Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science

Magnus Hirschfeld was a groundbreaking researcher into gender and sexuality in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work was dedicated to scientific study with the hope of dispelling stigma around homosexuality. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from Houstuffworks
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fryne. Today we are going to
talk about Magnus Hirshfeldt, who was a groundbreaking researcher into

(00:21):
gender and sexuality in Germany in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. His name and his work have come
up in a lot of past episodes, including Alan L.
Hart and the Compton's Cafeteria Riots, and Henry Gerber and
Chicago Society for Human Rights. I also know a lot
of listeners have requested this one, but when I went

(00:41):
into the email to try to figure out people's names,
I couldn't figure out who. So thanks to people who
did request this one. We are not going to be
talking about Hirschfeld's work in an explicit way, but the
subject matter does mean that there's going to be more
sex talk in today's episode than there typically is on
our show. We are also talking primarily about gay Jewish

(01:04):
men living at a time when homosexuality was outlawed in
Germany and when the Nazis were coming to power, So
there are a number of things that we're going to
get into that fall into the general umbrella of disturbing
and upsetting. Magnus Hirschfeld was born on May fourteenth, eighteen
sixty eight, in Kohlburg, Prussia, to Hermann and Frederic Hirschfeld.

(01:27):
Today Kolberg is Kolobjig, Poland, and that's on the coast
of the Baltic Sea. The family was Jewish. Hermann was
a doctor, and Magnus was one of ten or possibly
eleven children. Magnus's father was really prominent and respected in
their community. Kohlberg had been home to a Prussian garrison.
It was basically a military town, and until about eighteen twelve,

(01:51):
Jews hadn't been allowed to live there at all. After
that changed, a small Jewish community formed, which was mostly
made up of merchants and their families. Magnus's father was
the most well educated man among this group, and consequently
he was elected the president of the Deputy Assembly, which
was sort of the Jewish communities organization of self government.

(02:12):
Magnus's father died when Magnus was seventeen, and he had
been so beloved by the community that a monument was
erected in his honor. This monument was unfortunately destroyed by
the Nazis. In nineteen thirty three, when Magnus was a teen,
he became involved with the Social Democratic Party, although he
doesn't seem to have taken an active part in party
politics beyond that point. After the Nazis came to power

(02:35):
in Germany, the Social Democratic Party was outlawed, but Hirschfeld's
name doesn't appear on lists of doctors who were part
of the party. Hirschfeld studied at a number of universities
before earning his MD in eighteen ninety two. He originally
wanted to study language and writing, and he described this
as his first real love, but for practical reasons, he

(02:56):
ultimately decided to become a doctor, although he was a
prolific writer for his entire career. During his university years,
Hirschfeld became increasingly secular. He stopped describing himself as Jewish
and started describing himself as a dissident. He joined the
Monist League during these years as well. If you're not
familiar with that term, Monism is the idea that there's

(03:17):
one single element or principle that's the fundamental basis of
all reality. It underpins a number of religions and philosophies,
and this was a huge influence on both Hirschfeld's secular
philosophy and his later research into sex and gender. After
completing his medical degree, Hirschfeld traveled for a while, including

(03:38):
going to Chicago to visit the World's Columbian Exposition and
to spend time with family members who had immigrated to
the United States. He paid for his trip by writing
newspaper reports. After he returned to Europe in eighteen ninety four,
he settled in Magdeborg, roughly between Hanover and Berlin. Hirschfeld
incorporated nature opathy into his medical practice. In Magorg, he

(04:01):
emphasized avoiding alcohol and drinking lots of water, taking lots
of walks in fresh air, and practicing good nutrition. This
put him a bit at odds with the rest of
the German medical community. There were plenty of other nature paths,
but they tended to be lay people. This wasn't common
at all for an MD in Germany to focus so

(04:21):
much on nature apathy rather than on conventional medicine. This
led to some of the other doctors nearby being really
critical of him and his work. After a year or
so in Magdeborg, Hirschfeld moved to Charlottenborg, not far from Berlin,
where he continued to work as a doctor, continuing to
have a focus in nature ropathy. It was about this
time that Hirschfeld started focusing his work on gender and sexuality.

