Berlin Had a Trans Clinic in 1919. Students Burned Its Library in 1933.
You have seen the photograph, or one like it. A bonfire in a Berlin square in May 1933, students in uniform pitching armfuls of books into it. It runs in every documentary about the Nazis taking power.
What almost nobody is told is where a great many of those books came from.
They came from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science, which opened in Berlin's Tiergarten in July 1919 and was the first institution of its kind anywhere in the world. It held something like 20,000 books and tens of thousands of photographs. It ran medical clinics, marriage counseling and a research library. And it did things in 1919 that are difficult to get in a number of American states in 2026.
The man who built it was Magnus Hirschfeld, a doctor who had already spent two decades arguing that homosexuality was neither a sickness nor a crime. In 1897 he co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which is the first organization in the world devoted to gay rights. Its single political objective was the repeal of Paragraph 175, the clause of the German criminal code that made sex between men a crime. The committee circulated a petition for repeal for more than thirty years. Albert Einstein signed it. Thomas Mann signed it. It never passed.
The ID card that kept people out of jail
The Institute's most quietly radical product was a piece of paper.
Berlin police arrested people for appearing in public dressed as the wrong sex. Hirschfeld negotiated an arrangement under which the Institute could assess someone and issue what was called a Transvestitenschein, a transvestite pass, which the holder could produce when stopped. It was not a cure and it was not liberation. It was a document that meant you went home instead of to a cell, in 1920s Berlin, and it was issued by a clinic rather than confiscated by one.
The Institute was also where some of the earliest gender-affirming surgeries were performed. Dora Richter, who had come to Hirschfeld as a domestic worker at the Institute, underwent surgery there in 1931. For decades it was assumed she was killed when the building was attacked in 1933. Research published in 2024 found evidence she survived, and lived until 1966. The gap between those two accounts is its own kind of lesson about how this history gets kept.
6 May 1933
The Nazis had been in power for about three months. On the morning of 6 May 1933, students from the Deutsche Studentenschaft arrived at the Institute, went through the library, and carried the contents into the street. Four days later, on 10 May, the books were burned at the Opernplatz along with the rest of what the regime had decided was un-German.
Hirschfeld was not there. He was abroad on a lecture tour, and he was Jewish and gay and had been beaten nearly to death by nationalists in Munich in 1920, so there was no version of this where he came back. He saw it instead the way the rest of the world saw it, as newsreel footage, sitting in a cinema in France, watching his own library burn.
He died in Nice on 14 May 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday.
What was actually lost
The thing to understand about the Institute is that it was not a small radical outpost. It was a functioning research institution with a government-recognized role, in the capital of a major European country, and it was built on the assumption that this was all going to keep getting better. Hirschfeld's committee had been petitioning for repeal since 1897 and expected to win.
Paragraph 175 was not repealed in 1933. It was expanded. It stayed on the books in West Germany in its Nazi-era form until 1969 and was not removed entirely until 1994. The research was gone, the people who did it were scattered or dead, and the work had to be started again from almost nothing by people who in many cases did not know it had been done before.
That is the part worth sitting with. Not that it was destroyed, but that it existed, and that most of us were never told.
