Magnus Hirschfeld – saint or sinner

03/10/2023 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Like all people, Magnus Hirschfeld is a man who adjusted to his situation. He was a researcher, a scientist, and a supporter of sexual minorities. He founded the Scientific-Minorities Committed and World League of Sexual Reform. He purchased and then set up the Institute of Sexual Research on 6th July 1919, in the liberal atmosphere of the newly founded Weimar Republic. The institute came to house his immense archives and library on sexuality and provided educational services and medical consultations; it also housed the Museum of Sex. This all ended in 1932 when Chancellor Franz von Papen carried out a coup that exposed the Braun government in Prussia. Papen was a conservative Catholic with a long vocal history of criticism of homosexuality. He ordered the Prussian police to start enforcing Paragraph 175 (Does anyone see similarities with Section 28 in the UK much later in history from Margaret Thatcher?). In January 1933, Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, and less than four months later after the Nazis took power, and the Hirschfield’s Institute was sacked, this was followed by another ‘attack’ on May 6th, and the institute was finally forced to close. Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld, had by this stage left Germany, but throughout his travels, he hoped for a a return to Germany and to the liberal country that he had known. (Switzerland, France). But his impact was felt worldwide, e.g. Henry Gerber formed the Society for Human Rights following World War 1, and Harry Hay in 1950 formed the Mattachine Society because one of the members of the Society for Human Rights had communicated the existence to Harry Hay. In Ireland, the National LGBT Federation established the Hirschfield Centre in 1979.

But as I put in my title, was Magnus Hirschfeld a saint or a sinner? Fred Sargeant has written a large, extremely well-researched article ‘The dark legacy of Magnus Hirschfeld’ published 1st October 2023 in Spiked. The article concludes:

…Magnus Hirschfeld’s attempts to decriminalise homosexuality are to be admired. But his belief in eugenics, his flirtation with racial theory and his contribution to gender ideology are all deeply troubling. The legacy he has left is far more ambiguous than his contemporary champions would have us to believe…

I am going to leave you to make your own mind up, and I will leave you with links to various articles/websites for you to read and then come back and let us have your thoughts.

Links:

Magnus Hirschfeld

The Collini Case – Book Review

11/06/2019 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Title	The Collini Case
Place	West Germany
Publication date	4^th July 2013
Pages	PB 208
Price	PB £7.18
Author	Ferdinand von Sabruch
Publisher	Penquin
Edition
Special features (maps, etc.)
ISBN	978-0718159207

Firstly I must note my self-interest in legal stories, and ‘The Collini Case’ delivers for me in every way. whether it be in book form, TV, radio or movie.

I remember watching Perry Mason, The Defenders, and lately (ITV Series taken from USA). But also The Client by ….. Grisham which I read as a book and then watched as a movie and TV series.

I am also an ardent fan of police/detective procedural, having read the Moonstone when I was 8 years old, all of Sherlock Holmes, and most of John Buchan’s books; never mind the various police TV series over the years.

Yes I love the law, but I am not a lawyer/solicitor/or policeman!

So when I picked up this book, ‘The Collini Case’ second hand in a charity shop for £0.50, it was firstly because it was about the law, more specifically the law in Germany; and that it was about the second World War, the Nazi and economic regime over that period, and the fall out after the war, and it was about people.

The people are easily defined:

the lawyer
the murderer
the murdered person
the love interest
The mentor (?)

The law in this case is that of the law in Germany following reunification of West and East Germany. The German legal system is that of civil law which is founded on the principles laid out by the ‘Basic Law for the Federal Map of Germany, … but many of the most important laws were developed prior to the 1949 constitution. It is comprised of ‘public law’ which regulates the relationship between a citizen/person and the state… This area of law has also been subject to a wide array of influence from Roman Law to Napoleonic law.

I have already mentioned the main characters in general terms, the story is relatively simple; ‘a man walks into a hotel and kills another man. The murderer is a well-respected Mercedes-Benz worker, Fabrizio Collini – a man of unblemished record, and with no apparent reason for committing the murder. He doesn’t run away but refuses to defend himself to the police. His lawyer, assigned by the court, gets nowhere with him, and even though he is almost concerned with ‘just’ doing his job, he follows his legal nose, discovers his client’s past and therefore his reason for the murder and then he has to put together a mechanism for the prosecution to introduce the evidence so that he has the right of rebuttal.

