Before They Burned the Knowledge: Magnus Hirschfeld, Trans History, and Berlin’s Lost Legacy

When Knowledge is destroyed

A Place That Was More Than Walls

On May 6, 1933, Nazi students and SA members stormed the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. They looted rooms and carried off books, files, photographs, collection items, and research materials. Four days later, on May 10, 1933, parts of these holdings were publicly destroyed during the book burning at Berlin’s Opernplatz, now Bebelplatz.¹ What was thrown into the flames was not just paper. It was knowledge about people whose existence did not fit the Nazi worldview. It was traces of lives, research, counseling, self-discovery, and hope.

The history of the Institute for Sexual Science is therefore not just the history of a scientific institution. It is part of queer and trans history. It tells of a Berlin where sexual and gender diversity were already being researched, discussed, and debated more than a hundred years ago. It tells of people seeking support, of doctors and activists, of networks, publications, and places of refuge. And it tells of how deliberately that knowledge was destroyed.

Anyone who claims today that trans history is an invention of the present must pass by this place. This institute. Its archives. Its files. The people who sought advice there. Magnus Hirschfeld. Dora Richter. Toni Ebel. Charlotte Charlaque.

Magnus Hirschfeld: Science as a Path to Justice

Magnus Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in Kolberg. He was a physician, sexologist, Jewish, homosexual, and politically engaged. In early twentieth-century Germany, that combination made him an extraordinary figure, but also a target for those who wanted to define sexuality, gender, and social order only within narrow norms.²

Hirschfeld did not understand science as the detached collection of facts. For him, research was tied to education, decriminalization, protection, and social change. His often-quoted motto was Per scientiam ad justitiam, through science to justice.³ That phrase describes well what he was trying to do. People should not be persecuted because of whom they loved. They should not be stripped of rights because their bodies, identities, or forms of expression did not match the expectations of the majority.

As early as 1897, Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with others. It is considered one of the earliest organizations of the homosexual emancipation movement. One of its central goals was the abolition of Paragraph 175, which criminalized male homosexuality. In 1898, the committee submitted a petition to the German Reichstag, signed by numerous politicians, artists, and scholars, demanding the repeal of that law.⁴ This work was courageous, because it openly challenged existing law, social morality, and police persecution.

Hirschfeld’s activism did not stop with homosexuality. He engaged with a broad range of sexual and gender diversity. In doing so, he used terms that today must be understood in their historical context. His idea of “sexual intermediate stages” does not match today’s language or today’s understanding of gender, sexuality, and identity. Still, for its time, it was an important attempt to view diversity not simply as deviance or illness, but as part of human reality.

That ambivalence matters especially for trans history. Hirschfeld was not a modern trans activist in today’s sense. He was a scholar of his time, with the categories and limits of his time. But he opened spaces in which people who did not fit the rigid gender norms around them could become visible at all.

Berlin Before 1933: A City of Contradictions

The Berlin of the Weimar Republic is often described as free, dazzling, and modern. That is partly true, but it is only half the story. In the 1920s, Berlin really was a center of queer culture. There were meeting places, clubs, journals, theaters, bars, counseling services, and political initiatives. At the same time, many people remained legally vulnerable, socially stigmatized, and at risk of police violence.

That contradiction is exactly what makes the period so important. Visibility did not automatically mean safety. Public presence did not automatically mean acceptance. Queer and gender-nonconforming people could find places where they were seen. But they still lived in a society that could turn against them at any moment.

It was in this tension that the Institute for Sexual Science was founded.

The Institute for Sexual Science: Research, Counseling, Refuge

On July 6, 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. It was housed in the former Hatzfeld Palace in Berlin-Tiergarten, near what is now In den Zelten 9A to 10. Hirschfeld initially founded and financed the institute through a private foundation bearing his own name. The Magnus Hirschfeld Society describes it as the first institution of its kind in the world.⁵

Hirschfeld himself described the purpose of the institute as a “place of research, teaching, healing, and refuge.”⁶ These four terms are central. They show that the institute was not simply collecting books or hosting lectures. It aimed to research, educate, treat, and protect.

