Magnus Hirschfeld and the World's First Trans Clinic the Nazis Burned to the Ground
- Jun 12, 2024
- 13 min read
Updated: Aug 1
On the night of May 10, 1933, roughly 40,000 people packed into Opernplatz in central Berlin to watch Nazi students and paramilitary troops burn some 20,000 books in a bonfire that's since become one of the most reproduced spectacles of the 20th century, a fixture of textbooks, documentaries, and Holocaust museum walls. Most of that reproduction leaves out a detail that would surprise a lot of people: the single largest contribution to that bonfire came from one building, a Berlin research institute most people have never heard of. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science, spent fourteen years running the world's first sex museum, performing the world's first modern gender affirmation surgeries, and housing a rotating cast of writers, doctors, and even underground Communist agitators under one roof, before Nazi students raided it four days ahead of that bonfire and fed most of its library into the flames. Its founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, built something the world had never seen before. The Nazis made sure it never existed again.
Who Was Magnus Hirschfeld?
At the turn of the 20th century, a young doctor named Magnus Hirschfeld was woken late one night by a soldier at his Berlin practice. The man was distraught, and had come to confess that he was an "Urning," a term used at the time for homosexual men. The secrecy made sense. Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code made homosexuality a crime, and exposure could cost a man his career, his rank, and his freedom. Hirschfeld, who was gay and Jewish himself, tried to comfort him. It didn't work. The soldier was getting married the next day and couldn't face it. He shot himself shortly after.
Before he died, the soldier left Hirschfeld his papers and a letter. "The thought that you could contribute to a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of death," he wrote. Hirschfeld later published the story in his book The Sexual History of the World War. He also walked away from his medical practice and spent the rest of his life trying to make sure that future arrived.
In 1897, at thirty-one, Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a group formed partly in response to Oscar Wilde's trial two years earlier in England. Its motto was "through science to justice," and its goal was the repeal of Paragraph 175. It's now generally regarded as the first LGBTQ rights organization in the world. Hirschfeld spent the next two decades building a body of research that argued gender and sexuality existed on a spectrum rather than as a binary, work he summarized in his 1914 study Homosexuality in Men and Women. He called people who fell outside conventional categories "sexual intermediaries," a term broad enough to cover gay men, bisexual people, and what he called transvestites, meaning anyone who lived, at least in part, as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth.
The Institute for Sexual Science Opens in Berlin
Hirschfeld put his theories into practice on July 6, 1919, when he opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in a villa on the corner of In den Zelten and Beethovenstraße, on the northern edge of the Tiergarten park. The building itself had history: it had been built decades earlier for the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, one of the 19th century's most celebrated musicians. Two years after opening, Hirschfeld bought the building next door as well, to make room for a growing archive, consultation rooms, and a residence for himself and his partner. Anyone could get help with a sexual or gender related problem there, and patients too poor to pay could work off their fees in the office instead.
The institute's stated mission was research, teaching, healing, and refuge, and Hirschfeld kept expanding what that meant. In 1928 he co-founded the World League for Sexual Reform alongside British sexologist Havelock Ellis and Swiss physician Auguste-Henri Forel, turning what had started as one doctor's private crusade into an international movement with congresses held across Europe.
Inside the World's First Sex Museum
The institute wasn't just a clinic. Its library grew into the largest collection of sexuality research in the world, and according to National Geographic, visitors could also browse an actual sex museum, a global collection of artifacts curated by Hirschfeld's partner Karl Giese. It grew to include modern contraceptives, sex toys, erotic paintings, and objects gathered from around the world, among them an Indonesian stone phallus statue the institute's housekeeper reportedly smuggled through German customs in her luggage. Decades later, a researcher tracking down the institute's scattered remains was handed a box of antique Japanese sex toys by the daughter of a physician who'd worked there. "I like them very much," she told him, "but I cannot put them out on the piano, people would talk."