Apart from the initial murder, there is no further ‘American’ style action. It is a story about thinking, about research and also about the good, old-fashioned dogged investigation.

The sting in the tale is the impact that this story had on the German legal system and the German government after its publication. The outcry over ‘war criminals’ escaping justice led to the German government reviewing its legal system.

Links:

Amazon: The Collini Case
Cineuropa trailer:

Dictatorship 1, Democracy Nil – The People Loose

31/01/2017 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Democracy needs to be nurtured and looked after, if not then it gets strangled and we end of with a barren land. (David McFarlane)

Law, as it had been known, was no longer decisive in legal proceedings. Judges, now more than ever, were working toward the Fuehrer. Judicial independence, once the ideal of the German state, nearly vanished….Jim Snowden (https://jimsnowden.com/2013/11/06/the-nazi-judiciary/)

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”..John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902)

The problem with being an ‘outsider’ to another countries politics, is just that, you are an outsider. I don’t profess to understand American politics, but I do reserve the right to comment on what I perceive to be a fundamental change to society and the impact that it is having on others. When Hitler came to power, even though he had been well treated by the German Judiciary, he set out to control the courts and to remove fundamental rights. He succeeded, and to those who suffered because of this came the ‘Holocaust’ and the ‘Death Camps’. The United Nations states ‘The Rule of Law and Democracy Section stands as OHCHR focal point for democracy activities.’ The rule of law is the legal principle that law should govern a nation, as opposed to being governed by arbitrary decisions of individual government officials. The decision by President Trump goes in the face of all legal precedents except when you look at dictatorships such as Nazi Germany etc. Indeed it bares direct comparison with Hitler,

I expect the German legal profession to understand that the nation is not here for them, but that they are here for the nation*, and that from now on, I shall intervene in these cases and remove from office those judges who evidently do not understand the demand of the hour. (Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, vol III, the Justice Case,Washington, 1951 Page 51″)

President Trump - Democracy? Most of the world did not stand up to Hitler and his political aspirations, and the world ended up in a world war. In all conscience I cannot stand by and say nothing, President Trump is going down a very dangerous road, and the problem is that he is taking people who didn’t vote for him with him!

Donald Trump has fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered Justice Department lawyers to stop defending the president’s controversial immigration orders.

Source: Donald Trump sacks US attorney general Sally Yates for defiance over immigration ban – live