The institute had several functions. It was an archive and a library. It was a museum and a counseling center. It was a medical institution and a place of public education. More than forty people worked there, including psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld, social hygienist Max Hodann, physiologist Arthur Weil, gynecologists Bernhard Schapiro and Ludwig Levy-Lenz, and physician Felix Abraham. The jurist Kurt Hiller and Hirschfeld’s life partner Karl Giese were also part of its circle.⁷ The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the World League for Sexual Reform were based there as well.

People came there with questions about sexuality, contraception, sexually transmitted diseases, marriage, the body, identity, and social exclusion. What is remarkable is that trans, intersex, and homosexual people were not only patients, but in some cases also lived and worked there, including Dora Richter, Erich Amborn, and the writer Bruno Vogel.⁷

For many people, this place must have meant something hard to overestimate. In a society in which any departure from the norm was quickly treated as a moral, medical, or criminal problem, the simple experience of not being judged right away could already be decisive. The institute was not a paradise outside its time. Contemporary medical, social, and political assumptions were present there too, including eugenic ideas and forms of pathologization that we now view critically. But it was a place where questions could be asked that in many other places were not allowed to be asked at all.

Gender Diversity More Than a Hundred Years Ago

For the series Making Trans History Visible, it is especially important that Hirschfeld’s work also concerned people whom today we might describe, at least in part, as trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, or not neatly fitting into binary categories. The historical terms were different. Hirschfeld coined and used, among others, the term Transvestit. This term is not equivalent to modern words such as trans, nonbinary, or cross-dressing. From today’s perspective it can feel imprecise, outdated, and burdened. Even so, it matters historically because it shows that gender nonconformity was already being observed, described, and discussed at that time.⁸

In 1910, Hirschfeld published his work Die Transvestiten. In it, he tried to describe scientifically people whose clothing, presentation, or self-understanding did not match social expectations tied to their assigned sex. From today’s perspective, his language is not our language. His categories are not our categories. His early assumption that he was dealing with an “erotic urge to dress differently” was corrected through contact with people like Dora Richter. It was the patients themselves who changed Hirschfeld’s scientific view and helped him understand that this was about inner gendered selfhood, not a preference for certain clothes.⁹

That is significant for trans history. Not because we should simply overwrite historical people with today’s labels. That would be too easy. But because this history shows that people with diverse experiences of gender, diverse forms of expression, and diverse ways of living did not suddenly appear in the twenty-first century. They were there. They were looking for words. They were looking for spaces. They were looking for protection.

Dora Richter, Toni Ebel, and Charlotte Charlaque: Three Lives at the Institute

Behind the terms Hirschfeld coined were real people with lives of their own. Three of them are known to us by name today and are among the most important pioneers in documented trans medical history.

Dora Richter came to the institute in 1920 after a sympathetic judge referred her to Hirschfeld following several arrests for violating clothing regulations.⁹ She worked there as a domestic employee and, beginning in 1922, underwent a step-by-step medical transition. In June 1931, surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt performed a vaginoplasty on her at Urban Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg. She is therefore considered the first known person to undergo this kind of gender-affirming surgery.¹⁰

Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque were friends of Dora Richter and underwent gender-affirming surgeries themselves shortly afterward. Charlotte Charlaque worked at the institute, among other things as a receptionist, and spoke with trans patients about their clothing choices. She accompanied Hirschfeld to the third congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in London in 1929.¹¹ The three women lived together for a time at Motzstraße 76, now number 11, in Berlin-Schöneberg.⁹

For a long time, Dora Richter was considered missing or presumed to have been a victim of the Nazi attack on the institute. In 2023, researchers discovered that in 1934 she had applied for a legal name change in Czechoslovakia, which was approved by the president of Czechoslovakia. She survived the Nazi period and died in 1966 in Allersberg, West Germany.¹⁰ Parts of the later lives of Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel have also been reconstructed. Charlaque later emigrated to the United States and became known in New York as the “Queen of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.”¹¹

These names matter. They show that there were not just abstract “patients,” but people with relationships, jobs, friendships, and political awareness who in some cases documented their own lives in writing.

The “Transvestite Pass”: Protection and Control at the Same Time

A particularly vivid example of the link between protection and state control is the so-called Transvestitenschein, or “transvestite pass.” Using the example of Gerd Katter, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents that such official papers could be shown during police checks to avoid arrest for wearing clothes not deemed appropriate to one’s assigned sex.¹² Hirschfeld’s institute was actively involved in helping people obtain such papers, often on the basis of medical certificates.