(04:45):
One influence was probably the trial of Oscar Wilde for
gross indecency in eighteen ninety five. People in Germany knew
about this trial and it led to a lot of
discussions of homosexuality from both a medical and legal perspective.
In eighteen ninety six, Hirschfeld gave up his practice as
a doctor and a nature of path and devoted himself

(05:07):
to the study of sexuality and gender. He told a
different story about how he came to this decision, though,
although it's one that might be apocryphal. He wrote that
he had a patient who was supposed to be getting married,
and the patient in question was a young homosexual man.
The night before the wedding, he took his own life
rather than having to marry a woman. But first this

(05:28):
patient wrote a suicide note to Hirschfeld, his doctor, asking
him to tell his story and to use it to
help change society's understanding of homosexuality so that homosexual men
wouldn't be forced to hide their identities and marry women.
Hirschfeld's first written work on this subject came out that
same year. It was titled Sapho and Socrates, or how

(05:50):
is the Love of Men and Women for Persons of
their own sex? To be Explained? Under the advice of
his publisher, he used the pseudonym Theodore Raymond. This is
the only time that he didn't publish his work under
his own name. But Hirschfeld also told the publisher that
if anyone asked who had really written it, they could
absolutely say it was him. A lot of the people

(06:11):
who tried to track down the author of Sappho and
Socrates are people that today would fall under the umbrella
of gender and sexual minorities. People we would describe in
terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender today. These terms
weren't in use at all, or weren't in use in
quite the same way in eighteen ninety six, But that's

(06:32):
how we would describe folks in more modern times. As
a result of all these inquiries, in eighteen ninety seven,
Hirschfeld and other advocates established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. The
Scientific Humanitarian Committee was one of the first, if not
the first, established gay rights organizations in the world, and
we're going to talk more about it and its work

(06:53):
after we first paused for a little sponsor break. The
motto of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee is translated as justice
through science or through science justice. It was dedicated to
scientific study of gender and sexuality with the hope of

(07:15):
dispelling stigma around homosexuality. The organization was an advocate for
other reforms as well, including contraception and an overhaul of
divorce law to make it easier to get a divorce,
But the biggest focus was homosexuality, and on that front,
the Scientific Humanitarian Committee had a very concrete goal, the

(07:35):
repeal of paragraph one seventy five of the German Imperial
Penal Code, which dated back to eighteen seventy one. Paragraph
one seventy five outlawed homosexual conduct among men. In addition
to criminalizing homosexual behavior, this law also led to a
huge culture of blackmail in Germany. Blackmailers would threaten to

(07:57):
expose someone's real or alleged violation of paragraph one seventy
five and then extort huge amounts of money from their victims.
This added to the climate of fear and persecution of
gay men in Germany at the time. Added to the
repeal of paragraph one seventy five, Hirschfeld also wanted to
raise the age of consent in Germany from fourteen to sixteen.

(08:21):
He thought that it was only with some additional maturity
that a person could really know they were ready to
be sexually active and know with whom they were ready
to be sexually active. On top of that, raising the
age of consent would mean that pederasts wouldn't have a
loophole to get away with their crimes if paragraph one
seventy five was abolished. Hirschfeld was not the first person

(08:43):
to advocate for the reform of these laws in Germany.
That credit usually goes to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who gave
an address on the subject at the sixth Congress of
German Jurists in Munich in eighteen sixty seven, thirty years
before the establishment of the Scientific Humanitarian can and the
word homosexual had not been coined when Uleris made his speech,

(09:04):
and he was using completely different terminology that really isn't
in use today. But this is generally regarded as the
first time a gay person gave a speech on the
subject of gay rights. Ulrichs continued to campaign against paragraph
one seventy five until he finally had to leave Germany
in eighteen eighty. Yeah, his advocacy against laws that criminalized

(09:26):
homosexuality goes back even before paragraph one seventy five was
written into the code, So in a lot of ways,
Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee were picking up where
Orrix had left off. The organization drafted a petition arguing
for the removal of paragraph one seventy five from the
Penal Code, and they circulated it for the next thirty

(09:46):
three years, from eighteen ninety seven to nineteen thirty They
got thousands of signatures from well known prominent people, and
at its peak, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee had seven hundred
members the committee. He also published pamphlets and other informational material,
including sex education and education about homosexuality. One very popular