History -Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America

17/02/2015 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America Eric Lichtblau February 7, 2015 New York Times – Sunday Review Today the U.S. government treats immigrants from Latin America the way liberated Jews were treated after World War II. Then a presidential aid reported: “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S.
	Prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, as it was liberated by American forces in April 1945., Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures – Getty Images // The New York Times,
	World leaders gathered at Auschwitz last month to mark the liberation 70 years earlier of the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camp. More ceremonies will follow in coming months to remember the Allied forces’ discovery, in rapid succession, of other Nazi concentration camps at places like Bergen-Belsen that winter and spring of 1945. Largely lost to history, however, is the cruel reality of what “liberation” actually meant for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors discovered barely alive in the Nazi camps. Even after the victorious American and Allied forces took control of the camps, the survivors – mainly Jews, but also small numbers of gays, Roma, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others – remained for months behind barbed wire and under armed guard in what became known euphemistically as displaced persons, or D.P., camps. Many Jews were left wearing the same notorious striped pajamas that the Nazis first gave them. With the American forces overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of refugees under their control, underfed survivors lived for months in decrepit camps in Germany and Austria – a number of them on the same grounds as the concentration camps. Even after conditions improved, thousands of former prisoners remained inside and in limbo for as long as five years because the United States and most other nations refused to let them in. In the early months after the war, thousands of survivors died from disease and malnutrition. Food was so scarce that rioting broke out at some camps, as Allied commanders refused to give extra food rations to Jewish survivors because they did not want to be seen as giving them preferential treatment over German P.O.W.s and other prisoners. Faced with complaints by outside Jewish groups about conditions of “abject misery,” President Harry S. Truman sent a former immigration official, Earl Harrison, to Europe to inspect the camps. His findings were blistering. The survivors “have been `liberated’ more in a military sense than actually,” Harrison wrote Truman in the summer of 1945. “As matters now stand,” he wrote, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops.” I ran across Harrison’s report a few years ago while researching a book on the flight of Nazis to the United States after the war. As I examined the path the Nazis took out of Europe, I struggled to understand how so many of them had made it to America so easily while so many Holocaust survivors were left behind. One answer came in a copy of Gen. George S. Patton’s handwritten journal. In one entry from 1945, Patton, who oversaw the D.P. operations for the United States, seethed after reading Harrison’s findings, which he saw – quite accurately – as an attack on his own command. “Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote. He complained of how the Jews in one camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts,” and he told of taking his commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to tour a makeshift synagogue set up to commemorate the holy day of Yom Kippur. “We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen,” Patton wrote. “Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act.” Other evidence emerged revealing not only Patton’s disdain for the Jews in the camps, but an odd admiration for the Nazi prisoners of war under his watch. Under Patton, Nazis prisoners were not only bunked at times with Jewish survivors, but were even allowed to hold positions of authority, despite orders from Eisenhower to “de-Nazify” the camps. “Listen,” Patton told one of his officers of the Nazis, “if you need these men, keep them and don’t worry about anything else.” Following Harrison’s scathing report to Truman, conditions in the camps slowly became more livable, with schools, synagogues and markets sprouting up and fewer restrictions. But malaise set in, as survivors realized they had no place to go. Hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Eastern Europe – including many top Nazi collaborators – gained entry to the United States in the first few years after the war, but visas were scarce for those left in the camps. Some Washington policy makers were actively opposed to the idea of taking in Holocaust survivors because of lingering anti-Semitism. At Bergen-Belsen, as many as 12,000 Jewish survivors at a time remained there until the camp was closed in 1951. Menachem Z. Rosensaft was born at the camp in 1948 to two Holocaust survivors. He said in an interview that he believed that the survivors’ hardships after the war had often been overlooked because “it doesn’t neatly fit the story line that we won the war and liberated the camps.” Mr. Rosensaft, the editor of a new book by Holocaust descendants called “God, Faith and Identity from the Ashes,” added: “Nobody wanted them. They became an inconvenience to the world.” Joe Sachs, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who now lives outside Miami, said his three and a half years in a displaced person camp were tolerable. He met his wife there, learned a trade as a dental technician, and, on most days at least, there was enough food for everyone to get a piece of bread or meat. Compared with the Nazi camps, “it was heaven,” he said. “But of course we felt abandoned,” Mr. Sachs added. “We were treated not quite as human beings. In a camp like that with a few thousand people, the only thing you feel is abnormal.” The State Department finally approved visas for Mr. Sachs and his wife and their 18-month-old daughter in 1949, just as Holocaust survivors were finally being allowed into the country in large numbers, and they left for New York City. That, he said, was truly liberating. [Eric Lichtblau is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.”]

