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Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Samuel Clowes Huneke Open the ORCID record for Samuel Clowes Huneke [Opens in a new window]
Samuel Clowes Huneke*
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George Mason University
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Abstract

In recent years scholars have shown increasing interest in lesbianism under National Socialism. But because female homosexuality was never criminalized in Nazi Germany, excluding Austria, historians have few archival sources through which to recount this past. That lack of evidence has led to strikingly different interpretations in the scholarly literature, with some historians claiming lesbians were a persecuted group and others insisting they were not. This article presents three archival case studies, each of which epitomizes a different mode in the relationship between lesbians and the Nazi state. In presenting these cases, the article contextualizes them with twenty-seven other cases from the literature, arguing that these different modes illustrate why different women met with such radically different fates. In so doing, it attempts to bridge the divide in the scholarship, putting persecution and tolerance into a single frame of reference for understanding the lives of lesbians in the Third Reich.

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Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 297 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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Footnotes

Early stages of this work were presented at the 2019 Lessons and Legacies Conference in Munich and the 2019 workshop Homosexuellenverfolgung im regionalen Vergleich at the Hannah-Arendt-Insistut für Totalitarismusforschung. I would like to thank Edith Sheffer as well as the two anonymous readers for their generous critiques, which substantially improved the final copy. I would also like to thank Patricia Heberer-Rice and Ronald Coleman at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Martin Luchterhandt at the Landesarchiv Berlin, Johann Zilien at the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Steffi Kreßner at the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, and the staff at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen for helping me access the archival records on which this research depended.

References

1 File 106, A Pr.Br.Rep. 030-02-05, p. 63, RG-14.093M, Criminal Police Records on Homosexuality, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington, DC (USHMM).

2 See Dobler, Jens, Von anderen Ufern. Geschichte der Berliner Lesben und Schwulen in Kreuzberg und Friedrichshain (Berlin: Gmünder, 2003), 182–90Google Scholar; Schoppmann, Claudia, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität (Herbolzheim: Centaurus, 1997), 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dobler, Jens, “Unzucht und Kuppelei: Lesbenverfolgung im Nationalsozialismus,” in Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Eschebach, Insa (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 57Google Scholar; Schoppmann, Claudia, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung. Lesbische Frauen im ‘Dritten Reich,’” in Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Eschebach, Insa (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 44Google Scholar.

3 Jens Dobler, “Der Lesbenclub ‘Die Lustige Neun,’” Online-Project Lesbensgeschichte, ed. Ingeborg Boxhammer and Christiane Leidinger (https://www.lesbengeschichte.org/Pdfs/pdfs_regionalgeschichte_deutsch/lesbenclub_dobler_d_2003.pdf).

4 Jensen, Erik N., “The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1–2 (2002): 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 A new special issue of German History edited by Anna Hájková points to growing interest in traditionally marginalized areas of Nazi and Holocaust historiography. See Anna Hájková, “Introduction: Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma,” German History (June 9, 2020): 1–14. Hájková also maintains an online bibliography on lesbian and trans women in Nazi Germany, a remarkable resource for scholars in the field. “Bibliography on lesbian and trans women in Nazi Germany” (https://sexualityandholocaust.com/blog/bibliography/).

6 Dobler, “Unzucht und Kuppelei,” 62.

7 Stefanie Endlich, “Das Berliner Homosexuellen-Denkmal,” in Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und Männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Insa Eschebach (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 167–86; Corinna Tomberger, “Das Berliner Homosexuellen-Denkmal. Ein Denkmal für Schwule und Lesben?,” in Homophobie und Devianz: Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Insa Eschebach (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 198ff.

