On the 6th of July, 1919, a man founded the world's first medical and academic clinic dedicated to understanding and helping gay, lesbian, and trans people lead a full and happy life. He died in exile, his life's work destroyed by Nazis.
Magnus Hirschfeld was born in Poland in an Ashkenazi Jewish family. The son of a highly regarded physician, Magnus was interested in medicine from a very early age.
After earning his medical degree in 1892 in Berlin, Magnus travelled to America, visiting among other stops, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. While in Chicago, he became involved in that city's burgeoning gay scene. Struck by the similarities between Chicago and Berlin's homosexual subcultures, Hirschfeld began organizing a theory about the universality of LGBT people around the world. He began researching the gay subculture of other major cities of the world, reading newspapers from places like Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Tangier.
Magnus moved back to Germany with these ideas in the forefront of his mind, and established his medical practice in a suburb of Berlin called Charlottenburg. In 1896, one of Hirschfeld's patients, a young army officer whom he had been treating for depression killed himself, leaving behind a suicide note saying that despite his best efforts, he could not end his desires for other men, and so had ended his life out of his guilt and shame. In his suicide note, the officer wrote that he lacked the "strength" to tell his parents the "truth", and spoke of his shame of "that which nearly strangled my heart". The officer could not even bring himself to use the word "homosexuality", which he instead conspicuously referred to as "that" in his note. However, the officer mentioned at the end of his suicide note: "The thought that you [Hirschfeld] could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death."
This officer's suicide was not the only one. Magnus became increasingly concerned about how many of his gay patients were ending, or attempting to end their own lives, despite his best medical efforts. Less than a year later, Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with the publisher Max Spohr, the lawyer Eduard Oberg, and the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow. The goal of the committee was to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that, since 1871, had criminalized homosexuality, arguing that the law encouraged blackmail and was contributing to increased suicides. The motto of the committee, "Justice Through Science", reflected Hirschfeld's belief that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would eliminate social hostility toward LGBT people.
Hirschfeld spoke out eloquently about the taboo subject of suicide and was the first to present statistical evidence that homosexuals were more likely to commit suicide or attempt suicide than heterosexuals. Hirschfeld prepared questionnaires that gay men could answer anonymously about homosexuality and suicide. Collating his results, Hirschfeld estimated that 3 out of every 100 gays committed suicide every year, that a quarter of gays had attempted suicide at some point in their lives and that the other three-quarters had had suicidal thoughts at some point. He used his evidence to argue that, under current social conditions in Germany, life was literally unbearable for gay people.
Under Hirschfeld's leadership, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee gathered 6000 signatures from prominent Germans on a petition to overturn Paragraph 175. Signatories included such luminaries as Albert Einstein. The bill was brought before the Reichstag in 1898, but was supported only by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the German left-wing progressive party) and was quickly killed.
The next two decades of Magnus' life were a balance between his medical practice, and fierce activism for the rights of gay people to love and be loved, without prejudice. In 1914, Magnus published his book "Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes" ('The Homosexuality of Men and Women'), an attempt to comprehensively survey homosexuality around the world, as part of an effort to prove that gay and lesbian people occurred in every culture.
Hirschfeld's idea, that homosexuality was normal and natural, made him a highly controversial figure in Germany during this period, involving him in vigorous debates with other academics, who regarded homosexuality as unnatural and wrong. One such debate concerned the supposed existence of the Hottentottenschürze ('Hottentot apron'), namely the racist belief that the Khoekoe women of southern Africa (known to Westerners as Hottentots) had abnormally enlarged labia, which made them inclined toward lesbianism. Hirschfeld argued there was no evidence that the women of the Khoekoe had abnormally large labia, and that, other than having black skin, the bodies of Khoekoe women were no different from German women. Hirschfeld wrote: "The differences appear minimal compared to what is shared" between Khoekoe and German women. Turning the argument of the anthropologists on their head, Hirschfeld further argued that, if same-sex relationships were common among Khoekoe women, and if the bodies of Khoekoe women were essentially the same as Western women, then Western women must have the same tendencies. Hirschfeld's theories about a spectrum of sexuality existing in all of the world's cultures implicitly undercut the binary theories about the differences between various races that was the basis of the claim of white supremacy.
