report: Nazi Attack on jewish sexologist
Today’s guest-poster is HUGH RYAN, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer.
One hundred years ago today … the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s front page reported that a Nazi mob had murdered German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was at the time the leading voice for reform and education on sexuality, in Germany and around the world. However, although the article appeared under the headline “Mob Kills Sexologist” (the first time the Eagle published the word sexologist), Hirschfeld “was attacked because he was a Jew.” Some called it “‘the first pogrom’ in Germany.”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 13 October 1920, p. 1. Chronicling America.
Thankfully, the Eagle had the story wrong. Hirschfeld had been brutally beaten by young Nazis, but he survived. He kept up his work with his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Science of Sexuality), and continued to be a thorn in the side of the Nazi party. He campaigned for the rights of sexual minorities and the revocation of Paragraph 175, the German law that banned sex between men, which was used to send 5,000-15,000 men suspected of homosexuality to concentration camps during WWII.
1907 political cartoon of Magnus Hirschfeld, ‘Hero of the Day,’ drumming up support for the abolition of Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that criminalized homosexuality. The banner reads, ‘Away with Paragraph 175!’ The caption reads, ‘The foremost champion of the third sex!’ “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives.
In 1933, his Institut was sacked by the Nazis, who burned an estimated 20,000 books on sexuality, as well as taking the names and addresses of anyone who had corresponded with Hirschfeld. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was on a book tour throughout Europe at the time, but he died just two years later of a heart attack.
In the last years of his life, Hirschfeld mentored a young American lesbian named Jan Gay, who returned to New York City in 1931, determined to conduct a scientific study of the lives of lesbian women. Gay helped found the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, which conducted one of the earliest rigorous studies of modern sexuality in America, published a two-volume book of their results, and helped to inspire Alfred Kinsey’s later sexuality research.
WRITTEN BY HUGH RYAN, OCTOBER 13, 2020.
Hugh Ryan's first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, won a 2020 New York City Book Award and was a New York Times Editors' Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Awards. His next book, The Prison on Christopher Street, explores NYC's Women's House of Detention and the queer case for prison abolition. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association. Twitter: @Hugh_Ryan
TAGS: sexology, antisemitism, Nazis, fascism, lgbtq history, Germany