8 “Ravensbrück erhält Gedenkkugel für lesbische NS-Opfer,” queer.de, October 9, 2018 (https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=32099); Klaas-Wilhelm Brandenburg, “Was alle wollen und was doch nicht kommt,” Die Tageszeitung. taz, November 3, 2018, sec. taz (https://taz.de/Was-alle-wollen-und-was-doch-nicht-kommt/!5544919/); Isabel Lerch, “Vorerst kein Gedenkort für lesbische KZ-Opfer in Ravensbrück,” L. Mag, May 8, 2017 (https://www.l-mag.de/news-1010/vorerst-kein-gedenkort-fuer-lesbische-kz-opfer-in-ravensbrueck.html).

9 Alexander Zinn, “Aus dem Volkskörper entfernt”? Homosexuelle Männer im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2018), 275.

10 Samuel Clowes Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 1 (April 2017): 52–58.

11 Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 49; Claudia Schoppmann, “National Socialist Policies towards Female Homosexuality,” in Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (London: UCL Press, 1996), 185–86; Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, 259–63.

12 See, for instance, Zinn and Schoppmann's disagreement over how to characterize Mary Pünjer; Camille Fauroux's disagreement with me over Lucienne M. and Marie P.; and Ingeborg Boxhammer's conclusion about Marta Halusa and Margot Liu, which also diverges from mine. Alexander Zinn, “Aus dem Volkskörper entfernt”?, 313; Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, 242–44; Camille Fauroux, “Shared Intimacies: Women's Sexuality in Foreign Workers’ Camps, 1940–1945,” German History (June 9, 2020): 11–16; Ingeborg Boxhammer, Marta Halusa und Margot Liu. Die Lebenslange Liebe zweier Tänzerinnen (Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2015), 55–63; Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 30–59.

13 “Ravensbrück. Doch keine Gedenkkugel für verfolgte Lesben,” queer.de, October 11, 2018 (https://www.queer.de/detail.php?article_id=32120).

14 Anna Hájková, “Queere Geschichte und der Holocaust,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 38–39 (September 14, 2018) (http://www.bpb.de/apuz/275892/queere-geschichte-und-der-holocaust).

15 Alexander Zinn, “Abschied von der Opferperspektive. Plädoyer für einen Paradigmenwechsel in der schwulen und lesbischen Geschichtsschreibung,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 67 (2019): 935.

16 Gudrun Hauer, “Nationalsozialismus und Homosexualität. Anmerkungen zum ‘lesbischen Opferdiskurs,’” in Lieben und Begehren zwischen Geschlecht und Identität, ed. Maria Froihofer, Elke Murlasits, and Eva Taxacher (Vienna: Löcker, 2010), 138.

17 Laurie Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943,” American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (October 2016): 1193–94.

18 Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, 242–44.

19 Samuel Clowes Huneke, “Die Grenzen der Homophobie: Lesbischsein unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft,” in Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 1933–1969, ed. Alexander Zinn (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2020), 117–29.

20 A few explanatory notes about this data: although Jens Dobler's article “Männer nicht” includes information about ten lesbian women, I have included only Agnes Barfuß and Elizabeth Büttner's cases in this chart because they were the focus of the Gestapo's investigation. For each case I only note the most extreme punishment faced. That is, women who were sent to concentration camps and died there are listed under the “murdered/died” category, not under the concentration camp category. There are some cases of lesbian women known to have lived in Nazi Germany not represented in this table because there is not evidence that their sexuality came to the attention of Nazi Party or police officials. These include Martha Mosse, about whom Javier Samper Vendrell has written; Hilda Radusch, a lesbian communist about whom Claudia Schoppmann has written; and Ruth Roellig, the famous lesbian writer who lived out the Nazi period in relative comfort. Other cases, such as that of the Hamburg prostitutes Käthe K. and Anneliese M., I do not include because not enough is known to adequately categorize them. Finally, because more than one factor played a role in some cases, the total number listed here is slightly higher than the actual number of cases considered. The cases are drawn from: Jens Dobler, “‘Männer nicht.’ Eine lesbische Familie,” in Verzaubert in Nord-Ost. Die Geschichte der Berliner Lesben und Schwulen in Prenzlauer Berg, Pankow und Weißensee (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag, 2009), 125–34; Kirsten Plötz, “‘… ihre perversen Neigungen restlos bloß zu stellen.’ Die politische und sexuelle Denunziation einer Nationalsozialistin 1933,” Invertito. Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten (2002): 92–110; Claudia Schoppmann, “Vier Porträts. Elsa Conrad, Margarete Rosenberg, Mary Pünjer, Henny Schermann,” in Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Insa Eschebach (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 97–111; Dobler, “Unzucht und Kuppelei”; Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung”; Fauroux, “Shared Intimacies”; Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance”; Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State”; Zinn, “Abschied von der Opferperspektive”; Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 51–52; Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität; Claudia Schoppmann, “Denounced as a Lesbian: Elli Smula (1914–1943), Working Woman from Berlin,” trans. Elisabeth Tutschek, Testimony Between History and Memory 125 (October 2017): 91–94; Boxhammer, Marta Halusa und Margot Liu. See also Javier Samper Vendrell, “The Case of a German-Jewish Lesbian Woman: Martha Mosse and the Danger of Standing Out,” German Studies Review 41, no. 2 (May 2018): 335–53.

