lenient with them. And that's, that's pretty much the attitude. I mean, that's the attitude that not just the Nazis, but lots of other people have about it. But yeah, they're there, they definitely have this attitude that like, we should go hard on the on the repeat offender on the gender nonconforming guy.

Laurie (44:17.066)
Um, on the, on the older guy, if there's an age difference, um, but, um, particularly like I've seen all kinds of cases where people, you know, it wasn't funny for them, but it's a little funny and retrospect. Well, they'll be like, I just was super drunk or like this, this one woman was like, I didn't have, I didn't have fair, the fair for the trolley to go home. So I decided to just sleep with her and she only had one bed. So like, or like,

Yeah, I was really horny on the Eastern Front. Like, that will often work because they'll be like, oh, okay, you're not a hardcore recruiting, you know, unredeemable homosexual. This is just your first offense and you're young and this is not, you know. So yeah, they're not, I mean, people, the persecution of gay men is done through the court system by and large. Like...

And most of the gay men who are sent to the camps also start out in the police headquarters, and then they're heading for trial, and then they decide to send them into the camps instead. And for...

Waitman (45:23.571)
Well, this is the question. I think this is a good segue into it, which is sort of, you know, because again, one of the. One of the questions that I had, which, which I think still. Still needs someone to do the research on it. I mean, I was in conversation with Johanna Ostrowska, and it was a Polish historian who works on gay men in Poland. But, you know, the extent to which the extent to which Nazis went after.

Laurie (45:26.998)
Mm.

Waitman (45:54.483)
non-German gay people, right? Which I think is, you know, now we're looking at, you know, like level of research that really, really hasn't been done. But in terms of the German society, you sort of hinted at this, but can you talk about what the change in policing is from the sort of essentially laissez faire Weimar? You know, what

Laurie (45:58.09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Laurie (46:08.597)
That's right.

Waitman (46:21.375)
what are the Nazi authorities doing proactively to go after these people? But then also, does this again differ depending on who they see that they're going after?

Laurie (46:36.022)
Yeah, well, let me talk, let me also, I can say a little bit about the situation beyond Germany's borders too, because I think that's a really important question, like, is this just in Germany? So yeah, I think this is like a really exciting area of research. I'm excited about the person you mentioned. I don't know her work, but I'm excited to look it up. But I tried to look at Poland. And I mean,

You know, yeah, I would just say like I wasn't able to really do to look at, I looked at the Polish Gestapo in so far as I could. And they just, I mean, they're not really keeping records. Like it's a free for all for them in Poland. So.

Waitman (47:16.379)
Well, and the Asian thing, you know, that again, just looking at a very sort of basic level, you know, is that there is a certain.

viewpoint by some of the Nazi authorities that, look, if Polish people don't want to procreate, that's fine. We don't really care as long as they're not corrupting good German boys, but if they want to go be gay with themselves, that actually solves one of our problems, which is not having more Slavic people around. Now, I know that's simplistic and there are, there certainly are and

Laurie (47:37.15)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Laurie (47:43.47)
Great.

Laurie (47:53.314)
Yeah.

Waitman (47:55.959)
Again, Johanna Strauskas work shows this. There certainly are non-German Poles who are arrested and put into camps and these kind of things. And not just when they come into contact with Germans, but also you have the problem of there are areas of Poland that used to be Germany. But anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Laurie (48:05.907)
Yeah, well, that's.

Laurie (48:11.352)
Oh.

Laurie (48:17.47)
Yeah, right. Well, so I looked at Prague and they're absolutely arresting people in Prague. I mean, it's almost like, yeah. And I mean, so the under existing Czech law, but I would think that in France, they probably are rounding up gay men in France. Like I think it seems like in the States where there's a peaceful, like it's the war, it's not.

Well, actually, but I mean, her work on Poland is showing that, too. So so, yeah, it does seem like. I just for the Czech lands, I think they from what I saw, I admittedly, I only looked for cases of women arrested for having sex with women, but there are some from Prague.

and their tech.

Waitman (49:04.143)
And so, but in Germany, are the German authorities, like, are they, you know, are they going to gay clubs? I mean, obviously, they're closing them down, but are they are they doing sting operations? I mean, how interested are they? Or is it a case of if someone drops one of these people on my doorstep as a police officer, then I'll take care of it. But I'm not necessarily going after it.

Laurie (49:29.842)
Yeah, that's a really important question. So it's like, how interested are they? I would say they are. How to describe it is not the first priority of the Nazi states around a gay man. It's not. So let me try to illustrate this. Okay, it's not their first priority, but it is modern history's worst massacre of people for being gay by far like the number of people killed. So yeah, this is a super violent state.

Waitman (49:54.353)
Yeah.

Laurie (49:58.846)
And even when it's not a high priority, they killed, we think they may have killed like thousands of people just for having relationships with other adults. Like it's really horrible. So, but the way it works, so there's a really good local study of Cologne. In Cologne, there were like two police officers and this was their assignment, but they also had other assignments.

And the way that they policed gay men is that they would stake out one of the public urinals. But there are only two of them and they didn't stake it out every night. And they would really only focus on this one urinal. So if you had the good fortune to know that was the urinal that they were staking out, you could cruise in one of the other urinals and not get arrested. And aside from that, the way they found people is through denunciation. And that's it. You know, I.