(10:09):
pamphlet was what must our Nation Know About the Third Sex?
Which people would ask to have male to their family
members or would casually leave on public transportation to try
to educate others. So at this point in his work,
Hirshfeld and others were framing homosexuality as being part of
a third sex. This was also how Orix had framed

(10:29):
his theories, and Hirschfeld was basically building off of that
previous work. So the basic idea was that homosexuals and
bisexuals all belonged to a third sex, which was different
from male or female. Hirshfeld did not stick with this
third sex idea for long, though. He conducted at least
thirty thousand interviews and extensive physical examinations of gay men

(10:52):
and lesbians, and toured places like gay communities and bars
all over Africa, North America, and Europe, and all of
this work led him to a totally different conclusion what
he described as sexual intermediaries. Essentially, according to Hirschfeld, everyone
was some mix of masculine, feminine, and in some cases

(11:14):
androgenous traits. So in this model, there were not just
two types of human being, male and female, who were
sexually dimorphic and sorted into matching binary genders. There were
more than forty three million possible combinations of a whole
range of indicators. This made gender and sexual orientation a

(11:35):
colossally large spectrum and not a matter of a binary
even though he was conceiving of all of this as
a seemingly infinite range of sexual orientations and genders. Hirschfeld
still tried to develop taxonomies that incorporated homosexuals, bisexuals, and
the like. In eighteen ninety nine, he published his first

(11:56):
Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, something he continued to publish
annually until nineteen twenty three. One of the things that
Hirschfeld was trying to do, and all of this study
and all of this taxonomizing, was to establish the idea
that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable. He thought that if
he made it clear that people were born this way,

(12:17):
that it would dispel stigma and it would provide a
strong argument for the repeal of paragraph one seventy five.
Over the next few years, Hirschfeld established himself as such
a renowned expert engender and sexuality that he was called
on as an expert witness in court cases related to homosexuality.
Some of his colleagues at the Scientific Humanitarian Committee advocated

(12:40):
releasing the names of prominent gay people to try to
undermine the legitimacy of paragraph one seventy five, what we
would describe as outing today, and Hirschfeld never agreed with
this strategy, but when he was called on to be
an expert witness. He tried to frame his testimony in
a way that he hoped would have the same general
outcome of dismantling paragraph one seventy five. These intentions had

(13:04):
the opposite effect in nineteen oh seven, when Hirschfeld was
called on as an expert witness during the Yulenberg affair.
This was part of a huge scandal and press campaign
that was led by journalist Maximilian Harden. Harden alleged that
German Emperor Kaiser Wilhem the second was surrounded by a
quote degenerated homosexual Camilla, and that that degenerated group was

(13:29):
led by Prince Philip Ulenberg. The Ulenberg affair went on
from nineteen oh six to nineteen oh nine, and in
nineteen oh seven, high ranking Prussian general Kunomultke accused Harden
of libel, saying that Harden was spreading lies about Moltke
being a homosexual. A civil trial followed and Hirschfeld was

(13:49):
a witness. One of the things that had to be
established at this trial was whether what Harden was saying
about Moltke was true, because if it was true, it
wasn't libel. Hirschfeld's testimony, which was founded on his idea
that homosexuality wasn't deviant and wasn't a pathology. Was that
Moltke was an unconscious homosexual, whether he knew it or not.

(14:12):
The conservative press was outraged over these statements. Even though
Hirschfeld himself did not believe homosexuality was pathological, deviant, or criminal,
much of the rest of Germany believed the exact opposite.
So while Hirschfeld hoped that his testimony would help normalize
the idea of homosexuality in the minds of many, he

(14:33):
was just committing slander, and in a second trial Hirschfeld
had to recant his original testimony. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee
started losing support and members, and Hirschfeld himself became the
target of both anti semitism and homophobia. In defiance of
all of that criticism, Hirschfeld continued working. In nineteen ten,

(14:54):
he published a work called The Transvestites, coining that term
as well as the term trans Neither of those terms
is really the preferred term today, but at the time
he was creating language for something that nobody had really
named yet. In The Transvestites, he'd tried to make it
clear that there was a distinction between cross dressing and homosexuality,
as well as between cross dressers and other people who

