Overview Part I

Two men, one in SS uniform, examine materials plundered from the library of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, Berlin, May 6, 1933. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Episode Notes

In this first of two introductory episodes, hear how the walls closed in on LGBTQ people after Hitler came to power through the recorded and written memories of multiple queer people who witnessed or fell victim to the Nazis’ persecution.

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Audio Sources and Excerpted Writings

• The interview segment of Bertram Schaffner is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education, © 1998 USC Shoah Foundation. For more information about the USC Shoah Foundation, go here.
• The Eric Langer letter is an excerpt from The Pink Triangle by Richard Plant. Copyright © 1986 by Richard Plant. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All Rights Reserved.
• Michael Rittermann audio from the 1989 documentary Desire: Sexuality in Germany 1910-1945 (dir. Stuart Marshall) used by permission of Maya Vision International.
• RG-50.030.0445, oral history interview with Rolf Hirschberg, courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. For more information about the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, go here.
• The unpublished Liddy Bacroff writings reside at the Staatsarchiv der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, 242-4 Nr. 339.

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Resources

Some of the websites linked below are in foreign languages, but internet browsers like Chrome allow you to access them in English translation. For a wealth of additional resources, refer to this webpage curated by the Pink Triangle Legacies Project (PTLP); this extensive bibliography compiled by Dr. Anna Hájková offers resources specifically on the subject of lesbians and trans women during the Nazi era.

General information about the Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people:

• Useful primers from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the PTLP.
• For a recent book-length exploration, see W. Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2022).
• The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals by Richard Plant (Henry Holt, 1986).
• Paragraph 175, a 2000 documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, with interviews conducted by Klaus Müller.
• Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate, a 2023 documentary by Benjamin Cantu (Netflix Studios). The film features footage of Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel, who lived and worked at Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science before the Nazis came to power and were among the first transgender women in the world to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Learn more about them and their relationship in “Charlotte, Toni and Dora” by Raimund Wolfert (Replika, October 2, 2023).
• Wir hatten einen grosses A am Bein (We Were Marked with a Big “A”), a 1991 documentary by Elke Jeanrond and Joseph Weishaupt, featuring testimony by Kurt von Ruffin and Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim (available from USHMM). 
• For a nuanced exploration of the persecution of lesbians and gender-nonconforming people, see Laurie Marhoefer’s “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939-1943” (American Historical Review, Vol. 121, No. 4, October 2016).
• Explore biographical profiles of lesbians under Nazism from Lesbengeschichte.
• Learn more about the persecution of trans people in Zavier Nunn’s “Trans Liminality and the Nazi State” (Past & Present, Vol. 260, No. 1, August 2023) and the video program “Transgender People, the Nazi State, and the Holocaust,” featuring Dr. Marhoeffer (Museum of Jewish Heritage/YouTube).

Selected resources about some of the topics and people discussed in the episode: 

• For more information about Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, see MGH’s episode and accompanying episode notes about him here. Watch a newsreel of the 1933 Nazi book burnings that destroyed part of his institute’s library here.  
• As Richard Plant asserts in the episode, the Nazis have often been depicted as homosexuals. This article by Peter Tatchell shows how that homophobic narrative was adopted even in a landmark WWII account like William Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich. 
• Learn more about the murder of Ernst Röhm and the rest of the Nazi Storm Troopers’ leadership during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives in this USHMM summary.
• Albrecht Becker, who was convicted under Paragraph 175 and later enlisted in the German armed forces, discussed queer life before and after the murder of Röhm in a 1997 USC Shoah Foundation interview; watch excerpts here.
• Bertram Schaffner went on to work as a military psychiatrist during WW II, during which time he began research on male homosexuality, some of which was cited in the Kinsey Report. Learn more about him here (includes additional testimony from his 1998 USC Shoah Foundation interview).
• Rolf Hirschberg’s entire testimony (which also includes an account of visits to the Hirschfeld Institute) is available on the USHMM website. Interestingly, two months after that audio-only interview with Klaus Müller, Hirschberg also gave a closeted  on-camera interview to the USC Shoah Foundation in which he refers to Emil, his partner, as his cousin. 
• Ruth Roellig is the subject of a chapter in Claudia Schoppmann’s Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich (Columbia University Press, 1996); for an online profile of her from the GLBTQ Archives, go here. 
• Learn more about Liddy Bacroff by reading Bodie Ashton’s article “The Parallel Lives of Liddy Bacroff: Transgender (Pre)History and the Tyranny of the Archive in Twentieth-Century Germany” (German History, Vol. 42, No. 1, March 2024) or by watching their presentation about her here (Forum Queeres Archiv München/YouTube).