The building doubled as a residence, and according to a San Francisco Silent Film Festival essay on the institute's history, its guests and, for stretches, its lodgers included the writer Christopher Isherwood, philosopher Walter Benjamin, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and authors André Gide and W.H. Auden, drawn by its reputation as one of the only places in Europe taking gender and sexuality seriously as science rather than sin. Costume parties were held on the premises, one of which survives only in a single unlabeled photograph of Hirschfeld and Giese holding hands at the center of the crowd. The institute also issued legally recognized "transvestite" identity cards, which gave patients a shield against arrest for dressing as a gender other than the one on their birth certificate. The protection was real: in 1912, years before the institute even opened, a Hirschfeld patient named Gerda von Zobeltitz was arrested in Berlin for wearing women's clothing in public, and released only after producing the medical certificate Hirschfeld had given her. Out in the city, Berlin's drag balls at venues like the Eldorado were becoming a fixture of Weimar nightlife, and cards like hers were part of what made attending them survivable. Hirschfeld liked to say there were 43,046,721 different types of human sexuality. It's not entirely clear he was joking.
It's worth noting how differently the rest of the medical establishment was treating sexuality at the same moment. Elsewhere in Europe and America, doctors were still prescribing bed rest and surgical removal of the clitoris as treatments for female "hysteria." Hirschfeld's institute, whatever its blind spots, was operating on the opposite assumption: that sexual and gender variance wasn't a disease to be cured but a fact to be studied and, wherever possible, accommodated.
The World's First Gender Affirmation Surgery
The institute's medical wing performed what Hirschfeld's team called Genitalumwandlung, a staged surgical transition involving castration, penectomy, and vaginoplasty, carried out by gynecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz and surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, along with hormone therapy. It's now recognized as the first modern gender affirmation surgery in the world, though at the time the institute treated only trans women, since female to male phalloplasty wasn't practiced anywhere until the late 1940s. One of Hirschfeld's patients, Lili Elbe, later became the subject of the 2015 film The Danish Girl, though the film drops Hirschfeld's name entirely. Some patients who struggled to find work after their surgeries were hired at the institute itself, giving them both an income and a measure of legal protection. It would be another quarter century before an American GI named Christine Jorgensen made gender affirming surgery a household topic in the United States, by which point the pioneering work done under Hirschfeld's roof had been burned, scattered, and largely forgotten.
The Secret Communists Next Door
The institute had a second, far stranger life that rarely makes it into the history books. According to The Berliner, the building was also a working hideout for the Communist International. Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern's propaganda chief and self-styled "Red Millionaire," moved into a furnished room there in 1926 with his partner Babette Gross. Politburo member Heinz Neumann, famous for the slogan "beat the fascists wherever you meet them," shared their apartment, and the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy, who was busy plotting armed insurrection against the British Empire, lived in the building too. With patients and visitors constantly moving in and out for entirely unrelated reasons, the institute made perfect cover for secret meetings that would otherwise have drawn police attention. Hirschfeld himself never joined the Communist Party, but at least one of his researchers, Richard Linsert, held leadership roles in its paramilitary wing. Christopher Isherwood, who lived at the institute during this period, later based a character in his novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains on Münzenberg.
Different from the Others: Cinema's First Gay Rights Film
In 1919, the same year the institute opened, Hirschfeld co-wrote and appeared in Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern), a feature film arguing for the repeal of Paragraph 175. According to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, it was the first film to portray a gay relationship as something other than a punchline or a warning, and Hirschfeld himself played the sexologist who delivers its message directly to camera: homosexuality is "neither a vice nor a crime, indeed, not even an illness." Conrad Veidt starred, Karl Giese played his character's younger self, and in a supporting role was Anita Berber, Weimar Berlin's most notorious dancer, who was already a fixture of the same demimonde the institute served. The film was banned within fifteen months. When the Nazis took power, they hunted down and destroyed nearly every print of it. A single surviving copy turned up decades later in a Moscow film archive.