I was really interested to see that there are still gay clubs, like in Hamburg and Berlin. Those are two cities I've looked at a lot. In Hamburg, it was the Statt Casino, but the Hamburg police would get denunciations of people from their neighbors. One story that really stands out for me is a young man and a young woman who are sharing a rented room in a family's apartment.

and they were pretending to be a couple, like a heterosexual couple. And they told people they were engaged, but actually they were both gay. And they would go out together at night and have other relationships and stuff. And it was a way to have cover. And for reasons that aren't clear, one of the neighbors noticed this, and it particularly reported the guy to the police. He may have been gender nonconforming. The language is kind of like he's a sissy or something.

The Gestapo, no it wasn't the Gestapo, it was probably the regular police. Sorry, erased Gestapo there. They like called them in and interrogated both of them and they were going all the time to this bar called the Shtat Casino. And the police are, and the reports of the police are always like, the notorious Shtat Casino. They went to the notorious Shtat Casino where they met another, she met her girlfriend at the Shtat Casino. It's like, I was always like.

Laurie (52:17.974)
you guys aren't closing the stock casino. Like, why aren't you? You clearly, it's a gay bar. But they didn't. And like, I mean, maybe they raided it. They're in Berlin, they would occasionally raid these places and they're totally clandestine. Like it's all word of mouth now. There's no public advertising. The owners of these bars have to be super careful and they probably will kick the gay people out if they think there are too many of them. Berlin had same sex dancing before the Nazis in Weimar. Like same sex dancing, which it turns out.

Waitman (52:19.907)
Yeah.

Laurie (52:44.662)
That is huge. I think there's no other city in the world, maybe, that a lot, like in New York City, on Fire Island, you couldn't have same-sex dancing in the 30s. Like it's, that's, it's, Fire Island is this island off of New York where there was virtually no police presence. And even there, in this town that was supposedly so open to people, like they wouldn't let people same-sex dance. Berlin used to have that, but like that's all gone now in the Nazi period, you know, in these, in these underground bars. But at the same time, I think it shows you that like,

The bulk of the policing power is focused on other things, such as crushing the Communist Party, harassing the Jewish community, rounding them up, putting them on trains, harassing the Roma community. There's a ton of Ras and Shonda cases, the race to file make cases. I think there are, the numbers of people who are accused of having quote unquote interracial sex in Nazi Germany probably approaches the number of gay men who are.

who are accused of gay socks. That's a whole community of people who they just go after. Yeah, so, yeah.

Waitman (53:52.627)
And so would the, would transgender people?

would the, and this is a, this is a fortunately contemporarily relevant question, you know, would the Nazis, would Nazi authorities sort of file them under gay in the sense of like, you know, if we're looking for examples of trans people who are persecuted and suffered and or died under the Nazis, the Nazis are probably not categorizing them as trans people.

Laurie (54:26.038)
Yeah, that's right. So it's hard to find cases of, first of all, there aren't that many trans people. There aren't that many today. And I think it's the same. It's a small community. It's hard to find the files. But I've seen about 27 files, which I think is more than anybody else has looked at. And yeah, so it varies a little bit. There are some cases in Berlin where

trans guys get involved with the Berlin police and they're able to convince the police that they're not lesbian. They're like, I am not having relationships with women. I am not, you know, and once the police are like, okay, this person is not a lesbian, they seem to kind of be not so worried about them. So there's one that is kind of amazing where the guy went into the Berlin police.

and tried to renew his permit to cross-travel, which is like, yeah, it was like a really bad move. But the police, after a while, they were like, you're not, at first they were like, you're a lesbian, you're trying to use this to like, and they were like, we don't do that anymore, we don't do the permits, you know? And then, but then after a while they're like, look, just leave, you know, like, just go, we're not, and they're like, if you're living as a man, if no one complains, like.

Waitman (55:29.671)
Jeez. Optimistic.

Laurie (55:55.606)
whatever, you know, like, so in that case, I think like those cops probably were really influenced by what happened in Weimar and they kind of had a concept of this and they were like, okay, this isn't a lesbian, like, you know, I mean, also, they're not as worried about lesbians. But there's definitely no like national understanding of either what, who is trans and like, how should we address them? There's there's really like only one book that was published by somebody who published their dissertation.

and it's very anti-trans and it's like they're asocial, we need to put them in camps and stuff, but there's not like a national, well, I mean, the national police force that's created to police homosexuality and abortion is actually the national police force to police homosexuality transvestitism and abortion. So there is that, but I haven't ever found any files where they kind of explain.

you know, what is transvestitism and like, what should we do about it? And it seems like police are really going case by case. These are unusual cases. So there's that case in Berlin. And then the cases I've seen of trans women, you know, what it so some of them are from Hamburg. And it seems like Hamburg was kind of a particularly bad place to get in trouble with the police if you were trans, because there had been this research institute that like looked at transvestites in the.

in the Weimar period, and then some of those people seem to have kind of carried over. So like in the files, women will get arrested for like presenting as women in public and for being with men. And the police at first are like, sometimes at first they're confused, they're like, this is a woman, then they're like, no, this is a man in women's clothing. And then eventually they'll call in a medical expert. And then that person will be like, this person has transvestitism. Transvestitism is a form of degeneration. It's a form of like home.

it's they have homosexuality and transvestitism and they're asocial and it's all about degeneration. So it's kind of like in lay people's terms, they see it as like a worst case of homosexuality. Like they don't think people are born gay, right? So they think that homosexuality is kind of a more of this thing maybe related to degeneration. And here's transvestitism and it's sort of like, this coexisting thing that's related.