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Episode Transcript

Bertram Schaffner: There was one evening when I, I think my mother had gone to bed and I went out for a stroll. Um, and, but somebody else was strolling and I, uh, wanted to make contact. I thought he was interested in making contact, too.

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Eric Marcus Narration: It was 1936, and Bertram Shaffner was out cruising in Berlin. He was an American in his mid-20s and he and his German-born mother were visiting Germany three years into the Nazis’ reign. She was trying to persuade her Jewish relatives to get out of the country. When a man caught Schaffner’s eye that night, Schaffner sensed that something was wrong.

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BS: Then I became aware that there was something very uncomfortable about it for him, so I didn’t understand. And he managed to speak to me and ascertain what I was interested in. Uh, but he said, you know, “It’s extremely dangerous for us to be seen talking, because everybody is watched, and if you cannot prove that you knew each other before, that you stopped and talked to each other for a valid reason, uh, then you’re in trouble. And if you have stopped to talk to each other because of a sexual reason, then you’re immediately subject to arrest.” And he said, “Please don’t, please, sort of, let’s separate now. You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

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EM Narration: I’m Eric Marcus, and this is Making Gay History: The Nazi Era.

If the plague of homosexuality goes unchecked, it will spell the end of Germany. That was the message Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler delivered to an audience of SS officers four years after Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. By Himmler’s estimate, up to 10 percent of Germany’s men were homosexual. That was two million men shirking their responsibility to procreate, to grow the population of a nation intent on reclaiming its global standing after WWI.

And male homosexuality undermined Germany in other ways, Himmler said. Gay men posed a political threat: they were loose-lipped moral degenerates who were loyal to their own kind rather than the state—a charge that had long been leveled against the Jews as well. They were pathological liars. Mentally ill. It was unfortunate, really, he said, that they could no longer be dispatched as they had been in ancient times: by drowning in a bog—a course of action he called “not a punishment, but simply the eradication of abnormal life.”

By the time Himmler delivered his speech, the Nazi state had devised its own, more sophisticated methods to try to contain the homosexual contagion. The Nazis’ savagery ultimately led to the deaths of thousands of gay men—the worst massacre of gay people in modern history. Tens of thousands of queer lives were shattered.

In this episode, we’ll hear how a draconian antigay law and the vast powers of the Nazi police state were wielded ruthlessly to arrest, terrorize, torture, and imprison suspected homosexuals. And we’ll draw on archival excerpts to explore how gay men, lesbians, trans people, and gay Jews experienced persecution differently. We begin with my own decades-old interview with a gay German Jewish immigrant.

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Eric Marcus: Okay, hello, yep, I’m here. Interview with Richard Plant on May 14, 1989, New York City.

You came to New York in what year then?

Richard Plant: I came to America in 1938, May 1938.

EM: Uh-huh. And did you, did you move to Manhattan when you first…?

RP: Yeah, I moved to Manhattan, yeah, for the first couple of years. I did nothing but learn English. That was my main occupation in those days.

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EM Narration: Richard Plant had left Germany shortly after the Nazis came to power. He completed his studies in Switzerland before immigrating to New York City. That’s where I spoke with him at his tidy, compact apartment on the top floor of a Greenwich Village row house.

In 1986 Plant published The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. It was the first in-depth English-language book about the persecution of gay people in Nazi Germany, a subject he’d discovered precious few knew anything about.

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RP: Even my gay friends didn’t know about it.

EM: Didn’t know about…

RP: No. The persecution of the gays? No, nobody knew it. The official press depicted the Nazis as homosexuals. That explained their viciousness.

