Trans History Week and Germany 1933

There was a "transvestite" woman in Germany, somewhat well-known, who was a youth during the Nazi time in Berlin.
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, (which is a made up name, not the real name) was born in 1928 and Charlotte's father was a local higher up in the NSDAP. The father wanted Charlotte, then not yet transitioned, to join the party's youth wing and they were arguing often. In the end, Charlotte killed the father in self-defense (that was the story at least, but considering the circumstances, it could be true) and Charlotte was sentenced to youth prison/psychiatry in the "troubled youth"/"antisocial" kind of category.

As this was in 1945, Charlotte didn't stay in jail and was freed after the end of Nazi-Germany.
Only then Charlotte started to cross-dress in public, and worked in second-hand furniture / antiques dealing and was also accused of having kept belongings from apartments of deported Jews.
Later, during socialist Eastern Germany, Charlotte opened a museum.

The German entry in wikipedia is more extensive and detailed than the English version.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_von_Mahlsdorf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_von_Mahlsdorf

There is also a newspaper article where Charlotte's family say that not all of her stories about heroically saving old buildings from looting after the war are true. It seems Charlotte was a good storyteller and the actual biography is unclear.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/charlotte-von-mahlsdorf-hat-ihr-leben-aus-vielen-geschichten-zusammengesetzt-keiner-weiss-ob-sie-stimmen-aber-sie-klingen-gut-das-einfache-lottchen-li.963553

However, this person was in the media sometimes and there was barely any of the topics that are associated with the TRA debate currently, about using women's spaces, for example. The only aspect was that they were referred to as a woman, but it was absolutely known they were a man, that was the whole point. No-one seriously believed they were a woman, it was more a mental gymnastics game and even the wiki article refers to them as transvestite. It was a role and everyone knew it was a role.

I am mentioning this because it is an example of someone who was probably gay during the Nazi times and had a very strict father and used the chance after liberation to start the role as "Charlotte". The problems Charlotte had with the Nazi-regime was that they wouldn't want to join them, it was a political disagreement, not about sexuality.

That was very different from current TRA.

It reminds me of Rosie Duffield being investigated by the Labour disciplinary team for “antisemitism” and “Holocaust Denial” based on her retweeting Graham Linehans tweet mocking Eddie Izzard for claiming he would have been targeted by the Nazis.

It’s pretty obvious that the deeply conservative Nazi party of Kinder, kuche, kirche, which banned women from professions and exalted marriage and the production of aryan children, wasn’t keen on what they saw as the decadence and deviancy of the Weimar era. They did crack down on cross dressing, but that kind of persecution (which could be avoided by wearing men’s clothes in public) cannot be compared to the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust or of the genocide of Roma people. I accept that these days we’d call the poor, slow-witted cross-dressing chap in the Scientific American feature trans. But he wasn’t sent to prison for being a transvestite but for being a homosexual prostitute. In one famous case a women who presented as male was given a transvestite pass by the Nazi Government and was allowed to change her name to Gerd, which was gender neutral. Laws outlawing homosexuality and cross dressing were common around the world, including in the UK & US. Think of Alan Turing. They were bad, shameful laws and people suffered dreadfully under them, but surely nobody suggests there was a ‘genocide’ of trans or gay men in England on a par which the Holocaust.

With respect, while people almost certainly felt they were trans, the actual concept of becoming the opposite sex simply didn’t exist in the 1930s, the Nazi party opposed homosexuality, amongst many other things.

Just looking into paper I posted yesterday - when I posted yesterday I'd understood the paper had been instrumental in the German court case referenced upthread.

https://history.washington.edu/people/laurie-marhoefer

Author is Laurie Marhoefer. He's also written this article:

Note the note:

Editor’s Note, September 25, 2023: An earlier version of this story noted that the author’s testimony was submitted to a German court. While the testimony was submitted to a lawyer arguing in the court case, that lawyer did not ultimately submit it to the court. In addition, the story was edited in the third paragraph to more accurately reflect the decision of the German court.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/

So just wanted to clarify.