(15:17):
were at the time considered to be deviant, and once
again his goal was ending stigma. Cross dressing was not
outlawed under paragraph one seventy five, and when people were
arrested for cross dressing, the charges were usually vague offenses
like creating a disturbance. So he was hoping that by
drawing this very clear line dividing cross dressing from homosexuality,

(15:40):
that he would protect cross dressers from stigma and arrest
at the same time the transvestites. While groundbreaking, is also
kind of muddled by today's standards. His descriptions assumed that
all the people in his case studies in the work
are people that we would describe as cisgender today, that
they were the same gender as the sex that they
were assigned at birth. So the idea of being transgender,

(16:03):
which also wasn't a term that existed yet, does not
play a part in this at all, even though when
you read the case studies it's clear that some of
the people in them probably would have described themselves as
transgender if they lived today. In nineteen thirteen, Hirschfeld helped
establish the Medical Society for Sexual Science and eugenics. Hirschfeld

(16:25):
was vehemently against racial eugenics, but like a lot of
people at the time, he was in favor of the
idea of using eugenics to stop hereditary disease and improve
humanity in general. As we have discussed on the show before,
eugenics was an extremely mainstream concept at this point, and
the field of sexual science, which was brand new at

(16:46):
the time, was all tangled up with it. Yes, when
you look at this sort of newly developing field of
sexual science, there is a whole huge spectrum of how
people thought that eugenics canted to all of it, and
it's on the spectrum fum, oh, we could make humanity
a little better, to oh, we need to stop the

(17:06):
bad people from breeding. It's really all over the place
and it's tangled together. In nineteen fourteen, Hirschfeld published The
Homosexuality of Men and Women, which was a huge compendium
of research. At the time. This was the largest collection
of available research on gender and sexuality, and really, in
terms of just the sheer amount of information it collected

(17:28):
into one work, it might still be. In this work,
Hirschfeld continued his argument that homosexuality was not a pathology.
He argued that the psychiatric and interpersonal issues that gay
people faced were not a product of their sexuality, but
of the immense stress of trying to keep it a
secret and of living under so much stigma and discrimination.

(17:50):
He described it as quote the eternal battle between willing
spirit and weak flesh. That the perpetual fear of being discovered,
of blackmail, arrest, short sentences, loss of social status and
respect from family and friends greatly affects one's disposition, must
surely be nerve racking and could bring on a nervous breakdown, depression,

(18:13):
and thoughts of suicide. He also concluded that the reason
that homosexuality was so connected with deviance and medical literature
was that healthy and generally well adjusted homosexuals were able
to keep their sexual orientation a secret from their doctors.
So doctors only encountered homosexuals that they knew about when

(18:34):
there was some kind of physical or psychological problem going on,
or when they had been contacted by police to examine
someone who had been arrested for a crime. World War
One also began in nineteen fourteen, and much of the
work of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee turned to focus on
the war, like delivering care packages to troops. Hirschfeld was

(18:55):
called on to be an expert witness when servicemen were
suspected of homosexuality or cross dressing, but otherwise the World
War One years were something of a pause, and so
while they pause, we are going to pause and have
a little bit of a sponsor break. The period between

(19:18):
the end of World War One and the rise of
the Nazi Party in Germany is known as the Weimar Republic,
and the field of sexual science flourished in both Germany
and Austria during these years. It was a turbulent time,
but also one of some social progress and a whole
sexual revolution. Lots of other groups formed to advocate for
the legalization of homosexuality and for rights and protections for

(19:42):
gay people. In nineteen nineteen, using his own money, Magnus
Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science, also called the
Institute for Sexology. Initially, the institute was dedicated to mainly
scientific research and training related to sexuality and gender, but
it soon expanded to include marriage counseling, counseling related to

(20:04):
sexual identity and orientation, a medical facility, and a massive
library on gender and sexuality. When we say that it
is massive, it was incredibly huge. It encompassed basically everything
that was known about gender and sexuality in the early
twentieth century, including tens of thousands of books, original photographs,

(20:25):
and letters, and all of Hirschfeld's extensive collection of primary
data from all of the studies that he had been doing.
The Institute saw four thousand patients in its first year alone.
The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was folded into the Institute as
its Sex education division. The institute's research continued on the