21 Because of its focus on how Nazi state and party officials conceived of and dealt with women perceived to be lesbian in German society, this article does not look at how lesbians were treated in other parts of the Nazi empire or in the concentration camps. Rich historiographies on both topics have developed in the last several years, in particular, thanks to the work of Anna Hájková. See Anna Hájková, “Den Holocaust queer erzählen,” Sexualitäten (2018): 86–110; Anna Hájková, “Between Love and Coercion: Queer Desire, Sexual Barter and the Holocaust,” German History (June 9, 2020): 1–21; Insa Eschebach, “Homophobie, Devianz und weibliche Homosexualität im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück,” in Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Insa Eschebach (Berlin: Metropol, 2012), 65–78.

22 Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 30.

23 Martha Vicinus, “‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 478. Reading Linck's case in light of Jen Manion's scholarship, we might today ask if Linck is best understood as a lesbian or instead as a “female husband” and someone who “transed” gender. Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–14.

24 Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, 79–80.

25 Rüdiger Lautmann, “Das Verbrechen der widernatürlichen Unzucht. Seine Grundlegung in der preußischen Gesetzesrevision des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Kritische Justiz 25, no. 3 (1992): 308; Christian Schäfer, “Widernatürliche Unzucht” (§§ 175, 175a, 175b, 182 a.F. StGB): Reformdiskussion und Gesetzgebung seit 1945 (Berlin: BWV Verlag, 2006), 33; Jennifer V. Evans, “Bahnhof Boys: Policing Male Prostitution in Post-Nazi Berlin,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 4 (October 1, 2003): 610–11.

26 Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 146–73.

27 Andrew Wackerfuss, Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2015), 175–85; Geoffrey Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stolzfus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 236.

28 Eleanor Hancock, “The Purge of the SA Reconsidered: ‘An Old Putschist Trick?,’” Central European History 44, no. 4 (2011): 669–83. For more on the Night of Long Knives, see Eleanor Hancock, “‘Only the Real, the True, the Masculine Held Its Value’: Ernst Röhm, Masculinity, and Male Homosexuality,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 4 (1998): 616–41; Wackerfuss, Stormtrooper Families, 296–319.

29 Adolf Hitler, “Reichstagsrede: Über die Entstehung und den Verlauf der SA-Revolte,” July 13, 1934. Wackerfuss, Stormtrooper Families, 301–9; Daniel Siemens, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 175–79.

30 Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS and Police,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1–2 (2002): fn35.

31 Rudolf Klare, “Homosexualität und Strafrecht” (Diss., Halle-Wittenberg, Martin-Luther-Universität, 1937), 119.

32 Clayton J. Whisnant, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880–1945 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016), 236–37; Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 34–35; Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 154–62.

33 Harry Oosterhuis, “Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 2 (April 1, 1997): 187–205; Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz (Paderborn: Schöningh Paderborn, 1990), 26.

