Transgender people in Nazi Germany
In Nazi Germany, transgender people had a variety of experiences depending on whether they were considered "Aryan" or capable of useful work. According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Nazi German government "brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures." Some male-to-female transvestites were targeted under Paragraph 175 as part of the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany; Germany's transvestite community had a recognized subcategory (referred to by Magnus Hirschfeld as early as the 1920s as "total transvestites" or "extreme transvestites") that would later be recognized more widely in medical literature as transsexual. Historian Laurie Marhoefer argues that transgender people were a discrete target of Nazi persecution, citing instances of charges for violating Paragraph 183, a law against cross-dressing. Marhoefer also notes that the Nazis shut down several magazines published by transgender people, shut down the Eldorado Berlin nightclubs that some transgender people worked at, and shut down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexology research institute that advocated for transgender rights. Most people who held "transvestite certificates", given to them under the Weimar Republic, had them revoked or German police refused to recognize them. Despite these actions taken against transgender people by the Nazis, there was "little public discussion of trans people" in Germany. In 2022, the Regional Court of Cologne ruled that denying that trans people were victims of the Nazis qualifies as "a denial of Nazi crimes". See also
Liddy Bacroff
First homosexual movement
Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany
Lesbians in Nazi Germany

References

Further reading

 

LGBT in Nazi Germany
Transgender genocide
Transgender history in Germany