(20:45):
same tack that Hirschfeld had been pursuing earlier, in looking
for some kind of evidence that homosexuality was inborn and
had a biological basis. A lot of the ways that
we might do this today, like brain scans and hormone study,
didn't exist yet, so he was looking at people's observable traits,
such as in four hundred sixty three homosexual men, one

(21:08):
hundred twenty eight had undeveloped Adams apples, two hundred nineteen
had poorly developed ones, and only one hundred sixteen had
quote unquote normal ones. Or in five hundred homosexual men,
most had less to no body hair or very fine
body hair or in gay men, the width of the
hips tended to be about the same as the width

(21:30):
of the shoulders, whereas non gay men generally had broader
shoulders than their hips. And basically he was trying to
figure out what the norm was and figure out if
homosexuals deviated from that norm, and looking at just about
every physical trait you could think of to make these comparisons.
He also supported the work of Austrian researcher Eugen Steinach, who,

(21:52):
along with other research was building off the discovery of
sex hormones with the idea of transplanting gonadal tissue for
one person to another. This unfortunately did not work, and
in some cases it caused serious problems when the transplanted
tissue became necrotic, but Sinak is viewed as one of
the early pioneers of indercronology. Also in nineteen nineteen, Hirscheld

(22:15):
participated in the creation of a film called Different from
the Others, which was the first film to call for
decriminalization of homosexuality. The film was almost immediately banned and
it was later burned by Nazis. Was probably while working
on this film that Hirschfeld met Karl Giza, which is
one of only a couple of long term relationships in

(22:36):
his life that we really know about. Hirschfeld was very
private about his personal life, and for a lot of
it he seems to have lived alone. That sets him
apart from Karl Heinrich Rix, who publicly talked about his
own homosexuality, while Hirschfeld never publicly discussed himself as a
gay man. Giza moved in with Hirschfeld in nineteen nineteen.

(22:57):
In nineteen twenty eight, Hirschfeld co founded the World League
for Sexual Reform, which had existed in some form since
nineteen twenty six but wasn't formally chartered until two years later.
The World League hosted large conferences on the subject of
sexual reform, everything from women's rights to contraception to homosexual rights.

(23:18):
Throughout all of this, Hirschfield was still doing all this research,
and he was still advocating for the repeal of paragraph
one seventy five, and in late nineteen twenty nine it
looked like that was probably going to happen. A Penal
Code Reform Committee voted to remove the paragraph, with three exceptions.
One was if one party was under twenty one and

(23:39):
the other wasn't another was if one party quote used
a position of influence to pressure the other, and the
third was if it was a commercial relationship, in other words,
if it was sex work. Within the movement to abolish
paragraph one seventy five, this was really controversial to some.
It was a win, but the proposed change effectively raised

(24:00):
the age of consent for gay meen to twenty one,
which was higher than it was for anyone else. It
also made the punishments for homosexual acts that were still
illegal much harsher than they had been before, so in
the minds of others, it actually did more harm than good.
In spite of this vote, though a new penal code
did not go into effect, the revised code didn't make

(24:21):
it through the legislature before the rise of the Nazi Party.
In late nineteen thirty Mangus Hirschfeld left Germany on a
speaking and fundraising tour. He traveled all over the world.
Press in the US called him the Einstein of sex.
In Shanghai in nineteen thirty one, he met and began
a relationship with a man named Lee Chu Tong. Hirschfeld

(24:43):
and Carl Giza were still a couple as well at
this point. While in India, Hirschfeld started hearing rumors that
he was being targeted by the Nazis. He had also
started to experience a range of health issues. He contracted
malaria while he was on his tour. He also had
diabetes and a nerve disorder in a series of heart attacks.
The stress of not knowing for sure what was going

(25:04):
on back home in Germany made all of this a
lot worse, and he never went back to Germany after
starting that tour in nineteen thirty On May sixth, nineteen
thirty three, Nazis destroyed the Institute of Sexual Science. Copies
of a lot of Hirschfeld's published papers and books still exist,
but most of his primary data was destroyed in this attack.