Laurie (58:14.542)
But whatever it is, it's bad, you know, because it's a feminized man to them. And that's like really, this is like, when they decide to send people to a camp, they have this statement in the file about kind of justifying why this is really a violation of fascism. And like this one woman's file, they're like, in the state, in the manly fascist state, the state of manly outlook, we can't tolerate a man.

going around in women's clothing, like counterfeiting the female sex. It's like a really clear statement of like, yeah, as fascists, we can't truck with this. And that's when people get sent to camps. And that woman was murdered in a camp.

Waitman (58:56.391)
Well, and it's worth pointing out, I think, obviously that first of all, there are lots of LGBT people amongst the Jewish population who end up in camps and are never there because of their identity, right? Just because there are these people in the population, right? And that also there are numbers of, because I know this was an issue with Auschwitz in terms of...

If you go to Auschwitz and go through the surviving prisoner records, you're probably still not getting an accurate representation of how many people are there either because they were gay or were gay, right? Because you could you could you could end up there as an asocial as the things you just mentioned. Right. And so when people are trying to play the gotcha game of like how many people were persecuted by the Nazis because of their sexual identity or whatever.

Even the official records are not telling you the truth necessarily of the situation, right?

Laurie (59:59.53)
Yeah, I think that's so important to mention, like, because we think we have a tendency to kind of be like we end up talking about, you know, they're like, show us evidence. And then the evidence we end up showing is like, people who were quote unquote Aryan who lived in Germany, who are arrested for this. But there's lots of people who are Jewish or Roma. I mean, I've I have a case I've had come across a couple of cases of queer Roma men in Berlin and the police files. But like, I mean, lots of

people, Soviet POWs, right, like people who are in the LGBT community who are murdered for other reasons. And they, you know, that quote unquote, I mean, I hate that thing about like, well, that doesn't count. Like, it's like, no, it does. We're just trying to say these people were there, you know? Like, what do you, but there's a, so there are two really famous trans, one is trans and one is intersex, but like Jewish Germans.

Waitman (01:00:47.217)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:00:56.226)
who survived. So one is Charlotte Sherlock, who fled, was almost like, at one point got arrested, like her girlfriend helps her get out, and she ended up in Brooklyn and lived her life in Brooklyn. And there's a guy named Carl M. Bayer, I mentioned him before he was intersex, but he turned any transitions, and he was a prominent, like,

worked in the Jewish community in Berlin and was pretty prominent, worked with Leo Beck and was arrested with him, I believe in 1937, and like fled and was fortunate to get out. But yeah, they're transgender and queer Jewish people. And yeah, and I mean, unfortunately, we're talking about tens of millions of people who were murdered. So yeah, they were there.

Waitman (01:01:44.187)
But I mean, this is one of those things where, you know, as a, as somebody that works on this, like you do, you know, if you go to Auschwitz and you die in Auschwitz of sort of the kinds of things you die in Auschwitz from because you're gay, or if you go to Auschwitz and die of those kinds of things because you're Jewish or because you are a Polish resistor, you're equally dead. You know, I mean, it's, it sort of then becomes a, you know, why are we trying to sort of privilege?

the suffering and arguably, and this is something that our listeners probably know, but, you know, in a lot of these places, if you're actually, if you're one of the men that ends up in one of these camps and you are identified as such, you're marked as a gay man, like in some ways you have the worst possible experience because not only do you get it from the guards, but you also often get it from your fellow prisoners as well. Right.

It's worth just pointing that out. I mean, that's sort of, I think, fairly common knowledge at this point. But, you know, it's not a competition, right? But maybe now we should move toward the present day a little bit because one of the reasons, yeah, go ahead, please.

Laurie (01:02:56.846)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:03:03.19)
Well, let me mention, I should have, I would be remiss if I mentioned the work of my colleague, Anna Heikova on this, which is really wonderful. And just the stories of, like one of the incredible stories that she found was a survivor who really attributed her survival of the killing centers to her relationship with another woman, that it was like this love that carried her through. And she didn't feel like she could talk about it after the war because she lived in, the 50s were so homophobic

Waitman (01:03:10.204)
Yep, yep, yep.

Laurie (01:03:33.386)
It took a really long time for some of the queer survivors to be able to tell their stories. Yeah, but yeah, let's talk about the present day.

Waitman (01:03:43.215)
Yeah, let's talk about the present day because, you know, the Holocaust, for better or for worse, you know, is also a memory issue. And we see all the time it being marshaled by a group or another group for its own purposes. And the most relevant piece to today's episode is this idea that trans people aren't part of the Holocaust.

And maybe we can talk about the court case from 2022, which I think is an interesting thing. And I'm not quite sure I understand fully the outcome of it. And I'm sure you can maybe help us with that.