From today’s perspective, these documents feel touching and bitter at the same time. Touching, because they show that there were concrete attempts to protect gender-nonconforming people in daily life. Bitter, because a person had to carry official papers simply to be allowed to wear clothes that did not fit police expectations.

The Transvestitenschein was therefore not a sign of real freedom. It was a tool within a system of control. It made visible just how intensely bodies, clothing, and gender expression were being monitored. At the same time, it shows that people found ways to create room for action within that system. The institute was part of those efforts.

The Berlin of the Weimar Republic was not a safe place for all queer and trans people. But there were networks that organized protection. There were people who wrote expert opinions. There were counseling centers that mediated. There was knowledge that could help push back against arbitrary state power.

Networks, Public Visibility, and Early Education

Hirschfeld’s institute was not just an address in Berlin. It was part of an international network. Researchers, physicians, activists, and interested laypeople in different countries engaged with its work. Prominent visitors such as British writer Christopher Isherwood even lived at the institute for a time.⁷ It collected literature, case histories, photographs, letters, medical documents, and scholarly works. In that sense, it was also a place of memory, a place where knowledge about sexuality and gender was gathered that otherwise might have remained scattered, silenced, or destroyed.

Hirschfeld also appeared in public. He wrote, lectured, advised, argued, and took part in reform debates. He also helped educate through film. In 1919, he was involved in Anders als die Andern, directed by Richard Oswald and first shown at Berlin’s Apollo Theater on May 28, 1919. The film is considered one of the first motion pictures to openly oppose Paragraph 175. Hirschfeld partially financed it through his institute and even appeared on screen himself as a physician. In 1920, it became one of the first films banned after film censorship was reintroduced in the Weimar Republic.¹³

This public presence made him known. But it also made him a target. Hirschfeld became a figure of hatred for nationalist, antisemitic, queer-hostile, and reactionary forces. He stood for many things these circles rejected: Jewish scholarship, sex education, women’s rights, homosexual emancipation, gender diversity, internationalism, and modern urban culture. Already in the 1920s, he was attacked in public and seriously injured.

That is why the institute’s destruction in 1933 was no accident. It was symbolic. And for exactly that reason, it was destroyed.

The Destruction in 1933

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, their violence did not target only parties, labor unions, Jewish institutions, and political opponents. It also targeted queer structures, sex education, and scientific work that did not fit the Nazi image of humanity.

On May 6, 1933, the Institute for Sexual Science was looted. Its holdings were stolen, damaged, scattered, and partly destroyed. On May 10, 1933, the large-scale book burning took place at Berlin’s Opernplatz. Works from the institute were among the materials thrown into the flames.¹

The image of that book burning remains well known today. Students and Nazis threw books into the fire and staged the destruction of literature as a political purification. But in the case of the Institute for Sexual Science, this was about more than published texts. It was also about archives, documentation, correspondence, medical records, and personal traces. Part of this material is lost forever. The building itself, the Hatzfeld Palace, was destroyed in wartime bombing in 1943.⁵

That means that today we know not only that people were persecuted. We also know that parts of their history were taken from us. Their names, their letters, their medical journeys, their self-descriptions, their networks. The destruction of the institute was therefore also a destruction of memory.

This is one of the most painful aspects of the story. Nazi violence killed people. It destroyed institutions. It erased rights. And it attacked memory. Whoever destroys archives does not just want to dominate the present. They also want to determine what the future will be able to know about the past.

Hirschfeld in Exile

Magnus Hirschfeld himself was not in Berlin when the institute was looted. He had already left in 1930 on an extended world lecture tour, from which he never returned because of the political situation in Germany. He lived in exile, including in France, and had to watch newsreel footage in a Paris cinema showing the burning of his books at Berlin’s Opernplatz.⁵ After unsuccessfully trying to reestablish the institute in Paris, he died in Nice on May 14, 1935, his sixty-seventh birthday.⁵

It is a bitter ending. Hirschfeld had spent decades trying to build knowledge, protect people, and advance social reform. He lived long enough to see his institute destroyed and Germany transformed into a dictatorship in which queer people, Jewish people, political opponents, and many others were persecuted.