34 Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” 240–41.

35 Schäfer, “Widernatürliche Unzucht,” 319.

36 Hans-Georg Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 127.

37 See Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 175–219; Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Martial Status on Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 17–44; Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 10–64.

38 Dr. Schäfer to the Reichskommissar für die besetzten norwegischen Gebiete on June 18, 1942, printed in Ilse Kokula, “Zur Situation lesbischer Frauen während der NS-Zeit,” Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 12, no. 25 (1989): 34. Claudia Schoppmann similarly argues, “The fact that women were largely shut out of influential positions and careers and were not assumed to have an autonomous sexuality, unattached from men, led to the situation, that female homosexuality was considered to be socially benign and less dangerous to eugenic policy than male homosexuality.” See Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 49.

39 Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHStAW), Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 18.

40 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 15, 17.

41 List Material Ravensbrück, 1.1.35.1/3761466, ITS Digital Archives, Bad Arolsen.

42 Correspondence File, 6.3.3.2/103481431, ITS Digital Archive, Bad Arolsen.

43 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 13.

44 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 5.

45 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 5.

46 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14.

47 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14. For more information on US troops in Germany during the period 1918–1923, see Erika Kuhlman, “American Doughboys and German Fräuleins: Sexuality, Patriarchy, and Privilege in the American-Occupied Rhineland, 1918–1923,” The Journal of Military History 71, no. 4 (October 2007): 1077–1106. For more on Black Germans under the Nazis, see Clarence Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans During the Nazi Era (New York: Routledge, 2004); Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

48 Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 95–117; Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?, 21–30.

49 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14.

50 Eve Rosenhaft, “Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: The Limits of the ‘Racial State,’” History Workshop Journal 72 (Autumn 2011): 166.

51 Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” Signs 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 414.

52 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14.

53 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14; Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?, 56.

54 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14.

55 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 14.

56 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 780, 15.

57 Edith Sheffer, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (New York: Norton, 2018), 19–20; Lisa Pine, Hitler's “National Community”: Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 7–9.

58 Annette Timm, “The Ambivalent Outsider: Prostitution, Promiscuity, and VD Control in Nazi Berlin,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton University Press, 2001), 198. See too Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, “Social Outsiders and the Construction of the Community of the People,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11–12; Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann, “Before Auschwitz: The Formation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–9,” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (July 2010): 524; Schoppmann, “National Socialist policies towards Female Homosexuality,” 185.

59 Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany,” 418; Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 149.

60 Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler's Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 130.

61 Wachsmann, KL, 149.

62 Sheffer, Asperger's Children, 13.

63 Julia Roos, “Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ‘Occupation Children,’ 1920–30,” Contemporary European History 22, no. 2 (2013): 155–80; Julia Roos, “Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” German History 30, no. 1 (March 1, 2012): 45–74.

64 Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims, 143–44; Campt, Other Germans, 72–73.

65 Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany (New York: Perennial, 1999).

66 Rosenhaft, “Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany,” 165–66.

67 Campt, Other Germans, 64; Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims, 89.

68 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 140.

69 Boxhammer, Marta Halusa und Margot Liu, 55–65; Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 43–48.

70 Schoppmann, “Vier Porträts,” 99–100.

71 Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State,” 1172ff; “Ilse Sonja Totzke,” Yad Vashem (https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/totzke.html).

72 Schoppmann, “Vier Porträts,” 107.

73 Schoppmann, “Vier Porträts,” 109.

74 Schoppmann, “Vier Porträts,” 104–111.

75 Quoted in Schoppmann, “Denounced as a Lesbian,” 93.

76 Schoppmann, “National Socialist Policies towards Female Homosexuality,” 177, 184; Schoppmann, “Denounced as a Lesbian,” 94.

77 Hájková, “Queere Geschichte und der Holocaust.”

78 Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (BLHA), Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 7.

79 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 19.

80 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 33.

81 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 10.

82 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 4 and 18.

83 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 18–20.

84 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 9.

85 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 19.

