00:00:00.000In these interrogations, they are going into great detail about the sexual histories of these women.0.67
00:00:08.280And I should point out, in the gay male interrogations, they are similarly getting all of the details about who did what to whom and how many times you came.0.69
00:00:35.660Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.
00:00:39.600So, Adrian, today we have a very special guest, returning guest to the show, who is going to tell us a little bit about his new book, I Will Not Abandon You, Queer Women in Nazi Germany.
00:00:53.620I think this is like catnip for us, so I'm so excited for this one.
00:01:21.900So today is all about the fate of LGBT populations in Nazi Germany.
00:01:28.220But I also wanted to briefly talk about something else, which is the fate of LGBT populations in post-war memorial discourses.
00:01:37.860Because gay people, for listeners who mostly have followed us through 1933 and don't know that much yet about 1945, right?
00:01:44.340Like, a lot of people are released from prison, from camps in 1945, and then the question becomes how to rehabilitate them.1.00
00:01:51.560Queer people are unusual in that, by and large, they don't.0.97
00:01:56.220By and large, they are still considered criminals under the new law.
00:02:01.020So, can you walk us a little bit about why this question of queer Germans, 1933 to 1945, is so important and why lesbians in particular are so interesting?
00:05:34.620really started taking this history seriously.
00:05:37.840Just to put an even finer point on what you just said,
00:05:39.760the idea that there was no persecution,
00:05:44.560like no lesbian was persecuted for being a lesbian
00:05:47.200in the Nazi Germany is something that you still hear
00:05:49.920from Germans today or from German historians today.
00:05:53.520This is hotly contested, you know, since the 70s, well into the 2020s, right?
00:05:58.800Right, and it got, you know, I think this book kind of reflects a new scholarly consensus.0.88
00:06:03.800I think most scholars now accept that lesbians were, in fact, persecuted,
00:06:07.560despite the fact that there wasn't a law.
00:06:10.300That said, things got really nasty about five to ten years ago
00:06:15.320when there was an effort, a now successful effort to put a memorial at Ravensbrück, which is the
00:06:20.660large female concentration camp just north of Berlin. And there was a group of activists who
00:06:26.420placed this memorial. It was removed. They were sort of slandered. They were accused of placing
00:06:32.040wild memorials. All sorts of German historians and sort of official bodies came out and said,
00:06:37.900this is all just a myth. This isn't accurate. Lesbians were never persecuted because they
00:06:43.060were lesbians and there's no need for this kind of a memorial. There was also a kind of nasty debate
00:06:48.840over the homosexual memorial that is in Berlin, this big kind of ugly concrete box. It's sort of
00:06:57.300settled down a little bit at this point, but there are still people who insist that lesbians were not
00:07:02.820persecuted as lesbians, which is just wrong. So I guess one question I wanted to ask you about
00:07:09.720Sam is, you know, like in the initial post-war decades, there was like claims to reparations
00:07:15.280payments, right? And the like sort of delineation of who did and did not count as a victim of the
00:07:19.920Nazis based on like which identity categories or which categories of experience that had like
00:07:24.680monetary stakes, right? Yes. What are the stakes now? What are the moral stakes in the German0.61
00:07:31.600context? And why are people trying to sort of limit this history now? What are those motivations?
00:07:39.720Yeah, so I think this, and it goes way beyond Germany, I think really it has to do with the centrality of Nazism to how we understand political morality today, right?0.72
00:07:50.700The Nazi era, the Holocaust are still, and with good reason, held up as kind of like the most evil you can be, the worst thing you can be.0.67
00:08:00.960Obviously, that claim has sort of lost some of its power as we have, you know, like Elon Musk out here giving Sieg Hiles and literal neo-Nazis affiliated with our administration.0.51
00:08:12.000But there is still this sense that the Holocaust and the Nazis are the worst.
00:08:16.320And so if you can show that you or a group you belong to or are affiliated with were victims of the Nazis, then that gives you a kind of moral authority or a moral high ground.
00:08:28.940This is exactly the reason that gay rights movements in the 1970s, not just in West Germany, but all around the Western world, sort of take that history, why it's so important.
00:08:38.580And that's, you know, why the Pink Triangle becomes a symbol of gay liberation in this period.
00:08:43.780It lends kind of moral credibility to political claims.
00:08:48.200And so claiming that lesbians or trans people weren't persecuted was always really about saying, no, you don't get to stake the same kind of claims that we as gay men are claiming.
00:09:01.080And by the same token, trying to write this history and resurrect this history was an attempt to say, no, we ought to be included in this broader category of Nazi victims.
00:09:12.420So the category of a Nazi victim is not just a historical sort of ordering of the facts.
00:09:17.980It's also a moral claim as people sort of make their case for political inclusion going into the future.
00:09:23.960And that strikes me as maybe a good place to open up the reality that sort of similar contestation and argument is happening over the persecution of trans people during the Holocaust, right?
00:09:34.120Like, the question of whether trans people were victims of the Nazis is also sort of becoming a question of, like, should trans people be included in, like, the Gay Liberation Project now in the 21st century?
00:09:46.020Right. And I think that is exactly why you have seen people like J.K. Rowling very loudly say trans people were not persecuted by the Nazis, right?
00:10:16.580A couple of years ago, maybe, she went to Twitter, to X, sorry, to denounce this, in her view, myth.
00:10:23.820Or I think she called it a fever dream that trans people were persecuted in the Holocaust.
00:10:27.440And, of course, we know trans people were persecuted in the Holocaust, or, you know, by the Nazis.