Laurie (01:04:26.91)
Okay, yeah, so there was a Twitter feud in Germany. Let me get, I think it's July of 2022 when it started. Yeah, I may have that date off, but now it's about a year and a half back, and it was so similar to what happened when J.K. Rowling.

tweeted a couple of days ago, the tweets were really similar. And it was a prominent opponent of transgender rights in Germany, who started tweeting about the Holocaust. And then it spiraled into a legal battle because people tweeted back that she was denying the Holocaust, which is a very, it's a crime in Germany. Yeah. So she sued them for that. She, and it's under this German.

Waitman (01:05:14.195)
It's a crime in Germany.

Laurie (01:05:23.614)
So here, my knowledge of contemporary German law is like a little bit, but it's not exactly defamation, but I think it's kind of, it's basically sort of like defamation. It's like violating her rights, kind of her fundamental rights. And it went to court. And so the first court ruled against her and then she appealed and she lost the appeal. So initially what the court found is that

her rights were not violated because transgender people were persecuted by the Nazis. And the appeals court decided not to base, the appeals court said, look, we're not going to make the decision based on that. We're going to look at these other issues in the case. But she lost the appeal. And it...

Waitman (01:06:10.574)
So the person...

just to be clear because this is something that's been thrown up in my face and I'm this is not my thing. So the person who was accused of being a Holocaust denier essentially. Sued the people that accused her of that. And the first court said no. That the that you know, they were accurate essentially in calling you a Holocaust denier because trans people were victimized by the Nazis, which therefore makes them part of this.

Laurie (01:06:40.842)
I think, yeah, I think to try to...

Waitman (01:06:42.487)
And then the second court case overruled that.

Laurie (01:06:46.15)
No, it wasn't overruled. But I would characterize the first court's decision as your rights weren't violated because there's basis. They said something like, I thought it was a good, yeah, they said this was very heated. This was a very heated thing that happened on Twitter. And they said it was heated on both sides. And they had grounds to say what they said. And therefore, your rights aren't violated. That was the lower court decision. And the appeals court upheld that.

Waitman (01:06:48.071)
Okay, okay.

Waitman (01:06:57.435)
It was a reasonable critique.

Waitman (01:07:08.761)
Right.

Waitman (01:07:15.463)
Okay.

Laurie (01:07:15.882)
Yeah, the appeals court decision upholds it, but says, we're upholding this for other reasons, but they didn't overturn the lower court's rule. I mean, she lost twice.

Waitman (01:07:25.351)
So was it a case of, in your article, because I read your article about this, and you mentioned that, again, you point out what's really fascinating is that kind of like this case, and I think, I don't know if you mentioned it, but the Libstock case is another example of this where you actually have a court kind of like weighing in on what is historical truth or not, which is a.

Laurie (01:07:43.37)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:07:51.439)
It's kind of scary, I think, both ways, because it's like, if they get it wrong, you know, then so the but what is what you're saying that in the second in the appeals, the appeals court was looking at sort of legal technicalities or elements of the defamation point of it and not choosing not to make a historical judgment or yet.

Laurie (01:08:12.918)
That's right, yeah, they said we're not gonna make a, we don't need to make a historical judgment to decide this. That's what they said.

Waitman (01:08:22.043)
So what is, I mean.

What is its state? Why is this becoming such a such a huge issue for, for I suppose opponents of transgender rights? You know, why are they turning to the Holocaust as a as a tactic?

Laurie (01:08:42.058)
Yeah, that's such a great question. Like that's such a great question. Um, that's a great question. You know, it's to me, like I didn't grow up with the internet. So it's like also just the way the, um, I mean, the way these things can kind of explode on Twitter, which I guess now is called X, um, it's just such a weird. Okay. Good. Yeah. I don't really want to, I deleted.

Waitman (01:09:05.027)
It's always Twitter. It's always going to be Twitter to me.

Laurie (01:09:10.566)
at mine but uh

Why is this coming? You know, I don't know, Waitman, like why they're kind of latching onto the, I mean, I think, I think it's maybe a confluence of like, this is pretty new scholarship, like, I mean, some of the scholarship, you know, there's a book from 2005 that includes a lot of this information, but he does make the argument, which I also find really.

I really disagree with it and actually find it kind of funny, but his argument is like, well, we can't say transgender people were persecuted because the Nazis didn't think they were transgender. So it's like, but I'm like, yeah, but they also thought Jews were a parasite. I mean, what they thought, like what you said, like they thought, you know, they had all kinds of crazy ideas.

Waitman (01:09:54.8)
Right.

So like when they, so on the Eastern Front, when they're, when they're shooting women and children and saying they're partisans, do we then say that like the Nazis didn't persecute Jews because they were partisans? I mean, like, you know, it's ridiculous.

Laurie (01:10:10.378)
They said they were they thought they were partisan, so they didn't shoot women and children because they thought they also believed in world ice teaching. There's a new I'm really excited to read that new essay and Monica box edited volume about world ice teaching where like the Aryans get unfrozen from the ice and like they had all kinds of wacky ideas. Yeah. So but anyway, I mean, so I guess what I was seeing is like, it's not brand new, the scholarship, but like it is, you know, the I think the first really.

grounded academic, like trans studies informed work on it is coming out now. So it is kind of like, and the archives been there all along. Like those people, I mean, you know, these files I found, yeah, like this poor woman in Humbert, my wonderful colleague Bodhi Ashton has a great essay on this woman in Humbert who like, not only did she get murdered, but like she wrote all these essays about her gender identity. And like she continuously told the police to go screw themselves. She was like incredibly brave, like.