(25:26):
On May tenth, material taken from the institute was burned
in Opera Square, along with other books that were declared
to be anti German. Hirschfeld also became a part of
Nazi propaganda as an example of from the Nazi perspective,
an evil degenerate Jew. The distraction of the Institute of
Sexual Science and this ongoing persecution by the Nazis led

(25:49):
Hirschfeld to start considering how he should think about his
own identity. He had been the target of anti Semitism
for his entire career, including being beaten so badly an
anti Semitic attack in nineteen twenty that he was reported
to have been killed. This was particularly disturbing to him
because it was happening in spite of the fact that

(26:09):
he hadn't been an observant Jew since he was a child.
In nineteen thirty three, he wrote, quote, the question where
do you belong? What are you? Really? Tortures me. If
I frame the question as are you a German, a Jew,
or a world citizen? Then my answer as always world
citizen or all three. On November fourteenth, nineteen thirty three,

(26:32):
everything from the institute that hadn't been destroyed was sold
at auction. Herscheld wrote quote, today November fourteenth, it has
been three years since I left Berlin and never returned.
Today in my former home begins the auction of my
remaining books, materials, furniture. The last act for now of
a fateful tragedy that comprises a terrible psychological martyrdom. Everyone

(26:57):
turned out of the house, even my sisters. As a
bar association took possession of the house. I was completely
stripped of all my rights persecuted, a bounty put on
my head and insulted. Hirschfeld was able to buy back
a few things from the institute, and with that he
hoped to start a new French institute of sexual science.

(27:18):
In nineteen thirty three. Carl Guiso was supposed to be
part of this new institute, but he was arrested in
a bathhouse and deported from France. The French institute soon closed.
Toward the very end of his life, Hirschfeld wrote a
study of racism, which he had started on after leaving Germany.
It was first published as an English translation in nineteen

(27:39):
thirty eight, and it was a response to Nazi ideology.
Hirschfeld also sent a copy to a friend of his
who had become a strong supporter of the Nazis, in
the hope that his work would change this person's mind.
Mangus Hirschfeld died on his sixty seventh birthday, May fourteenth,
nineteen thirty five, in Niice, France. At the time, Carl
Giso was in Vienna and Lishutong was studying in Zurich.

(28:03):
Hirschfeld left his remaining work to these two men, but
Giza wasn't able to collect his inheritance, because doing so
would have required him to go to the German embassy,
which for obvious reasons, he could not do. He took
his own life in nineteen thirty eight. Lischu Tong lived
until nineteen ninety three, and he kept up with the
materials that Hirschfeld had left him for the rest of

(28:24):
his life, although some of these belongings were found in
a trash heap after his death. A number of materials
he had kept were handed over to the Magnus Hirschfeld
Society in two thousand and three. Although some of Hirschfeld's
family members and colleagues at the Institute of Sexual Science
were able to get out of Germany, others did not
survive the Holocaust. Even after his death, the Nazi Party

(28:48):
continued using Magnus Hirschfeld in anti Semitic and anti homosexual propaganda.
There was a bust of him placed in the Museum
of the Revolution in Nuremberg with a really disparaging sign,
and his head was carried through the streets in effigy
during rallies. When Hirschfeld was making his arguments that homosexuality
was inborn and unchangeable, it was controversial. He hoped that

(29:11):
proving that people were born gay or lesbian would end
stigma in persecution. But to some the idea of being
born this way was just too restrictive, and others feared
that proving that homosexuality was inborn and finding physical markers
that correlated to it would just lead to more persecution.
This fear was, and frankly continues to be absolutely justified.

(29:34):
Not long after Magnus Hirschfeld's death, on June twenty eighth,
nineteen thirty five, the Nazi Party expanded paragraph one seventy five.
It broadened the definition of criminally indecent activities between men
to include anything that could be interpreted as homosexual in
any way. Later on, German courts upheld the idea that

(29:55):
this applied to even thinking about it. SS Chief Heinrich
Himmler established the Right Central Office for Combating Abortion and
Homosexuality on October twenty sixth, nineteen thirty six, and its
officers had almost unlimited power to arrest anyone considered to
be in violation of the law and held without trial indefinitely.