EM: Right.

RP: There was a book by a Jewish man who said that the reason for antisemitism is homosexuality. Sure. They all joined. From the Hasidics to the Catholic Church and back. That explained the viciousness. They were all homosexuals.

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EM Narration: Plant grew up during the interwar Weimar years, a relatively liberal time when queer subcultures thrived in Germany’s cities, and when LGBTQ rights advocate and sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld founded his internationally renowned Institute for Sexual Science.

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EM: Did you, were you aware when you, what danger your friends were in in Germany?

RP: I didn’t know the extent of the gay persecution and the extent of the Jewish persecution.

EM: Until later.

RP: But I had an idea.

EM: Right.

RP: Because the Hirschfeld Institute was burned in ’33.

EM: Do you recall what happened to the, do you remember the Hirschfeld Institute being destroyed or was that not news?

RP: The Swiss papers reported it. The Swiss papers printed things which the German press couldn’t print anymore because they were being coordinated. But none of us could see the size of this, how big it would get. Neither the Jews nor the gays had any idea what was going to happen.

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EM Narration: No one knew how big it would get, but the first signs of repression came soon after Hitler was appointed chancellor. Gay rights organizations were forced to disband, queer publications were branded indecent and outlawed, and many gay and lesbian bars were ordered shut.

Nazi students destroyed Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. Its archives and library went up in flames during the Nazi book burnings.

Still, many LGBTQ people initially underestimated the Nazi threat. They had good reason to. Ernst Röhm, the chief of the SA, the Nazis’ Storm Troopers, was widely known to be gay and he was a close Hitler ally.

But then on June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered the execution of Röhm and the rest of the SA leadership. It came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives. Röhm’s murder was really about a power struggle—Hitler suspected Röhm of plotting against him. But he used Röhm’s homosexuality to justify the assassination and publicly vowed to purge the Nazi ranks of homosexuals. It was an effective piece of antigay propaganda that reinforced prejudices already held by ordinary Germans.

Later that year, the Nazis stepped up raids on queer meeting places. Hundreds of men were rounded up, interrogated, beaten into revealing names and networks. Scores were jailed or imprisoned in the Nazis’ first concentration camps.

In a 1935 letter, Richard Plant’s friend Eric Langer wrote about Röhm’s murder and what happened next.

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Eric Langer VO: Before I come to what has happened to some of our acquaintances, here is some news not published by anybody in Frankfurt. Have you heard about the Röhm murders? With that it started, the rounding up, the closing of the bars, and so on. No place is open here in Frankfurt.

Remember the G.G. brothers? Arrested a week ago, put into Preungesheim jail. Remember Max? Supposedly in Dachau, near Munich. What little contact I had with Ferdi is lost but I’m afraid his SA uniform is no protection with Röhm gone. A few he seduced on his endless expeditions would rat on him quickly.

You remember Bert? You will not believe it, he joined the SS gang, displays his elegant penmanship in their main office, and looks the other way when he spots me.

Richard, you could never guess how many told on their former friends when they were thrown in jail and “reeducated” by the bullies.

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EM Narration: Kurt von Ruffin spent nine months in the Lichtenberg concentration camp in the early days of Hitler’s reign. He said in a documentary interview that he had to wear a yellow band with the letter “A”—“A” for the German word for “ass-fucker.” He also described the particular suffering of prisoners he referred to as transvestites, who were brought in dressed in women’s clothes, stripped naked, humiliated, and beaten.

Concentration camp prisoners had no legal recourse. The Gestapo, the Nazi secret police force, operated without legal oversight. They could take people into so-called “protective custody” for an indefinite period of time without going through the court system.

But it wasn’t long before the Nazis turned the law and the courts into powerful tools of persecution as well. In 1935, they strengthened Paragraph 175, an anti-sodomy law that had been part of the German Criminal Code for decades. Up until then it was narrowly interpreted and the number of convictions was limited.

Under the stricter Nazi version, prison sentences could be handed down for any “indecency” between men. And even a whisper of suspicion or a perceived intention toward homosexual activity—a look, a smile, a touch—could get you arrested.