Holocaust Memorial Day: The Nazi Bid to Exterminate Gay People

31/01/2015 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

Human rights campaigner; director, Peter Tatchell Foundation

Posted: 27/01/2015 08:11 GMT Updated: 27/01/2015 14:59 GMT

“We must exterminate these people (homosexuals) root and branch… We can’t permit such danger to the country; the homosexual must be entirely eliminated.”
With these chilling words, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, set out the Nazi master plan for the sexual cleansing of the Aryan race.
Heinz F was a care-free young German gay man in the early 1930s. He had no idea of what was about to happen. “I didn’t fully understand the situation,” he admitted with pained regret. One morning, out of the blue, the police knocked on his door. “You are suspected of being a homosexual,” they told him. “You are hereby under arrest.”
“What could I do? Off I went to Dachau, without a trial,” he recalls in an interview for the documentary film Paragraph 175.
After spending a year and a half in Dachau, Heinz was released but soon rearrested and sent to Buchenwald. He was stunned to discover the grisly fate of gay and bisexual men. “Almost all the homosexuals…nearly all of them…were killed.”
Heinz amazingly survived a total of eight-plus years in concentration camps. Following the war, he never spoke to anyone about his experiences. He was afraid. Gay ex-prisoners were regarded as common criminals – not victims of Nazism. With tears trickling down his cheeks, he lamented: “Nobody wanted to hear about it.”
His life had been very different up until 1933. Berlin was the gay capital of the world, with a huge, buzzing gay scene of bars and clubs. It boasted gay magazines and gay arts and sports associations, as well as organisations campaigning for greater understanding and rights. Life in Berlin was good – and getting better – for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and inter-sex (LGBTI) people.
Although homosexuality was illegal under paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, it was relatively rarely enforced. In the Reichstag, MPs were on the verge of securing its repeal. A new era of freedom seemed to be dawning. Then came the horrors of Nazism.
Within weeks of assuming power in 1933, Hitler outlawed homosexual organisations and publications. Gay bars and clubs were closed down soon afterwards. Storm troopers ransacked the headquarters of the gay rights movement, the Institute of Sexual Science, and publicly burned its vast library of “degenerate” books. Before the end of the year, the first homosexuals were deported to newly established concentration camps.
In 1934, the Nazis stepped up their anti-gay campaign, with the creation of the Reich Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality. According to Himmler: “Those who practice homosexuality deprive Germany of the children they owe her … our nation will fall to pieces because of that plague.” The police were ordered to draw up “pink lists” of known or suspected homosexuals. Mass arrests followed.
The Nazis again intensified the war against what they called “abnormal existence” in 1935, broadening the definition of homosexual behaviour and the grounds for arrest. Gossip and innuendo became evidence. A man could be incarcerated on the basis of a mere touch, gesture or look.
Later, Himmler authorised a ‘scientific’ programme for the eradication of “this vice.” Gay prisoners were subjected to gruesome medical experiments in a bid to “cure” their homosexuality – including hormone implants and castration.
From 1933-1945, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 men were arrested under paragraph 175 for the crime of homosexuality. Some were tried and sentenced in the courts; others were sent direct to concentration camps without any trial or formal sentence. The death rate of gay prisoners in the camps was over 50%, the highest among non-Jewish victims.
Heinz Dormer and Gad Beck were also interviewed for the film Paragraph 175. Dormer spent nearly ten years in prisons and concentration camps. He remembers the haunting, agonised cries from “the singing forest”, a row of tall poles on which condemned men were hung: “Everyone who was sentenced to death would be lifted up onto the hook. The howling and screaming were inhuman… Beyond human comprehension.”
The Nazi ‘homocaust’ sought to completely eliminate gay and bisexual men. It was an integral part of the Holocaust. Contrary to false histories that claim the persecution of Jewish people was entirely distinct and separate from the victimisation of other minorities, the mass murder of Jews was part of Hitler’s grand design for the racial and genetic purification of the German volk. The Nazis set out to eradicate what they deemed to be racial and genetic “inferiors” – not just Jews, but also gay, disabled, Slav, Roma and Sinti people.
Gad Beck carried a double burden. He was gay and Jewish. He recalls his first sexual experience as a teenage schoolboy:
“I ran home to my mother and said: ‘Mother, today I had my first man.'” Luckily, his parents accepted his homosexuality. But they feared for his safety: “They said: ‘Oh my god, he’s Jewish and he’s gay. Either way he’ll be persecuted. This cannot end well.'”
But Beck survived the war, although nearly everyone around him perished. Two of his lovers were seized by the Nazis:
“I met this beautiful blonde Jew. He invited me to spend the night. In the morning the Gestapo came … I showed my ID – not on the list. They took him to Auschwitz. It had a different value then, a night of love.”
Later, Beck tried to free another lover, Manfred Lewin, from a Gestapo transfer camp. He posed as a Hitler Youth member and asked the commandant to release Manfred to help with a construction project. Although this incredibly daring, dangerous deception was successful, as they walked to freedom Manfred told Gad he could not abandon his family in the camp. Beck watched helplessly as his lover returned to be with them. He never saw Manfred again. Lewin and his entire family were murdered in Auschwitz.
During the Third Reich, these heart-breaking personal tragedies were repeated over and over millions of times for both gay and non-gay victims of Nazism. But for gay people the trauma was compounded by the fact that they often suffered alone – rejected by their families, persecuted by the Nazis and vilified by other concentration camp inmates.
No wonder so few survived and why so many were reluctant to speak out in the post-war years. Paragraph 175 remained on the statute books after 1945. Homosexuality continued to be a crime in East Germany until 1968 and in West Germany until 1969.
For more information about Peter Tatchell’s human rights campaigns, to receive his email bulletins or to make a donation: http://www.PeterTatchellFoundation.org

Berlin before the Nazis'

27/11/2014 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

The Editor: – Reposted from the Mail’ which of course ends its article with its normal barb in the tail. However before you read the article I would suggest you read what Berlin is atcually like today, as published from the ‘Visit Berlin‘ website:

Berlin is so free. Welcome to the gay and lesbian capital of Europe. Openness. Tolerance. Creativity. – This flair is unique. Berlin is simply Berlin. Berlin is the city of freedom. A Mecca for lesbians and gays. The ingredients? Queer bars and restaurants. Gay comedy. A legendary club scene with an eccentric night life. And: more gay and lesbian parties, street festivals and events than anywhere else. From Christopher Street Day to the “LesbianGay Parkfest”. Convince yourself.

Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and a mecca for cross dressers and transsexuals where the first male-to-female surgery was performed – until the Nazis came to power, new book reveals

An uninhibited urban gay sexual scene flourished in Berlin, Germany in the wake of World War One
The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded at the Institute of Sexual Science where the first male-to-female surgery was performed
German scientists concluded that same-sex love was a natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the perversion of a ‘normal’ sexual tendency
There were 30 separate homosexual periodicals
Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for large sizes and singles searching for gay love could place ads

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By CAROLINE HOWE FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 12:56, 25 November 2014 | UPDATED: 13:24, 25 November 2014

Think Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray in Carberet. Think West Hollywood, Greenwich Village and Provincetown and the Castro, known as hotbeds of homosexuality.

But they are nothing like the uninhibited urban gay sexual scene and vast homosexual subculture that flourished in Berliin under Germany’s Weimar Republic.

Sexual experimentation between the same sexes and medical advances of helping genders ‘trapped within the wrong body’ in Germany more than one hundred years ago shaped our understanding of gay identity today.

The city’s liberal years – before the rise of Hitler – are detailed in a new book, Gay Berlin.

The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded in Berlin at the Institute of Sexual Science where the first male-to-female surgery was performed. The words ‘homosexual’ or ‘transvestite’ were German innovations.

Police mugshots of Berlin prostitute Johann Scheff, arrested in July 1932. Youths dressed in women’s clothing who successfully passed for women, descended on department stores en masse stealing large quantities of merchandise.

The cover of Die Intel, December 1930, advertising a serialized installment of Men for Sale (Manner zu verkaufen). German gay magazines also offered gay and lesbian friendly services to the gay subculture including medical doctors specializing in ‘sexual disturbances’, detective agencies offering to investigate blackmail threats, as well as dressmakers and restaurants

Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey starred in the film version of Carbaret in 1972

Male prostitution, homosexual bars and nightclubs, cabarets populated by gay men, lesbians and transsexuals flourished in a wild, incomparable sexual subculture that was exciting yet dangerous.

It was in Berlin where scientists concluded that ‘same sex love was a natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the perversion of a ‘normal’ sexual tendency’, author and scholar Robert Beachy writes in his compelling book, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Knopf Publishers.

The Weimar Republic emerged out of the wreckage of Germany’s war. The Kaiser was gone, the 1919 Versailles Treaty saw the abolition of the German Empire and the loss of significant amounts of its territory.

It was a troubled and tortured time for Germany, but Berlin, the old imperial capital became its most liberal city.

High living, a vibrant urban life and relaxed social attitudes, along with the influx of American money defined the Golden Twenties in Berlin that was the most creative period in German history.

Writers, poets, artists from London, France, the United States arrived in the German city to witness and experience the wild erotic sexual freedom along with curiosity seekers, voyeurs, and homosexuals.

Western Europeans, Scandinavians and Russians all came to indulge their sexual appetites in the hedonistic nightlife and party culture of the German capital – or they came to witness the ‘luridly licentious Berlin’, spiking their own voyeuristic impulses.

‘The pervasive prostitution (both male and female), the public cross-dressing, and the easy access to bars and clubs that catered to homosexual men and lesbians were just a few of the features that supported Berlin’s sex industry’.

Transvestite prostitutes sitting on the laps of gay men in the popular Berlin gay bar Marienkasin

Hansi Sturm, was the winner of the Miss Eldorado transvestite pageant in 1926

There were twenty-five to thirty separate homosexual German-language periodicals that were appearing in Berlin, weekly or monthly.

There were no other journals published anywhere else in the world until after 1945.

Openly nudist and homosexual titles were displayed in the kiosks.

Same-sex bars, clubs and cafes advertised as well as the professional services of doctors, dentists, lawyers, stationers…all with the implied ‘friends patronize friends’.

In those magazines, anyone facing blackmail found private detectives to track down extortion threats.

Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for large sizes.

There were the single ads placed by individuals forever in search of love.

The American modernist artist, poet and essayist Marsden Hartley, a habitué of 1920s Berlin, ‘attended large transvestite balls and patronized homosexual bars frequented by male hustlers.