He also has he/they pronouns, fwiw, so appears to identify as something other than what one would generally expect.

And is working on a book on the subject, due out 2027.

And lastly an excerpt that seems worthwhile:

'From my years of research and from the published literature, I have knowledge of about twenty-seven cases of transgender men and women in the Nazi period.
9
To my knowledge this is the largest number of cases ever discussed at once.
Most scholarship deals with a much smaller number.

Often when one sees the term “persecution (Verfolgung)”in the context of the Nazi state, one thinks foremost of the persecution of Jewish Europeans. The Nazi state systematically rounded up whole communities of Jews and Roma—gay as well as straight, cisgender as well as transgender—deported them, and murdered them.

10
This did not happen to “Aryans.”It did not happen to “Aryans”even if they were accused of “crimes”having to do with sex and gender, such as male-male sex (§175) or “public indecency (Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses)”(§183), a charge made against trans people.'

There's a lot of paperwork generated by any government or military bureaucracy, and the Nazis were champions of creating paperwork. That's why Jewish orgs have been so successful in identifying victims.

To the extent that there's doubt about Jewish deaths, that's due to (a) massacres by the Einsatzgruppen on the Soviet front, or (b) massacres by collaborationist groups in places like Lithuania or Ukraine. But the Holocaust was basically a very bureacratic genocide with tons of paperwork involved.

When you've got a regime as obsessed with paperwork as the Nazis, I'm afraid absence of evidence really does suggest evidence of absence, and we can't get around that by hallucinating that the regime persecuted trans people but, uniquely, there aren't any surviving records of this.

They attempted to burn some records that established which senior people knew and did stuff, and who the high ranked collaborators in other countries were.

They didn't attempt to burn the records that showed who they killed and imprisoned - why would they, they didn't care about them.

Because trans people are THE most victimised group in the whole world ever, you silly goose, when will you accept that?! Even before they existed they were victims of genocide and literal violence 🙄

They were meticulous record keepers that were unrepentantly proud of what they did and wanted to record it for posterity. But,... BUT - when it came to 'trans people', they.... gasp .... BURNT all the records.

Yeah, NAH!

.

But they didn't burn the records of their other victims because...?

Oh but they burnt ‘all the records’ apparently 🙄 all of the records to do with the trans people who they have admitted weren’t categorised as such and therefore weren’t recorded because they didn’t exist. But they still burnt all the records of these non existent people. Someone please make it make sense!

It’s pretty clear that accusing us of ‘denialism’ and refusing to believe that trans people were ‘targeted by the Nazis’ is a little more than a difference of opinion, you and @suggestionsplease1 only come here to scold and you know it.

I’m confused. I thought trans people nearly always passed so well that no one could tell they were trans and “you’d never know if you were meeting a trans person”. In that case, how could the Nazis target trans people if they didn’t know they were trans?

As many others have pointed out to you, the concept of transgender didn't exist at that time. So yes, it makes perfect sense that they would have been "given a free pass", as you put it.

It's genuinely astonishing that you think, "it makes sense that trans people would also have been persecuted because trans people are always persecuted" is good enough evidence to say that they were.

Not everything has to centre trans people, and the Holocaust is one of the many things that doesn't.

At this point it's starting to sound as offensive and egotistical as Justin Bieber writing, "I'm sure she would have been a Belieber" in the guest book at the Anne Frank museum.

Yes, so some transsexuals were victims of the Nazis….

You cannot extend that to a general claim that “transgender people” were targeted. Lots of people were victims of the Nazi’s without being one of the specific targeted groups.

Sounds like if she'd stuck to asking them to name one of these victims, the witch hunt would have failed.

I second that request. No matter how well these supposed trans people hid themselves ,if they were captured by the Nazis then there would be a paper trail somewhere. Nazis were meticulous record keepers. A man's name would be on papers showing when and where he was arrested, what transport he was put on, what camp he arrived at, and his death notice if he did not survive.
Then there were witnesses to his arrest, family members searching for him, people he encountered on transports and in camps -there were huge efforts to track missing people down after the war.
Strange that there is no record of people who thought they were the opposite sex.Also strange that there are no survivors to tell their story.