At left, highlighted, the Nazi-revised version of Paragraph 175 in the German Criminal Code; English translation on the right.

Paragraph 175 was most zealously enforced in the years leading up to the war. To hunt down gay men, the Gestapo made use of “pink lists”—lists of known or suspected homosexuals that were compiled by local police long before the Nazi era. Arrests soared, and tens of thousands of men were sent to prison. Possessions seized during house searches—address books, letters, an affectionate note scribbled on the back of a photo—produced more leads as the scope of the crackdown grew.

Michael Rittermann, an Austrian actor, was in his late twenties when his address book was confiscated.

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Michael Rittermann: I came home one night and my stepmother told me that the Gestapo had called. And as I was out, they said, “Fine, we’ll come back tomorrow morning,” which indeed they did. And there was a house search in my room and in my writing desk, they found an address book, which they took with them. And then I was taken to the Gestapo headquarters, where I was interrogated by these Gestapo men in a way, which I would, in hindsight, say was perfectly correct and acceptable.

But when the interrogation at the Gestapo was over, I was taken to a police prison, where I found myself together with two other chaps in the cell. And during the first night there I was taken into a room in the cellar where there were, I would say—I’m not certain about the actual number—but I would say about 10 men, and each of them held a stick very much heavier than my walking stick. And they had my address book in their hands. There’s one after the other. I have to stand to attention in front of each one, I had to undress, and then they opened my address book and said, “Who is this man?” So I said, “I’m very sorry. I can’t tell you.” And this interrogation went on from man to man, accompanied each time by a desperate blow with that heavy stick.

Now, eventually, and there is a blank now in my mind, I came to on the floor of the cell, which, you may know or may not know, is never in complete darkness during the night. There’s always a little lamp hanging down, so there is a sort of semi-light. When I came to, I thought, how extraordinary—somebody must have poured honey over my face. And I did this and looked at my hand and realized that it was covered in blood. So of course my first reaction when I got over the immediate shock, uh, was that my face had been bashed in, and I thought, what’s going to happen to my future? I can’t work in the theater with a monstrously disfigured face.

So time went by, not many weeks, until I was called out of my cell and taken to the ground floor, where this same gentleman who interrogated me waited for me and said, “I have good news for you. You are free. But don’t run away. Wait for official information by letter that the case against you because of lack of evidence is closed.”

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EM Narration: Rittermann knew better than to stick around and risk what might come next. He fled the country.

Paragraph 175 did not apply to lesbians. The Nazis viewed same-sex desire in women as less permanent. And unlike gay men, lesbians weren’t a political threat to the state because women didn’t hold positions of power.

But the Nazis had other tools to go after people who deviated from the norm. Even though there was no specific law for the systematic persecution of lesbians, they were still in very real danger. Statutes that covered sex with dependents, prostitution, abortion, or seduction of minors could be used as pretexts to go after women who attracted the authorities’ notice.

Trans and gender nonconforming people could be charged under Germany’s public indecency law, Paragraph 183, for wearing clothing that didn’t match their legally assigned gender.

Once people were under investigation, their lives could be scrutinized for other offenses against the Nazi state.

And it wasn’t just the scrutiny of the authorities that posed a threat to LGBTQ people.

Many ordinary German citizens were complicit in their persecution and were all too eager to inform on those who didn’t toe the heterosexual or gender-conforming line.

People outside the norm were vulnerable to denunciation or blackmail by acquaintances or strangers. Denunciations were at the root of an estimated third of Paragraph 175 cases during the Nazi era.

Rolf Hirschberg, a gay Jew, was the target of just such a blackmail threat. He tells the story to Dr. Klaus Müller.

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Rolf Hirschberg: I started getting letter, “You dirty Jew, uh, we know you are a homosexual and so on and so forth. You better look out and, but we get you,” and bah, bah, bah. I was very excited and my mother said, “Ah, that’s stupid.” I said, “Don’t say such nonsense, these guys are liable to do everything or anything.”

