By: Myriam Brenner, FSWC Education Co-ordinator

With Pride Month celebrated in June in many countries, including Canada, we take the time to remember those the Nazis persecuted for being homosexual.

Magnus Hirschfeld was a German Jewish doctor who devoted himself to the study of sexuality and gender. After witnessing the horrors of World War I as a Red Cross physician, he supported the founding of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s democratic government. Gender and sexual norms were openly challenged, and gay communities flourished. This encouraged Hirschfeld to establish the Institute for Sexual Science and promote the rights of those who did not conform to existing sexual norms.

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they began to dismantle what they perceived as a decadent culture of homosexuality. They closed gay bars, associations and newspapers. Between 1937 and 1939, they arrested about 90,000 men under the German Criminal Code for being gay. Between 5,000 to 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by a pink triangle on their prisoner uniform. They were subjected to hard labour and inhumane medical experiments. Sexual relations between women were not subject to the same laws even though this was not acceptable in Nazi Germany.

In May 1933, in their pursuit of destroying any existence of homosexual communities, a group of Nazi students together with members of the Sturmabteilung (a paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party), broke into the Hirschfeld Institute, stealing books, clinical files and artifacts. These were all publicly destroyed in book burning ceremonies across Germany, as the Nazis claimed the books were “un-German.”

The Institute was forced to close down shortly after. At the time, Hirschfeld was not in Germany as he was travelling to deliver his lectures. Following threats, Hirschfeld decided to move to Switzerland as Germany, his country of birth, had become a dangerous place for him. He eventually moved to the French coast due to health issues.

Although to the Nazis Hirschfeld was a symbol of “un-German” culture, today he is recognized as an important early pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights and the related movement. In the 1990’s, the German government also recognized the Nazi persecution of homosexuals by overturning convictions that had been made under this regime.