Waitman (01:10:47.648)
existed.

Laurie (01:11:04.898)
They made her stop dressing. She had a permit to dress as a woman. They made her stop. They took the permit away. So she wore men's clothes, but she was so feminine that she still passed as a woman. She was just wearing really femi pants. And she totally, yeah, she was like, fine, I'll wear pants suits, screw you. And that's just incredible. All this documentation and this woman's story was there all along. It's been there all along and nobody.

Waitman (01:11:16.443)
like pantsuits and like, you know.

Laurie (01:11:28.81)
I mean, she actually, people were like, well, that's a gay man. It's like, no, she really is super clear in the file. She's like, I'm a woman. My sense of myself is a woman. So it's almost like part of the thing, you know, it's this, this general weird thing about transgender where like, it was there all along, but like so many historians just weren't thinking about it. You know, so, I mean, in some fairness to like, the people who are like, what, there were transgender people in the 1920s, like, you know, partially like, yeah, the scholarship is being done now. I mean.

Waitman (01:11:58.863)
Which is, which is in many ways, it's also, this is what I think is so interesting about memory stuff is, you know, that it's just as much a commentary on where we are today as it is about the actual historical debate. Right. I mean, like the reason that people can come on Twitter and scream, where's all the doc, where's all the scholarship on trans people if they were, you know, persecuted by the Nazis? Well, exactly. Right. That's, that's part of the problem is that we haven't, we haven't been accepting of this.

Laurie (01:11:59.191)
Like when I was...

Waitman (01:12:27.903)
in sort of officialdom up until now. And so there's a reason, there's an institutional structural reason why we don't have this, this documentation out there, just like I suppose 40 years ago, you can make the argument about women, um, in the Holocaust or all these, any, any one of a number of groups where scholars are now focusing on it in a way that they weren't before and often because not always, but often because there was like a negative.

Laurie (01:12:43.786)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:12:57.284)
a negative influence to not do it.

Laurie (01:13:00.378)
it's like Raoul Hilberg writing his dissertation, that story, his faculty were like, you will never get a job with this dissertation. It was like the first academic dissertation on the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi state. And they were like, you can't do that, no one will hire you. Like, no one cares. Like, right? I mean, the yeah, the way that we like tell this history has is really shaped by the moment we're in and we're telling it in a better, we're getting better and better, you know, like,

we're getting better and better at it. And weirdly, like, no, it's just like our account, like after Raoul Hilberg's book, it was like one of the first books on the murder of Jewish people, the way we taught the history of the Nazi state got much better because before him, they were literally teaching it without mentioning Jewish people being persecuted. Like that was a really inaccurate account because as like you know, and like Chris Browning has shown, but like all kinds of people,

Waitman (01:13:30.447)
Well, and I think the other thing is, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Laurie (01:13:59.514)
you know, Michael Burley, but like the anti-Semitism was at the heart of the regime. It was the heart of everything they did. They were constantly talking about it. Like, like we had an inaccurate view of Nazi Germany and it got better. And because of the moment that Raoul Hauberg was in where you should, you could suddenly write a dissertation on the persecution of Jewish people. And that's happened again and again. Yeah, like with gender history, you know, people are like, we can't do gender history of the Holocaust for a while.

I mean, gay men, there's a great quote in Jen Evans's book of a mayor in Germany, I think in the 50s, who's like, we have to be careful who we memorialize at Sachsenhausen because some of them, some of the people were in there for a reason, you know, like those homosexuals. We don't want to memorialize them.

Waitman (01:14:42.863)
Well, it bears mentioning, right, that the gay men convicted of paragraph 175 stuff under the Nazis were like explicitly not amnestied, right, after the war, when everybody else sort of got there. Oh, well, you were convicted under the Nazis for Nazi crimes. I mean, by the Nazis, right? They put you in a concentration camp and accused you of something. We're going to say that that's not true. We're going to expunge that from your record.

Unless you were put there for, for one 75, in which case, sorry, you know, that was a legitimate, it was a legitimate criminal sort of conviction. I mean, it.

Laurie (01:15:24.382)
Right? Yeah. Or like all the people. Oh, sorry. Well, I think, I think like the next generation is going to be like, what about all the people in the camp system because they're criminals? People who are in there for like panhandling or even for theft.

Waitman (01:15:27.335)
It's a-

You're good.

Waitman (01:15:43.707)
Well, and even with the, you know, again, like this is why you're here, because you're the expert. But, you know, I came across one example when I was looking again, particularly specifically for the Holocaust in Eastern Europe book. But there was a guy who was he was he had been convicted and sent to prison under 175. And I'm not sure if it was under the Nazis or before.

Laurie (01:15:47.978)
the murder.