86 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 4

87 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 7.

88 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 10.

89 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 1 and 4.

90 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 32.

91 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 4.

92 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 4.

93 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 4.

94 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 4.

95 For example, Estelle B. Freedman, “The Prison Lesbian: Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915–1965,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 397–423; Lisa Duggan, “The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,” Signs 18, no. 4(1993): 792ff.

96 Marti Lybeck, Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), 109.

97 Robert D. Rachlin, “Roland Freisler and the Volksgerichtshof: The Court as an Instrument of Terror,” in The Law in Nazi Germany: Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice, ed. Alan E. Steinweis and Robert D. Rachlin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 63–88.

98 John Brown Mason, “The Judicial System of the Nazi Party,” The American Political Science Review 38, no. 1 (February 1944): 96–99.

99 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 10.

100 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 2.

101 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 1.

102 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 35.

103 BLHA, Rep. 31 A Potsdam Nr. 5097, 36.

104 For more intergenerational relationships among queer men, see Evans, “Bahnhof Boys,” 605–36.

105 Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz, 212, 318.

106 Dobler, “‘Männer nicht,’” 132.

107 Dobler, “‘Männer nicht,’” 125.

108 Quoted in Dobler, “‘Männer nicht,’” 130.

109 Dobler, “‘Männer nicht,’” 134.

110 Quoted in Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 42.

111 Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 42–43.

112 Dobler, “Unzucht und Kuppelei,” 56–57; Fauroux, “Shared Intimacies,” 14.

113 Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 51–52.

114 File 106, A Pr.Br.Rep. 030-02-05, 7, 18, RG-14.093M, Criminal Police Records on Homosexuality, USHMM. For more about Hahm and the Violetta club, see Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic, 56–62.

115 Plötz, “‘… ihre perversen Neigungen restlos bloß zu stellen,’” 94.

116 Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 36.

117 Fauroux, “Shared Intimacies,” 14–15; Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 49.

118 Zinn, “Abschied von der Opferperspektive,” 951–52.

119 File 106, A Pr.Br.Rep. 030-02-05, 43, RG-14.093M, Criminal Police Records on Homosexuality, USHMM.

120 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 13.

121 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 5.

122 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 13.

123 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 14.

124 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 14.

125 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 14.

126 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 14–15.

127 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 16.

128 HHStAW, Abt. 409/5, Nr. 1165, 19–20.

129 Timm, “The Ambivalent Outsider,” 192.

130 Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 44–45.

131 Zinn, “Abschied von der Opferperspektive,” 951–52.

132 Dobler, “Unzucht und Kuppelei,” 59.

133 Quoted in Zinn, “Aus dem Volkskörper entfernt”?, 283.

134 Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, 96–97.

135 Quoted in Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 45.

136 Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade, 42.

137 Schoppmann, “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung,” 35.

138 Quoted in Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 40.

139 Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 40–43.

140 Hauer, Gudrun, “Der NS-Staat. Ein zwangsheterosexuelles/heteronormatives Konstrukt?,” in Homosexuelle im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Schwartz, Michael (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 32Google Scholar.

141 Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 52.

142 Currah, Paisley, “The State,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2017): 198Google Scholar.

143 Zinn, “Aus dem Volkskörper Entfernt”?, 30; Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 51.

144 Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State,” 1194. Sylvia Köchl too argues, “The persecution of lesbians by the Nazis has been defamed as allegedly ‘not systematic’ or ‘less severe’ in comparison with the persecution of gays.” See Sylvia Köchl, “Real Talk: Lesbisch, Verfolgt, Vergessen,” Missy Magazine, April/May 2017, 45.

145 See, for example, Richard J. Evans, “The History Wars,” New Statesman, June 17, 2020 (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/06/history-wars); Stroud, Scott R. and Henson, Jonathan A., “Memory, Reconstruction, and Ethics in Memorialization,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33, no. 2 (2019): 282–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

146 Currah, “The State,” 199.

147 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2004), 20Google Scholar.