But Hirschfeld’s work did not disappear completely. His publications had already spread internationally. Memories of the institute survived. Some documents, photographs, and materials endured. Later, historians, activists, and institutions began piecing this history back together. The Federal Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, established in 2011, and the Magnus Hirschfeld Society now help preserve the memory of the institute, its work, and its destruction.¹⁴

The Lost Knowledge

When we speak about the Institute for Sexual Science today, we are always also speaking about a gap. We are not just telling what once was. We are also telling what is missing.

Many stories can no longer be fully reconstructed. Many files have disappeared. Many voices were not preserved. Some of the people who sought help there remain nameless to us. Others appear only in fragments, in photographs, identification papers, marginal notes, or later recollections. The fact that Dora Richter’s life could be further reconstructed only in 2023 shows how much research is still needed today.

This lost knowledge concerns queer history as a whole. But it concerns trans history in a special way. Trans and gender-nonconforming people were long not treated as historical subjects in their own right. Their traces were often filed under false terms, pathologized medically, registered by police, or later made invisible. When archives are then destroyed on top of that, a double erasure occurs. First life is normalized and controlled. Then the traces of that life are destroyed.

That is why historical work here is more than academic curiosity. It is reclamation. It asks: Who was there? Who was seen? Who was misnamed? Who was protected? Who was persecuted? And whose history is missing because others decided it should not survive?

Why This History Matters Today

The history of Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science refutes one of the most stubborn narratives of our own time, the claim that gender diversity is new, artificial, or merely a product of current debates.

No. People have always lived with gender in different ways. They searched for words, even if those words were different from the ones we use today. They dressed, loved, suffered, hoped, sought medical help, found community, and negotiated the limits of their time.

What has changed is not the existence of these people. What changes are language, visibility, rights, and possibilities.

The Institute for Sexual Science shows that there were already efforts more than a hundred years ago to take this diversity seriously in scientific terms. But it also shows how quickly progress can be attacked. The Weimar Republic had queer spaces, courageous researchers, political movements, and cultural visibility. Just a few years later, books were burned, institutes destroyed, people persecuted, and entire worlds of life erased.

That is what makes this history feel so immediate.

The Warning: When Knowledge Is Meant to Disappear Again

The story of the Institute for Sexual Science does not end in 1933. It does not end with the looting of its rooms, not with the book burning, and not with Hirschfeld’s death in exile. It reaches into our present because it asks a question that has once again become frighteningly urgent. What happens when a society begins to treat knowledge about certain people as a danger?

The Nazis did not just burn paper. They attacked the possibility of speaking, researching, counseling, and remembering queer and trans life. They destroyed archives, life stories, medical knowledge, networks, and places of refuge. What was lost was not just books. It was traces of people who had lived, loved, searched, doubted, and hoped.

That is why this story is more than a look backward. It is a warning.

We live in a time in which far-right, right-wing populist, and antifeminist forces are once again trying to present sexual and gender diversity as a threat. This does not happen everywhere in the same way, and not in the same forms as 1933. History does not simply repeat itself. But patterns can return. People are labeled “unnatural,” “dangerous,” or “ideological.” Education is treated with suspicion. Language itself is attacked. Books are removed from libraries. Events are threatened. Protective rights are called into question.

In Germany, the security report on crimes against LSBTQIA* people for 2023 shows a significant increase in recorded anti-queer offenses. A total of 1,785 crimes against LSBTQIA* people were recorded, compared with 1,188 in 2022, an increase of about 50 percent. The most common offenses included insults, violent acts, incitement to hatred, coercion, and threats. The number of crimes in the areas of “sexual orientation” and “gender-related diversity” has increased nearly tenfold since 2010.¹⁵ For the following year, the Federal Criminal Police Office reported a further increase, especially in crimes targeting trans, intersex, and nonbinary people.¹⁶

Internationally, too, attacks on knowledge, education, and visibility are easy to see. PEN America documented 6,870 cases of book bans in U.S. public schools during the 2024 to 2025 school year, spread across 23 states and 87 school districts. Since 2021, the organization has counted around 23,000 documented cases. Books dealing with marginalized perspectives, racism, sexuality, queer topics, or gender diversity are especially often affected.¹⁷

Of course, a contemporary book ban is not the same thing as a Nazi book burning. That distinction matters. But it would be dangerous to refuse to see any connection at all because of that difference. Authoritarian movements often do not begin with open destruction. They begin with language. With suspicion. With the claim that certain topics are dangerous for children. With demands to remove certain books from shelves. With the desire to push certain people out of public life.