The Einstein of Sex Goes to America
By 1930, Hirschfeld's American lecture tour had earned him a nickname the press loved: "Germany's Einstein of Sex." According to the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, he arrived in Brooklyn by ocean liner on November 22, 1930, and took a room on the 40th floor of the newly opened Hotel New Yorker. Asked why he'd chosen a skyscraper hotel, he said, "Because towers reaching to heaven seem to me the very symbol of the America I love and of her high aspirations." The trip had been arranged in part by Dr. Harry Benjamin, a New York physician who'd first met Hirschfeld in Berlin and who would go on, decades later, to become the founding figure of transgender medicine in the United States. Benjamin and his wife hosted Hirschfeld for dinners at their apartment on West 75th Street. Over six weeks in the city, Hirschfeld lectured to medical societies, did fieldwork in Harlem, at bathhouses, and at night court, and met Margaret Sanger, Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and attorney Clarence Darrow.
The tour was only supposed to end in New York. Warned that another wave of antisemitism was building back home, Hirschfeld extended it indefinitely, adding Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco before continuing on to Japan, the Philippines, China, the Dutch East Indies, India, Egypt, and Palestine. He never went back to Germany. By the time the Nazis came for his institute, he was already living out of a suitcase on the other side of the world.
Why the Nazis Targeted Hirschfeld
The Nazi Party was founded the same year the institute opened, and it targeted Hirschfeld almost from the start. He was heckled at public appearances, and smoke bombs were set off at his lectures. In 1920, he was beaten so badly outside a lecture hall in Munich that newspapers reported him dead. He recovered, which meant he got to read his own obituary. Hitler personally called him a "Jewish swine," and Hirschfeld's image was reproduced in the propaganda magazine Der Stürmer as an example of the degeneracy the party claimed to be cleansing from Germany. For the Nazis, his Jewish heritage and his advocacy for gay and trans rights weren't separate offenses. They were treated as the same one. The British codebreaker Alan Turing would later be destroyed by a version of the same logic under British law, a reminder that Paragraph 175 wasn't uniquely German or uniquely Nazi, just uniquely enforced.
The Raid and the Book Burning, May 6, 1933
By the time Hitler was named chancellor in January 1933, the institute had spent months under surveillance and threat. On the morning of May 6, members of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, a Nazi aligned student group, marched on the building with a brass band, forced their way in, and spent hours hauling out books, photographs, and the bronze bust of Hirschfeld that stood in its library. Hirschfeld was still abroad. Giese escaped with almost nothing. Four days later, on May 10, the confiscated material was added to a bonfire in Berlin's Opernplatz, which a JSTOR Daily essay on the raid describes as "engineered in advance" for maximum spectacle. More than 20,000 books and manuscripts burned, some of them irreplaceable research going back decades. Newsreel cameras filmed the whole thing, and a narrator declared the flames were consuming the "intellectual garbage of the past." Hirschfeld watched the footage months later, in a cinema in Paris.
What Got Smuggled Out, and What Never Resurfaced
Not everything burned. Before the raid, someone negotiated with Nazi officials to buy back around twenty boxes of the library's most valuable material, which Hirschfeld hoped to use to rebuild the institute in exile. Those boxes went into storage, likely in Paris or Nice, and have never been located since. Separately, according to National Geographic, the institute held roughly 40,000 completed "psycho biological questionnaires," detailed patient intake forms that recorded visitors' sexual histories and identities. In the wrong hands, those files could have gotten patients arrested or worse. According to lore collected by researcher Ralf Dose, a staff member was hauling a cart of the files to a hiding spot when it tipped over in front of a Nazi officer, who helped right it without realizing what was inside. The files are rumored to have been smuggled out by Communist party members at the institute, the same network with roots in Münzenberg's operation, and sent to Moscow. They've never resurfaced. Only a single completed questionnaire has ever been found, sitting today in the Berlin State Library.
A handful of the burned library's individual books have turned up since, scattered across the world by the chaos of war. Researchers have identified a 1904 study on the history of women's clothing recovered in Berlin, a 1920 copy of Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality found in Prague, and a 1902 collection by activist August Fleischmann called Vita Homosexualis, discovered in a Polish bookstore with a note attached saying it had been slated for destruction back in 1933.