Yes, I went over this link, too:
https://nrwe.justiz.nrw.de/olgs/koeln/j2023/15_U_208_22_Beschluss_20230120.html

It is a very, very, very extensive consideration of context, after Ms Vollbrecht complained about a "narrative". The court went over how she was framed as anti-trans after the event at the university in Berlin, where the university had to backtrack (after supporting the view that there are more than two sexes, coming from a renowned research university; and had tried to ruin her reputation).

The court also points out that TRA already had her in their sights and were just looking for something they could sue about, and that, given Ms Vollbrechts education as biologist and her conduct as a citizen (democratic, not a holochaust denier or anything), it was clear she wasn't denying that individual trans people could have been targeted by the Nazis, but the narrative and the framing of transvestites as separate group targetted, comparable to Jewish people (if I got that right, she wasn't denying either that transvestites, crossdressers and others existed).
The court even points out that official free material by an education institution financed by the state (as @Igneococcus said), agrees with Ms Vollbrecht's perspective (line 14 in the judgement).

This court case debate is perhaps comparable to that "most oppressed minority" story from current times.

The conclusion from the court is that TRA are permitted to say that she denied something, but it is not permitted for everyone outside of the debate Vollbrecht vs TRA to claim denial after her tweet - because even the state of Germany agrees that they were not an equal "target" group compared to others - which does not seem a very logical conclusion but it seems the court tried to look at the problem from all angles and finally found one where she was wrong.

However, this is not a very clear cut simple court decision saying she was outright wrong.

Why is disagreement on here always seen as "scolding?"
Is it usuallyreally that much of an echo chamber on here you can't bear to hear different opinions and feel all "told off?"

This quote refers to transsexuals, not transgender people.

Not the same thing. It's one thing to dress up as the opposite sex, it's quite another thing to claim to be the opposite sex.

On the subject of alleged denials that transgender people exist - of course the people exist, it's the label of 'transgender' that has no factual basis, given that human beings are either male or female, and you can't swap between the two.

I believe that all sorts of people exist - astrologers exist, that anti-vaxxers exist, that people who think one or all of the moon landings were faked exist. I just don't accept that what they believe is true, but thankfully astrologers, anti-vaxxers and people who think one or all of the moon landings were faked don't aggressively demand that language, the law, education, the media, medicine etc must change to go along with their unproven beliefs.

There are clear links with fascism, extremism etc and transgenderism.

They all see "sex changes" as a cure for homosexuality. Apartheid South Africa promoted this, Iran (to this day) promotes this.

And they sought them from the doctors who would later go on to work in the concentration camps and carry out other experiments.

Wow what a discussion. I now have a better understanding as to why, GC beliefs are claimed to be akin to being a nazi sympathiser by the erm righteous.

I do not doubt that all sorts of “deviants” and undesirables were murdered during the holocaust but the primary target were Jews,

LEST WE FORGET

Correct me if i am wrong i think it was about 6 million.

The T people are not really helping themselves jumping on the death camp bandwagon.

Quite offensive actually.

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You know there was no legal categorisation for trans people at that time right? They were targeted through public order offences or mental illness categories.

this is surely the key point- there was no legal categorisation of 'trans people' because there was no concept of 'trans people'
there was a concept of homosexual people and a concept of sexual deviance but not of transgender identity as proposed today (and for the last decade or so)

its not like the nazis were thinking 'shit we forgot to make laws banning the people who were born in the wrong body, what can we do? how can we get rid of them? I know, here's an idea, lets just say they were homosexual, that will do, they kind of are anyway.OK?'

I am reminded of a conversation I had with someone from the middle east, I think Egyptian, and I was trying to find out if there was a different view (legally) of gay people and transgender people but I was told this was impossible to discuss because the same word covered both categories

I have no idea if that was inaccurate but it doesn't surprise me because after all thats what has happened here with the forced teaming LGB+T