Waitman (01:16:12.891)
But basically, he did his time and the prison warden was like, he was a great prisoner. He did everything fine, like cool, like no risk to society. And he was out for like a month. And then the Gestapo got him. But basically because he didn't do anything, but the Gestapo just had the records and they were like, well, you know, we're going to put you back in a camp. You know, even though you...

You hadn't really done anything. I mean, I didn't do anything anyway, but like you hadn't there was no they didn't pick him up again but it was just a case of you know easy pickings, right But I mean, I think I mean I think it's important to point out Because one of the things that you know, and I am NOT I am NOT the important element here But I'm an example I suppose is in this latest Twitter thing, you know, I've been I've been accused of being revisionist historian

Laurie (01:16:56.958)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:17:12.443)
And one of the worst things that Holocaust deniers ever did was make the word revisionist like a bad thing, right? Because like all history is ultimately revising. All good professional history is looking at things in a different way, not necessarily overturning accepted knowledge, but it's adding, right? If you look at it in a positive way. And I think one of the pieces of rhetoric that I've seen thrown about in the public

is that somehow being more inclusive of who was victimized by the Nazis takes away from other victims, which I just don't think is accurate. I don't think that anybody is viewed as less a victim of the Nazis because we're all saying, well, also actually this group was also persecuted.

Laurie (01:18:07.006)
Yeah, that makes me really, that makes me sad too that happened in Germany too that like you're mocking the other victims because You know, because I'm like, what about these poor transgender like I have these files of these transgender women who were murdered and I'm like, What are you saying about them, you know that we can't even talk about their murder to that's like making fun of everybody else. You know, it's just so transphobic. It's like trans people are just, you know,

a joke or whatever, like makes me so sad. But I will say to your earlier question, like, why is this going down now? I didn't know about kind of the anti-transgender internet until I started publishing, in particular on the German court case, because I had published on the history, but it's like when I started publishing about the... And I don't feel like I had a lot to say about her, but when my work touched on what's going on with this anti-trans German feminist, like...

I kind of was introduced to all these people online who like to engage in this debate. And like the way they go about it is not anything I had ever encountered as a historian where they will just come after you with a really like super intense language that's scary. And then they will like try to pick up one, they'll take a little detail and twist it and kind of come and come and come with it. And like, I mean, they went around.

like demanding retractions from places that have published my essays and stuff. Like I've never had anything like that happen. And it was really, I don't know, anyone who's ever had a retraction, you know, like, I mean, nobody retracted anything because the editors were like, what the what's going on? But it was like it was it was creepy and it gave me a lot of. I don't know, you know, I definitely was like, I'm not going to be on social media because I don't want to then I won't have to see the stuff, but it.

Waitman (01:19:51.106)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:20:05.194)
It gave, I don't know, it gave me pause and it's this issue. Like, I've published lots of other stuff. In my book that came out, the end of the book kind of ends by being like, everyone is gay, you know, you're gay too. Straight reader, like, yay, gay. And like, the only feedback I got on that was like everyone, you know, gay people who are like, I love that you wrote everyone was gay. You know, I've never, it's not the first time that I've.

I mean, I don't feel like that's that controversial, but it's a little bit maybe, you know, that's gonna but like, I'm not as an academic historian, I'm used to getting tough questions at conferences maybe are like from peer reviewers, but it's always very grounded in the facts and in reality and in and I think in a good faith, you know, as as, as critical as people can be at the German Studies Association and the q&a, like it's usually good faith, right? And the and what happens on the internet, like

from these people who I don't really know who they are, it's not in good faith, it's in bad faith.

Waitman (01:21:04.123)
Well, and it just escalates. Right. And again, obviously, I am the lowest on the totem pole. But there was a guy who wrote a big, very long thread in the most recent example. And it was, as I said, it's a case study. It's a shining example of a red herring. Because basically, the upshot of it is, as I see it, the guy is transphobic, fundamentally.

But the whole thread is about Hirschfeld was a fan of eugenics. Eugenics is bad. It's like agreed. Like not no argument here. Doctors in camps did lots of awful experiments on people. Again, also no argument for me. Right. It was there was there was no there there. Right. It was just it was just this weird like by putting these things next to each other, we're trying to associate.

Laurie (01:21:55.53)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:22:03.451)
you know, gender reassignment surgery with, you know, Nazi medical experiments and stuff. And it's just like, what are you doing? Like this, this doesn't make any, it just doesn't on its face make any sense except that you're, you're just cloaking yourself in various pieces of Holocaust history to be a sort of transphobic asshole.

Laurie (01:22:23.754)
Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly, I couldn't have put it better. That's exactly what happened.

Waitman (01:22:26.615)
I mean, and I'm just like, you know, what are you doing? Like it's, um, and it, but it also, it, I don't know. I think it, there's this very bizarre moment in American, but I guess also in British and, you know, to the extent that I'm aware of world public opinion, but this, there's just this weird, um, it's almost like it, it reminds me in some sense of the

I suppose it was at the eighties or nineties where this whole like gay men are after your kids kind of thing, the whole pedophilia and like recruiting and grooming nonsense, right? That has just been reawoken as anti-trans rhetoric. And then people are grappling for things that they think ennoble that message. And if you can, if you can wrap yourself in the Holocaust.