Death in Exile
Giese caught up with Hirschfeld and his companion Li Shiu Tong, a former medical student, in Paris, and the three lived together while trying to raise money to reopen the institute abroad. The plan collapsed as Nazi occupation crept toward France, and they relocated to Nice. Hirschfeld died there of a stroke on May 14, 1935, his 67th birthday, reportedly saying not long before, "if Germany doesn't want me, I don't want it either." Giese died by suicide in 1938. Li abandoned an attempt to found a successor institute in Hong Kong and lived out the rest of his life in relative obscurity, eventually settling in Vancouver, Canada.
The Suitcases in a Vancouver Dumpster
That last detail turned out to matter. In the early 1990s, a Canadian student named Adam Smith opened a dumpster in his apartment building's basement and found a stack of old leather suitcases, left behind after an elderly Chinese neighbor died. Inside were journals, photographs, and a plaster death mask cast from a man's face. Smith didn't know who any of it belonged to, but he couldn't bring himself to throw it out, so he posted a note online asking if anyone recognized the names Magnus Hirschfeld or Li Shiu Tong. A decade passed before Ralf Dose, co-founder of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society and the person who has spent the past forty years hunting the institute's scattered remains, stumbled across the post. He tracked Smith down and flew from Germany to collect the suitcases in 2003. They had belonged to Li Shiu Tong, Hirschfeld's last companion, all along. As of the last count, Dose and his fellow researchers have recovered only 35 of the roughly 10,000 volumes the institute's library once held.
Is Anything Left of the Institute Today?
Not much, physically. The villa survived the Nazi raid, but not the war: it was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid a few years later, and the site was cleared by 1950. Construction on the Kongresshalle began nearby in 1956, a building now used by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt arts center. According to The Berliner, a small plaque was finally installed along the Spree river in 1994, and even that isn't quite in the right spot: the actual villa stood on the opposite side of the arts center, but city planners didn't want the marker sitting in the middle of what was then a construction zone for the new Federal Chancellery. The Magnus Hirschfeld Society, founded by activists in the early 1980s to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the raid, still runs a small library in Berlin today, staffed by volunteers, and is currently trying to raise the funds to build a proper queer archive at the site of the city's old Kindl Brewery.
The photograph of the bonfire in Opernplatz remains one of the most reprinted images of the Nazi era. Almost nobody who sees it knows it was a sex research institute's library going up in smoke, or that the man who built that library had already tried, and failed, to get the law that criminalized his own life taken off the books, or that a handful of Communist revolutionaries were using the same building to plot against fascism from a floor away. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft ran for fourteen years. It's taken most of a century for anyone to start putting it back together.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Magnus Hirschfeld the first person to perform gender affirming surgery?
His institute is widely credited with carrying out the first modern gender affirmation surgeries, starting around 1930, using a staged procedure the team called Genitalumwandlung. The institute treated only trans women during this period, since surgical options for trans men weren't developed until the late 1940s.
What happened to the Institute for Sexual Science?
Nazi aligned students raided the institute on May 6, 1933, and four days later its library, more than 20,000 books and manuscripts, was burned in a public bonfire in Berlin's Opernplatz. Hirschfeld was abroad at the time and never returned to Germany. The building itself was later destroyed in an Allied bombing raid during the war.
Is the Institute for Sexual Science still around today?
Not in its original form. The villa that housed it is gone, and a small, sometimes misplaced plaque along the Spree river is the only physical marker. The Magnus Hirschfeld Society, founded in the early 1980s, keeps a small library open in Berlin and is working to build a larger queer archive elsewhere in the city.
Who was in the famous 1933 Nazi book burning photo?
The most widely reproduced images from that day show Nazi aligned students and members of the SA sorting through and burning material looted from Hirschfeld's institute. The event is usually captioned as a generic Nazi book burning, without noting that the material came specifically from the world's first sex research institute.
Sources
4. Scientific American, "The Forgotten History of the World's First Trans Clinic" (Brandy Schillace)