He later recalled, ‘Life in Berlin then was at the height of heights – that is to the highest pitch of sophistication and abandon. None of us had seen anything quite like the spectacle’.

Acclaimed American Architect Philip Johnson often considered the dean of American architects, ‘availed himself of Berlin’s male prostitution’.

‘Paris was never that hospitable’, Johnson said. He became fluent in German later saying, ‘I learned it the best way, using “the horizontal method”.’

Transvestites having drinks in the Eldorado club that was not hidden away but celebrated in the golden age of the gay bar and club scene in Weimar Berlin. It was a hot spot for high society and partying until dawn was the norm

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in March 1919, the first such facility in the world to offer medical and psychological counseling on sexual issues to heterosexual men and women, homosexuals, cross-dressers and intersex individuals also known as hermaphrodites or individuals caught between male and female.

‘The institute represented the first attempt to establish “sexology”, or sexual science, as a topic of legitimate academic study and research.

‘Nowhere else in the world was there so much as a university department or chair devoted to the subject, much less an entire institute,’ writes author Robert Beachy.

The Institute also emphasized public education and had a museum of sexuality, the Hirschfeld Museum, with not only wall charts and photographs but also cases filled with phalluses and fetishes from around the globe.

Photographs of homosexuals dressed in huge hats, earrings and makeup adored the walls as well as women in men’s clothing and top hats.

When Dr William Robinson, a New York physician and prominent activist for birth control, visited the institute in 1925, he stated: ‘It is an institution absolutely unique in the whole world…which I hoped to establish in the United States but which I felt would not thrive on account of our prudish, hypocritical attitude to all questions of sex.’

It was at this institute that Hirschfeld and his colleagues pioneered some of the first sex-reassignment surgeries as well as primitive hormone treatments

Dr Hirschfeld studied cross-dressing, men and women who wore the clothing of the opposite sex.

Previously interpreted as a symptom of homosexuality by psychiatrists and sexologists, and associated with prostitution and criminal activity, Hirschfeld believed cross-dressers were often heterosexual.

Picture postcard of the gay club Silhouette, popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Always under a blue haze of cigarette and cigar smoke, film stars, cabaret artists and wealthy nobility were regulars including a young Marlene Dietrich alongside princes, counts and barons.

Nazi officials sort through ‘un-German’ and ‘perverted’ materials in the debris of the Institute for Social Science, that was ransacked on May 6, 1933, for a book burning event they staged four days later.

Male and female impersonators drew huge crowds at cabarets, circuses and variety theatres – as well as providing entertainment at the big transvestite balls and homosexual clubs, but they faced the possibility of being arrested by the police and harassed.

Dr Hirschfeld helped reform the practices of the Berlin police and convinced them to issue ‘transvestite passes’ so that performers could work without fear of harassment although there was no law prohibiting public cross-dressing.

But dressing like the opposite sex sometimes inspired the desire for a physical metamorphosis.

So the doctor performed one of the first (primitive) male-to-female sex-reassignment surgeries on a twenty-three year old officer who had fought in World War I.

From childhood on, he felt he was trapped in the wrong body and only went into the military to demonstrate his masculinity. But that didn’t subdue his feminine feelings and when the war was over, he felt suicidal.

Hirschfeld’s colleague, Dr. Arthur Kronfeld removed the man’s testicles and the effect was quite successful leading to a ‘psychic relaxation and a permanent feeling of harmony and balance’.

His facial hair disappeared and now he passed for a woman.

He visited a Dresden gynecologist, Dr. Richard Muhsam, who made a ‘vagina-like structure’ and tucked his member up in there in what was the first attempt to construct a vagina for a man.

Five months later, the former officer was back and reported having erections.

He also had fallen in love with a woman, abandoned his cross-dressing and was now masculine.

The doctor successfully undid the surgery and restored his masculinity.

Afternoon teas and large costume balls were held at the Institute as another venue for flamboyant cross-dressers. The balls attracted young male prostitutes along with the cross-dressers and prominent, open homosexuals.

Hirschfeld wanted homosexual men and lesbians to experience greater erotic fulfillment that wasn’t connected to procreation.

With the Great Depression of 1929, and the crash of the American stock market, the Golden Age was slipping away to a Hitler-led government by spring 1930, the Nazis were on the rise with the new Reichstag election.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler completed his march to power – and with fury the Nazis pursued Hirschfeld as a symbol of all they hated – as Jew, homosexual and sexologist.

The party in Berlin was over.