That is exactly why remembrance matters.

The Institute for Sexual Science was a place where people did not have to disappear. A place where what others wanted to deny was gathered and preserved. A place that showed that sexual and gender diversity is not a passing trend, but part of human history.

The fact that this place was destroyed should not provoke only grief. It should make us vigilant.

Because when people once again demand today that certain books be removed from shelves, certain topics be banned from classrooms, certain people be erased from language, and certain realities of life be made invisible, then it is never just about words, curricula, or libraries. It is about who is allowed to exist. Who is protected. Who is remembered. And who is meant to disappear again.

The answer to that cannot be silence.

Making trans history visible therefore means more than telling stories about the past. It means searching again for destroyed knowledge. It means naming the gaps. It means restoring dignity to people whose traces were meant to be erased. And it means remaining clear-eyed in the present when old patterns return in new language.

Before the books burned, there was a place of research, counseling, and hope in Berlin. The fact that we can still tell its story today is part of what the flames could not destroy.

Yours, Lizbeth

Sources

1. Bundesarchiv: Magnus Hirschfelds Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919 bis 1933. Gastbeitrag von Rainer Herrn, Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V.

2. Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V.: Institutsgründer Magnus Hirschfeld.

3. Wikipedia, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft: Motto „Per scientiam ad justitiam“.

4. Bundesarchiv: Magnus Hirschfelds Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919 bis 1933: Gründung des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees 1897 und Petition 1898 zur Streichung des § 175.

5. Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V.: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (1919 bis 1933).

6. Bundesarchiv: Magnus Hirschfelds Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919 bis 1933. Beschreibung des Instituts als „Forschungs-, Lehr-, Heil- und Zufluchtsstätte“.

7. Bundesarchiv: Magnus Hirschfelds Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919 bis 1933. Mitarbeitende und Bewohner des Instituts, darunter Kronfeld, Hodann, Levy-Lenz, Hiller, Giese, Dora Richter, Erich Amborn, Bruno Vogel sowie Gäste wie Christopher Isherwood.

8. Magnus Hirschfeld: Die Transvestiten. Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb, Berlin 1910. Vergleiche auch Wikipedia, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

9. Homolulu Berlin: Dora Richter. Biografische Darstellung mit Hinweisen auf Levy-Lenz, das gemeinsame Wohnen in der Motzstraße sowie Hirschfelds Lernprozess durch trans Patient:innen.

10. Wikipedia, Dora Richter: Ankunft 1920, Operation 1931 durch Erwin Gohrbandt, Namensänderung 1934 in der Tschechoslowakei, Tod 1966 in Allersberg.

11. Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V.: Charlotte Charlaque, Schauspielerin. Biografischer Eintrag, Tätigkeit als Rezeptionistin am Institut, Reise nach London 1929.

12. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science. Darstellung des „Transvestitenscheins“ am Beispiel von Gerd Katter.

13. Filmportal, Anders als die Andern (Regie Richard Oswald, Drehbuch zusammen mit Magnus Hirschfeld, Uraufführung 28. Mai 1919 im Apollo-Theater Berlin).

14. Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld, errichtet am 27. Oktober 2011

15. Bundesministerium des Innern und für Heimat sowie Bundeskriminalamt: Lagebericht zur kriminalitätsbezogenen Sicherheit von LSBTIQ* Menschen in Deutschland 2023, veröffentlicht am 13. Dezember 2024.

16. Lesben- und Schwulenverband (LSVD): Queerfeindliche Gewalt. Angriffe auf Lesben, Schwule, bisexuelle, trans, intergeschlechtliche und a_spec sowie queere Menschen (LSBTIAQ*)*. Aufbereitung der BKA-Daten 2024.

17. PEN America: Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning. Bericht für das Schuljahr 2024 bis 2025, veröffentlicht im Oktober 2025. sowie PEN America Index of School Book Bans 2024 bis 2025.