LGBTQ+ Stories from Nazi Germany

Born in 1891, Eve Adams was a Polish, Jewish immigrant to the United States, an entrepreneur, an author, and a leftist. She also never hid the fact that she loved women. After she was deported to Europe in 1930, Eve became a victim of the Holocaust.

Born in Amsterdam to a Jewish father and Christian mother, Frieda Belinfante had a cosmopolitan upbringing and enjoyed music. She lived life on her own terms and defied society's expectations. After the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, she bravely joined together with other LGBTQ+ people to resist the Nazis and protect tens of thousands of Jews. After the war, she continued her life of love, authenticity, and service to others.

Rudolf Brazda is known as the last pink triangle concentration camp survivor. He was born on June 26, 1913, in Meuselwitz, Germany. At 29 years old, Rudolf was deported to Buchenwald for violation of Paragraph 175. He remained silent about his experience for most of his life after liberation. Rudolf broke his silence at the age of 95. He spent the rest of his life inspiring people with his story.

Annette Eick was a poet, author, and educator whose life and quest for survival transcended national boundaries. As a Jewish lesbian in Nazi Germany, her life was in constant danger. On the eve of World War II, she fled to England, where she fell in love and forged a new life.

The artist Richard Grune was twenty-nine years old when he moved to Berlin to find a place for himself in the city’s world-famous LGBTQ+ community. Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor at the same time. The Nazis arrested Grune for being gay and he spent a decade locked away in prisons and concentration camps.

Margot Hueman was fifteen years old when the Nazis deported her and her family to the Theresienstadt ghetto. That's where she met Dita, the love of her life. Together, Margot and Dita survived seven different camps and were liberated in April 1945. Margot became the only lesbian Jewish  Holocaust survivor to bear testimony.

Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was a pioneering German sexologist and political advocate who founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first LGBTQ+ rights organization in the world. During Germany’s Weimar Republic, he also established the Institute for Sexual Science, which provided counseling, healthcare, and a range of other services to Germany’s LGBTQ+ communities. When the Nazis came to power, they targeted Hirschfeld because of his work.   

Gerd Katter was a trans man born in Berlin, Germany in 1910. As a teenager, Katter was a patient at Magnus Hirschfeld’s famed Institute for Sexual Science, and even received a “transvestite certificate” that allowed him to live openly as his true self without reprisal from the police. Katter’s story showcases his bravery while also teaching us about life in early twentieth century Berlin.

Fritz Kitzing was a gender-nonconforming person who was just 27 years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany. They faced harassment, discrimination, and violence from the German police, Nazi organizations, and ordinary citizens. Despite this, Kitzing navigated the web of laws and policies and insisted on living their life.

Josef was twenty-four years old when he fell in love with Fred. Unfortunately, Fred's father was a Nazi official and had Josef sent to a concentration camp. Josef survived and bravely told his life story in 1972 by publishing a book under the pseudonym Heinz Heger. It was the first to tell the history of the Nazis' gay victims and it inspired queer activists to reclaim the pink triangle as a symbol of activism and pride.

Ernst Pack was a construction worker and German veteran of World War I. The Nazis arrested him multiple times for violating Paragraph 175, Germany’s national anti-gay law. He was eventually sent to concentration camps, where he was forced to undergo an invasive and irreversible medical procedure aimed at “curing” him of being gay.

Friedrich Radszuweit was a gay German entrepreneur, publisher, and political advocate. He was the most successful gay publisher of his time and led the first mass-movement homosexual emancipation organization in the world. But, he used neither his extensive influence nor his extensive following to oppose the rise of the Nazi party.

Hilde Radusch was a lesbian activist and anti-fascist who resisted both Nazism and political repression throughout her life. A committed communist in Weimar Germany, she was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 for her political organizing. During the Nazi era, Radusch and her partner secretly aided Jews and political dissidents through their Berlin restaurant. After the war, she became a leading figure in Germany’s lesbian activist movement and worked to preserve lesbian history and memory.

Henny Schermann was a Jewish lesbian born in 1912 to Russian immigrants. She worked as a salesperson in her family shoe store. In 1940, she was arrested for objecting to the law demanding all Jewish women adopt Sara as part of their name. The Nazis also noted that she was a “promiscuous lesbian.” She was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp and subsequently murdered by gas at the Bernburg killing facility in 1942.

In 1940s war-torn Berlin, Felice Schragenheim, a Jew in hiding, and Elisabeth “Lilly” Wust, the wife of a German soldier, made an unlikely couple. Through a courtship of love letters and poems, their relationship deepened into living together, co-writing their own marriage contract, and exchanging rings. Buried for decades, their struggle brings to light a unique, complicated, and powerful love story.

Pierre Seel grew up in a Catholic family in France. After the German occupation of France, the Gestapo arrested Pierre for being gay and sent him to the Schirmeck concentration camp. He survived the torture and became a powerful voice advocating for the recognition of the Nazis’ LGBTQ+ victims. He published one of only three books written by gay concentration camp survivors.

Ilse Totzke was a music student in Würzburg, Germany. Multiple people in Totzke’s neighborhood denounced her to the Nazis for being a “social degenerate” manhater who “did not receive gentleman visitors.” The Gestapo seemed more interested in the fact that Totzke continued associating with Jewish people, despite the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited such interaction between Jews and non-Jews in Germany. Totzke persisted and risked her life to save her Jewish friend.

Born in the town of Riesenburg, West Prussia (now Prabuty in Powiat Kwidzyński, Poland), Charlotte Wolff  lived openly as a lesbian starting as early as her days in primary school. Prior to the start of World War II, Charlotte’s experiences with antisemitism led to her fleeing to Paris, and eventually London. While living in London, Charlotte’s works on bisexuality and lesbianism set the foundation for others in her field.