In 1906, a military general named Kuno von Moltke sued the journalist Maximilian Harden after the latter had run an article accusing him of having a homosexual relationship with the politically powerful Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, who was Kaiser Wilhelm II's best friend. The series of courts-martial and 5 civil trials which followed has been described as "the biggest homosexual scandal ever", outing many prominent members of the Kaiser's cabinet and entourage in its wake. Magnus Hirschfeld was called to testify for Harden, telling the court that "homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love." Hirschfeld's testimony caused outrage all over Germany. Because Prince Eulenburg was a prominent anti-Semite and Hirschfeld was a Jew, during the trials, the völkisch movement came out in support of Eulenburg, whom they portrayed as an Aryan heterosexual, framed by false allegations of homosexuality by Hirschfeld and Harden. The prominent newspaper "Vossische Zeitung" condemned Hirschfeld in an editorial as "a freak who acted for freaks in the name of pseudoscience". Another newspaper declared in an editorial: "Dr. Hirschfeld makes public propaganda under the cover of science, which does nothing but poison our people. Real science should fight against this!" As a gay Jew, Hirschfeld was relentlessly vilified by the völkisch newspapers. Outside Hirschfeld's house in Berlin, posters were affixed by völkisch activists, which read "Dr. Hirschfeld A Public Danger: The Jews are Our Undoing!"
When WWI broke out, Hirschfeld at first attempted to take an ultra-patriotic stance, reasoning that it might break down prejudices by showing that German Jews and/or homosexuals could also be good, patriotic Germans, rallying to the cry of the Fatherland. However, by 1916, horrified by what he considered needless suffering, Hirschfeld was writing pacifist pamphlets, calling for an immediate end to the war. After the war ended, Germany reformed under the more liberal Weimar Republic, and Hirschfeld purchased a villa not far from the Reichstag building in Berlin, founding a medical research clinic he called the "Institut für Sexualwissenschaft" ('Institute of Sexology'). It opened on July 6th, 1919.
The Institute housed Hirschfeld's immense archives and library on human sexuality, collected over a lifetime of careful study and research. It also provided educational services and medical consultations for gay, lesbian, and trans people. Among them Dora Richter, the world's first known recipient of gender affirming surgery, and her better well-known friend, Lili Elba. Hirschfeld himself lived at the Institution on the second floor with his partner, Karl Giese. People from around Europe and beyond came to the Institute to gain a clearer understanding of gender and sexuality.
On May 6th, 1933, while Hirschfeld happened to be in Switzerland on a speaking tour, a pro-fascist student organization made an organized attack on the Institute. A brass band accompanied them as they broke into the building, looted its contents, and publicly burned its books. Following this, the leader of the Nazi student group gave a speech, and the students sang Horst-Wessel-Lied (Raise the Flag High), the anthem of the Nazi party. Members of the SA, or "Sturmabteilung", the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, appeared later in the day to continue looting the institute. Four days later, the Institute's remaining library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz by members of the SA, alongside the students, as the brass band played. A bronze bust of Hirschfeld, taken from the Institute, was placed on top of the bonfire. One estimate says that between 12,000 to 20,000 books and journals were destroyed. This included artistic works, rare medical and anthropological documentation of trans people, and charts concerning cases of intersexuality. The Nazis then seized control of the buildings themselves and used them for their own purposes.
On the 28th of June, 1934 Hitler conducted a purge of gay/trans people in the ranks of the SA wing of the Nazis, murdering them in the Night of the Long Knives. He is believed to have used address lists seized from the Institute.
Hirschfeld never returned to Germany, living out the rest of his days in exile. On his 67th birthday, Magnus Hirschfeld died of a heart attack in his apartment in Nice. The slab covering his tomb is engraved "Per Scientiam ad Justitiam".
When you hear people claim that trans people are a "new" idea or that there is not enough "research" about LGBT people, blame a Nazi. They're the reason why you think that.
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