So I went to my lawyer. He said, “Rolfie, don’t be afraid, these are beginners. They don’t even know that… They’re simply lousy Nazi youngsters, they want to make money and think they can oppress you, that’s it.”

Well, anyway, uh, so my friend says, “You know what? I think it’s the time we are leaving.”

Klaus Müller: So how did you feel, um, as a homosexual in these years between ’33 and ’37?

RH: Uh, like a stranger, to tell you the truth. Because I was born in Berlin, right? And I was a Berliner. But when the Nazis came, you had the feeling you are a stranger all of a sudden.

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EM Narration: In this climate of fear, maintaining a low profile was crucial to staying out of trouble. Lesbians grew their hair long, feminine-presenting gay men tried to adopt a more masculine bearing. Same-sex couples moved into separate homes, and some gay men and lesbians married each other in order to pass as straight.

For LGBTQ people who were deemed Aryan, avoiding notice or trying to earn a living sometimes meant working in the service of the state that persecuted them. Some conformed to the demands of Nazi ideology—like Ruth Roellig, a lesbian author who had published a guide to Berlin’s lesbian clubs—with a prologue by Dr. Hirschfeld no less. Once the Nazis took over, they required all German writers to join the Reich Chamber of Culture if they wanted to keep working. Roellig signed up and she even went on to write an antisemitic novel. Whether out of conviction or opportunism we don’t know. But we do know that while the Nazis were in power, Roellig was able to live with her girlfriend and continue to work.

Many gay men—even men who’d been convicted under Paragraph 175—enlisted in the German military. That’s what Richard Plant’s friend Eric Langer did.

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EM: Your friend Eric was still in, in Germany.

RP: Yeah, my friend Eric joined the navy. And many of the gays joined the army and the navy. But many didn’t, and they thought they could pass by. Many managed to pass, like, you know, some very light-skinned Negroes passed as white.

EM: Right, right.

RP: It’s really like that. And as I said in my book, you cannot, uh, [unintelligible] in your passport that you are gay. It’s in your passport that you’re Jewish or Catholic or Protestant… As a baby you are not classified yet.

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EM Narration: In the eyes of the Nazis, being Jewish was a far greater offense than being gay. And that information was captured in all kinds of paper records that could ultimately send them to their deaths once the Nazis put their genocidal plans into action.

The persecution of queer people wasn’t uniform. Their fate depended on factors beyond sexual orientation—political leanings, social class, ability to blend in, and above all, racial status. There were also the whims of the authorities. In one instance, a trans man from Berlin—identified as G.W.—was investigated by the police but sent home without being charged. As long as he passed and didn’t cause public offense, he was allowed to go about his life.

For Liddy Bacroff, there was no leniency. Bacroff was born in southwestern Germany in 1908. At 21, she started living fulltime as a woman and settled in Hamburg, where she found a community of fellow sex workers who practiced their profession in the city’s red-light district.

Bacroff identified as a “transvestite”—a term that’s now generally considered offensive, but at the time it was close to our present-day understanding of the word “transgender.” That’s not how the authorities saw her. She was convicted several times as a gay cisgender man under Paragraph 175 even before the law was strengthened by the Nazis.

But harassment and convictions didn’t compel Bacroff to leave her adopted home, as she wrote while in custody in 1931.

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Liddy Bacroff VO: It has now been two years, and I can’t leave Hamburg, the Reeperbahn, the singular district of Saint Pauli. Here I have everything I once longed for, and that’s now been fulfilled. I have good friends or fleeting acquaintances of the night—they come and go—some who know me as a transvestite and others who address me as a harlot, like every other on our street.

For a year and a half now I’ve had a steady boyfriend. I know that we love and understand each other. But I also know that one day this love will come to a sudden and unexpected end. That I will, at some unknown hour, leave him—him, who I still sincerely love today. I don’t know if that’s because of my nature, but I feel I can’t be held responsible for that.

I am so terribly indifferent to everything. I’m drifting with the current of the world and of the people who are all, today, more or less fighting for their existence. And somewhere in this world, without much fuss being made about it, I will end, too. But when that moment arrives, I will not utter any complaints, for I have lived according to my nature.