(30:15):
Roughly one hundred thousand gay men were arrested for their
sexual orientation in Germany. In German occupied territories. Between nineteen
thirty three and nineteen forty five, about fifty thousand men
were imprisoned, and somewhere between five thousand and fifteen thousand
were sent to concentration camps. Lesbians were not targeted nearly
as much because they were not considered to be as

(30:36):
much of a threat to the idea of Aryan purity.
The Nazi Party also put an end to the field
of sex research that had been flourishing in Germany and
Austria during the Weimar era. Paragraph one seventy five was
removed from the Penal Code in East Germany in nineteen fifty,
but it remained part of the code in West Germany
until after German reunification was formally removed in nineteen ninety four.

(31:02):
In the two thousands, the German parliament annulled the convictions
of gay men who had been convicted under Nazi rule,
and then just very recently, in twenty seventeen, Germany announced
that roughly fifty thousand other men would be pardoned, including
men who were convicted after the end of World War Two.
After World War Two, Magnus Hirschfeld really fell into almost

(31:22):
total obscurity. He was remembered only by people who had
personally known and worked with him, but his work was
rediscovered during the nineteen eighties. The Magnus Hirschfeld Federal Foundation
was founded in twenty eleven, devoted to research and advocacy
on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Today,
a lot of Hirschfeld's surviving research and notes are in

(31:44):
the Kinsey Institute for Research and Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
I feel like the idea that he based so much
of his work on, that sexual orientation is inborn, has
come and gone out of favor in the years since then.
Like it was a controversial idea when he was advocating
for it. I know, when I was growing up in

(32:05):
the nineteen eighties and nineties, it was almost universally accepted
as common knowledge within the community. And now I feel
like it's evolved a little bit to be that, Like
it's a person can't really consciously change their sexual orientation,
but it is possible for people to understand their identity

(32:26):
differently in different parts of their life. Yeah, it's a
little more nuanced, it is, and it can I mean,
the whole idea of identity and gender continues to evolve.
So yeah, where we're at now is probably not the
place we will be even in a year or two,
and certainly not in another five to ten. So it

(32:48):
is pretty fascinating that this was going on way before.
We often think of these concepts as having been developed. Yeah, well,
like I know a lot of folks think of and
we've talked about this on the show before, like a
lot of people will sort of imagine the gay rights
movement starting with the Stonewall Riots, and really there was
a lot going on way before that, and in the
case of in Germany, way way way before that. Do

(33:11):
you have some listener mail, I do it the correction.
It is from Alicia, and Alicia said, I just listened
to your Ambos Noogles episode, which was fantastic. One glaring
air was Glasden. It is Gadsden Purchase named after James Gadsden.
I love listening to your shows about Mexican, American and
Southwest related history. My father's paternal side of the family

(33:34):
has been in Arizona since the days of the Spanish
Presidio and Tucson. His mother's family fled Mexico during the
Revolution when my grandmother was a baby, so We've been
here under many flags. I discovered many historical events that
were intertwined with our history. My dad loved telling these
family stories, and I loved listening. With his recent passing,

(33:54):
these stories have become that much more important to me.
Thank you so much for your shows that bring to
life these lesser known events. Keep up the great work, Alisha.
Thank you Alicia for pointing that out. I made a
typo that not only did I make the typo in
the script and we said it wrong like that same
typo we then picked up and like put other places

(34:16):
and had to fix it later. And it was one
hundred percent my fumble fingers. Also, gadsden is a weirdly
difficult word to say. I have realized I think more
than likely my typo just came because my brain was like, oh,
that seems way too tricky, but glass didn't seems way

(34:37):
more like what it should be as a word, which
was not correct, So thank you. A couple other people
sent us various notes and tweets about that as well,
so I apologize for that error. If you would like
to send us a note about this or any other
podcast where History podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com, we are
all over social media at missed in History. That's where
you'll find our Facebook and our Twitter, and our pinterests

(34:58):
and our Instagram. You can come to our website, which
is Missed Inhistory dot com, where you can find the
show notes on all the episodes that Holly and I
have worked on together, and a searchable archive of every
episode before. And you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcasts and Google podcasts and wherever else you'd like
to get your podcasts. For more on this and thousands

(35:24):
of other topics, visit Houstuffworks dot com