I think they think it provides them with some kind of shield from criticism, you know, because then you're criticizing, how dare you criticize the Holocaust or minimize the Holocaust or whatever. But it's

Laurie (01:23:40.49)
Yeah, yeah, and I think, I think they like the attention. And then if you like, if you put Nazi, the word Nazi in a tweet or Holocaust, like, you know, the emotion goes up for everybody. The stakes are super high. And yeah.

Waitman (01:23:56.579)
Well, it's the conversation ender, right? I mean, like it's, you saw this with COVID and with everything else where the people just say, well, that's what the Nazis did. Though, ironically, in this case, it's, that's not what the Nazis did. You know, it's like, it's like, you know, um, some, which is also makes it weird. Like if you're on the side of like, excusing the Nazis from doing something, maybe rethink your position, right? Cause you're not, you're not on the right side of things, you know, like, I mean.

Laurie (01:24:12.501)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:24:24.487)
There probably are very few victim groups that the Nazis didn't or wouldn't have persecuted. I mean, looking for the one that they, you know, they got off, it's like very bizarre.

I don't know.

Laurie (01:24:37.006)
Actually, one of my students asked this really good question. He was like, what about the fraternities when they came to power? Because the fraternities were super rabidly, right? Right of center. Like, because I was talking about coordination and how they took over all the social groups. And I was like, wow, that's a great question. I don't know. And I looked it up and I was like, nope, they totally took over the fraternity. Even the fraternities. Yeah. Like, what groups do you think, you really think they were like, oh, trans women. Yeah, gay pride parade. Like, like.

But it also plays on this really, really old trope that the Nazis are gay or they're sexually disordered. There's some kind of like moral disorder there that caused murder and also causes gender bending and also causes gay love. And you see it in the movie Cabaret actually, which I love the movie Cabaret, but it's like, it recycles this idea that the Nazis are kind of queer and they like to cross dress and like the Cabaret becomes the space of fascism. And...

Waitman (01:25:14.451)
Mm-hmm.

Laurie (01:25:31.394)
that actually dates back to before they took power with the accusations about Rome. And then in the post-war, West German historians really latched onto that and they were like, yeah, that's why they got so morally disordered. They were, you know, they couldn't keep their sexual selves ordered or their sort of non-murdering selves. And it was all, you know, homosexuality and like sodomy and murder are kind of like, like that. And that just like keeps getting reiterated as my friend Lynn pointed out to me last night, but this is kind of that too,

Like, yeah, the Nazi, I mean, what upset me so much is, yeah.

Waitman (01:26:03.651)
I mean, this is that great example of, you know, it's really good that you brought that up because there's also this like, oh, Hitler. What is Hitler's sexuality? And, you know, my response is always like, who gives a shit? Like, it's not predictive, right? It didn't... whatever his sexuality. Maybe he was. I don't know. But there's no evidence either way, you know, but it doesn't matter. Like, that's not a...

There's no sort of connection, right, between one's sexual identity, which, which in Hitler's case just seems weird, whatever it was. Um, but there's also this, and you see this with the transphobic stuff because it, because on the, on the, the internet stuff that I've seen, it also always comes back to bathrooms. It always comes back to, I'm just want to protect, protect women and

as I pointed out and as I'm not the only person, everybody points this out, like the number one threat to women is men. It's not transgender people, you know, but it's men, like it's not a person who is identifying as a woman going into a restroom, you know, like this is not the, but there is this, but I think that, I think there is an interesting connection to what you just said that,

Laurie (01:26:59.32)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:27:12.065)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:27:19.702)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:27:27.879)
from that perspective, the transphobic people, they have to up the ante, that this isn't just like a sort of cultural degradation thing, this is an actual threat, a violent threat in some ways to people, which, you know, obviously it isn't. But it's interesting you make that comparison to where this actually something that people use to sort of deride the Nazis is sexuality, which I hadn't really put that together.

Laurie (01:27:39.85)
Hmm, yeah, yeah.

Laurie (01:27:55.198)
Yeah. And the, I mean, I was really upset about the thing you mentioned about, like, doc-ow and maybe transgender medicine was a Nazi medical experiment, which has absolutely no basis in reality. Because right now in the US, like, the Republican controlled states are totally banning access to trans healthcare for

for people under 18 and they're trying to restrict it for adults. I know people, I know adults who are like moving out of red states because they can't get health care anymore. And that's never happened before. There have never in history been laws restricting whether or not you can get care for gender dysphoria. And it's been, we have over a hundred years of people getting medical services. And it's the first time that that's been restricted.

Um, and, and it's really, it's huge, you know, there's like hundreds of bills and trans people are terrified. And like, that's the context, you know, that's the context of like, oh, maybe. I mean, I, we've been like, I was like, pissed. I was like, I was like reading up on the, the hypothermia experiments, which I had not read up on before. And like.

it was really horrible. And then I was like, I cannot believe that I'm doing this because I'm being trolled, you know, by these people who just want to ban healthcare, and they'll say anything. And like, here I am reading about the hypothermia experiments, which are like, have absolutely nothing to do with gender. Like, it, yeah, it was, I was mad. Yeah.