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EM Narration: Living according to her nature became increasingly perilous after the revision of Paragraph 175, especially because that revision also included a new section: 175a. It took aim at homosexual behaviors that were considered especially heinous—including sex deemed to have a corrupting effect on other men, like prostitution or sex with a subordinate or a man under the age of 21—behaviors for which both parties could be sentenced for up to 10 years of hard labor.

Bacroff was first convicted for prostitution under Paragraph 175a in 1936 and served a two-year prison sentence. When she was arrested again soon after her release, she petitioned the court for so-called voluntary castration. The procedure offered some who were prosecuted under Paragraph 175 the possibility of a more lenient sentence or helped them avoid being sent to a concentration camp.

But Bacroff’s motives were considered suspect. The court argued that castration in her case wouldn’t offer a “cure.” It would only make it easier for Bacroff to hide her genitals from her clients and, in having sex with them, “entice non-homosexually inclined young people into homosexuality, once they notice that he is a man.”

But a man, she was not. That’s clear in her writings, which survived in the archives of the institutions that persecuted her. In one of her stories, Bacroff describes an encounter with a client, a steamship radio operator named Rolf, who recognizes in her the woman she knew herself to be.

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LB VO: A handsome young man came up to me and asked me to dance. I noticed the light pressure of his right hand on my back. Several times, without thinking, I looked into his eyes, and as soon as he noticed, a sheepish smile appeared around his lips.

Hours passed, we danced even more—we had found each other. Rolf was passionately in love with me! Countless times I heard my name from his lips—“Liddy,” often like a breath, dreamy, rapturous, awake to the happiness of love.

Rolf was a really fine person, extremely decent and caring towards me, because when we were exposed to the unhealthy cold, damp air of the rainy break of day, and I was noticeably shivering, he tenderly placed his coat around me, and held me tight in his strong male embrace, and I was so unspeakably happy.

Rolf saw and loved in me only the feminine. A brief chaste struggle was followed by complete and mutual devotion. Although Rolf silently slipped 20 marks in my purse when we said goodbye two hours later, I’m convinced that this experience was free from any harlotry—and from the vices that make up the path that we as transvestites are all more or less forced to travel and live by.

Signed Liddy Bacroff, Transvestite

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EM Narration: Bacroff’s castration appeal was denied. After another four years in prison, she was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where in January 1943 she was murdered.

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In our next episode: the war years, and life in the concentration camps.

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This episode was produced by Inge De Taeye, Nahanni Rous, and me, Eric Marcus. It was mixed and sound designed by Anne Pope. John Cariani gave voice to Eric Langer; Esther Fallick voiced Liddy Bacroff. Our studio engineers were Michael Bognar, Cathleen Conte, Katherine Cook, and Tucker Dalton at CDM Sound Studios. Our music was composed by Fritz Myers.

Thank you to our founding editor and producer, Sara Burningham, and our founding production partner, Jenna Weiss-Berman at Pineapple Street Studios.

The oral history excerpt of Rolf Hirschberg was provided courtesy of the Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The clip of Bertram Schaffner’s interview is from the archive of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Thank you to Maya Vision International for the audio of Michael Rittermann. And thank you to Henry Holt & Company for permission to use the excerpt of Eric Langer’s letter reproduced in Richard Plant’s The Pink Triangle.

In this episode and this entire series we are indebted to the work of LGBTQ historians who’ve uncovered, and continue to uncover, this underexplored part of our history—people like the late Richard Plant, Klaus Müller, Claudia Schoppmann, Jake Newsome, Laurie Marhoefer, and Anna Hájková, who also served as our pre-production consultant. We also owe special thanks to Bodie Ashton, who generously provided us with Liddy Bacroff’s writings and helped us tell her story. You can find links to some of these historians’ contributions at makinggayhistory.org, along with other resources, a transcript of the episode, and archival photos compiled by our photo editor Michael Green.

This special series on the experiences of LGBTQ people during the rise of the Nazi regime, World War II, and the Holocaust is a production of Making Gay History, in partnership with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

I’m Eric Marcus. Until next time.

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