Waitman (01:29:30.215)
Right. And I mean, and just because like it's this weird, like we'll move on from this, but the one that I've seen most recently is Hirschfeld was into eugenics. Other random Nazi doctor was into eugenics. That random Nazi doctor at Dachau did the high altitude pressure experiments. Ergo, I mean, it's just a complete non sequitur, right?

Laurie (01:29:38.827)
Ew.

Laurie (01:29:57.978)
Yeah, it's a total non sequitur. And the guy, I mean, not to excuse this guy, but it's like, he, he's reprehensible the Dachau guy. He, he was a Luftwaffe high ranking medical official. And he was like, at a, he was at a conference, and he published a paper. He is not the guy who ran the hypothermia experiment, you know, like, but I mean, we're professional historians. And like, this is not how history usually works, where we're chasing down these weird red herrings, like,

Waitman (01:30:10.426)
Oh yeah, I mean...

Laurie (01:30:25.698)
But I do want to say, I don't think Hitler was gay. I actually, I agree with you that it's not really relevant, but like he had a long-term girl, like there was a rumor started by his enemies in Weimar. I've looked at it. It doesn't seem to be based on anything. And he had like a girlfriend.

Waitman (01:30:28.432)
Yes, yes, yeah.

Waitman (01:30:36.013)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:30:41.151)
Yes. Yeah, yeah, no, it's worth pointing that out. I didn't mean to imply that I thought he was. I don't. I mean, to the extent that anybody can know. It's just there's this idea that you only had one testicle. And all of these weird things that it's like, that's just, you know, who cares?

Laurie (01:30:49.441)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:30:58.346)
yeah right, which apparently Stalin may have spread that rumor

Laurie (01:31:09.226)
Yeah, like he was a vegetarian too, but and he loved dogs and-

Waitman (01:31:11.375)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah. I mean, but I think, you know, again, like what makes this, I think, have a particular valence for me as well is, you know, it's one of those situations where. You know, people are actually behaving like the Nazis, as you pointed out, with like all of the laws and, you know, this is not an academic debate in the sense of all that's at stake is, you know, whether I'm right or wrong. I mean, it.

there are actual policies that affect actual human beings negatively in very real negative ways. And so I think that that's one of the reasons why it's important the work that you do and also having the opportunity to sort of publicize that to be like, look, like here's the history that's being abused, you know, for the purposes of justifying, because ultimately in some sense,

That's what this is about in the same way that Holocaust denial is ultimately about anti-Semitism, right? Because ultimately the reason that you're denying the Holocaust, at least as it deals with gas chambers and that kind of stuff, is because you're anti-Semitic. Like, you know, that's going to piss off Jews and you want you want to hurt Jewish people. And I think the same the same is, in a sense, true here as well. You know, it's not a good faith. It's not a good faith discussion. It's.

Laurie (01:32:25.738)
Yeah.

Laurie (01:32:29.752)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:32:39.791)
It's we want to justify our intolerant behavior, but it's more than sort of intolerance because it actually has real world effects and it's driving policy. Right. I mean, I guarantee you that in the next three months, some congressman is going to cite one of these internet theories about the Nazis and transgender people by way of justifying something.

Laurie (01:33:06.334)
Yeah, yeah, I bet you're right.

Waitman (01:33:10.351)
ridiculous and awful. Um, which is, which is sort of sad. Um, but, but let's, um, let's, let's leave on a slightly more optimistic note, maybe, um, cause I know I've taken up too much of your time already, um, but let's, let's talk about, uh, give us your, I always ask, uh, what is one book Holocaust related or in your area related that you found? Um,

Laurie (01:33:12.222)
Yeah. Well.

Waitman (01:33:39.671)
interesting, engaging, you know, useful, right? So we'll leave it on a somewhat of a positive note.

Laurie (01:33:47.262)
I want to say I'm glad we got to the Hitler I testicle thing. I think that we did it. We covered it if we got to it. And I'm really glad I think you brought it up. So I'm like, that's great. That was perfect. But yes, so I decided to just say there are so many incredible books. Like one of the fun things about this field is there's just so much good scholarship.

Waitman (01:33:51.948)
Yeah, we had to get to Hitler had one ball at some point.

Waitman (01:33:59.003)
Yeah, exactly.

Laurie (01:34:15.266)
But I'd say right now my three favorites are just for a general history of the Holocaust for like a beginner. Doris Bergen's book, War and Genocide is just incredible. And then I love, I mean, I love all of Chris Browning's work, but my favorite is Remembering Survival, which I think a lot of people haven't read. And I would absolutely recommend that if don't, if you've read Ordinary Men, you have to.

Waitman (01:34:37.095)
Don't sleep on the third album.

Laurie (01:34:39.602)
Exactly. You have to read Remembering Survival. It's flipping incredible. I love it's a just a beautiful book. And then of course, Marion Kaplan's Between Dignity and Despair is also like just a gorgeous book. So but I love many of them. Yeah, many really good books.

Waitman (01:34:52.147)
Awesome. Yeah, and as always, I will link to not only those, but also Laurie's books in the show notes so that you can check those out. Once again, thank you for listening. Please like and subscribe and leave us a rating or a comment. Those things help apparently in the great big algorithm in the sky.

And again, Lori, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

Laurie (01:35:25.634)
Sure, thanks a lot for doing this, thank you.