00:10:31.320So there's a lot of really good work coming out about this. My colleague Lori Marhofer has written about this, as well as my colleague Zav Nunn has a book coming out soon about trans women in Nazi Germany. So a lot of really exciting scholarship there, too. And it's interesting that there is sort of a parallel track here and a parallel history to that history, that both of these come out of a kind of denial of these histories.
00:10:56.840And we should say that in Germany, of course, as you allude to in the book, there's the additional dimension that being recognized as a victim of Nazi persecution places particular pressure on denial of persecution, right?
00:11:12.960So Holocaust denial famously is illegal in Germany.
00:11:16.400And there are transphobes in Germany who've gotten essentially where the question was like, well, is this Holocaust denial?
00:11:23.900Yeah. And there was a court case about this a couple of years ago with a, I want to say, biology student.
00:11:30.840Who was saying that trans people weren't persecuted in the Holocaust.0.95
00:11:35.100People were then kind of mocking her and criticizing her and saying that she was exactly, she was denying, you know, the Holocaust, basically, in a certain sense.
00:11:42.820And she then went to court saying that, you know, she'd been slandered or her reputation had been impugned.
00:11:47.960And Marhoffer, as well as another colleague of mine, Bodhi Ashton, both wrote briefs, sort of legal briefs based in their historical research about this.
00:11:55.820Yeah. The other thing that, of course, I think we're already sort of pushing towards is that we're talking about Nazi persecution. We're talking about Nazi repression. We talk about the Holocaust. And in the popular imagination, these obviously all kind of coincide.
00:12:08.660But with something like paragraph 175, which did not apply to women, and we know that the Nazis themselves noticed that.
00:12:15.740Sam and I are both familiar with a case where the NSDAP did a whole investigation of this lady, and they're like, wait, is this actually not a crime?
00:12:23.900Did we just spend two months investigating something that's not a crime?
00:12:27.000And of course, saying that the only way you can persecute someone is with laws.
00:12:45.780But does that mean that that is the beginning and the end of persecution in Nazi Germany?
00:12:51.400Well, that takes a very kind of naive view of what Nazi Germany really looked like, right?
00:12:57.080Yeah, no, and I think you also, I mean, I increasingly just compare it to policing in the U.S. today, right?
00:13:02.760You know, just because we have an amendment that guarantees the right against unreasonable searches and seizure won't help very much if ICE is bashing your door in.
00:13:12.140These governments don't actually necessarily care a lot about what's in the law.
00:13:16.700What's really interesting, though, about the Nazis, and this is something I keep running up against and scratching my head over, is we know all of these cases where they're kind of flouting laws, they're flouting precedent.
00:13:29.820But then there are also these cases where they're real sticklers for the letter of the law.0.61
00:13:34.320And they're very punctiliously saying, well, you know, this isn't a crime, and so we can't do anything.0.51
00:13:39.760But, and I think this is important in a lot of these cases, they may not be immediately throwing the person in prison because female homosexuality isn't a crime.0.63
00:13:49.340But they're going to keep surveilling them.0.61
00:13:51.380They're going to keep watching them, and they're going to charge them with another crime if they can.
00:13:56.460Yeah, and the charging is really important, I think.0.93
00:13:58.960The really interesting thing about the Holocaust is obviously that it's carried out partly through legalistic means, right?0.90
00:14:04.540Like that's the kind of remarkable thing.
00:14:06.540That doesn't mean that all persecution was sort of through legalistic means in Nazi Germany.
00:19:55.300On the other hand, it is kind of a remarkably open society.
00:19:58.700And what's interesting for lesbians and for trans people is that it really changes from the imperial era.
00:20:03.800All of the kind of queer stuff in the imperial era is really focused on gay men.
00:20:08.340And all of a sudden, in part because of the lack of censorship in the Weimar Republic, you have all of these new periodicals targeted at lesbians and trans people, all of these new social opportunities.
00:20:18.940Well, there's also, I guess, simple demographic shifts, right?
00:20:22.600Like, it's a society in which, you know, a huge number of men have gone off to war and died there.0.82
00:20:29.300And the 20s is sort of the heyday of the single female breadwinner who just, like, lives by herself and goes to work by herself.
00:20:38.400And, of course, that is much more compatible with, let's say, having a girlfriend on the side than it would be if you're, like, at home and, like, hubby comes home and is like, where's dinner, right?
00:20:48.780Although Hirschfeld has, Magnus Hirschfeld, who's this sort of very prominent both sexologist and campaigner for gay rights, has this really amusing anecdote in one of his many publications.
00:21:00.740I forget off the top of my head which one, but he describes how this man goes off to war in 1914, and when he comes home on leave like the next year, he finds that his wife has shacked up with their maid.
00:21:12.000And after the war, you know, he survives the war somehow, comes home, and she sues for divorce and says, you know, sorry, I'm a lesbian now. So, you know, it's amazing.
00:21:21.060And this is where you get one of my favorite, least favorite words in the German language, Frauenüberschuss, right? The surplus of women of the Weimar years, which then also carries over into the post-World War II years. But completely right, you have all of these women who are of young, marriageable age, and there simply are not enough men around for all of them to marry.0.62
00:21:43.980Which also, interestingly, is one of the many complaints of women about the Weimar Republic and one of the reasons that many of them do wind up voting for the Nazis or other far-right parties.
00:21:56.440It also occurs to me, I mean, just in a broad sense, one of the things you see when you're looking at lesbian history is that in order to live a lesbian life, a woman has to be able to live without a man, right?
00:22:06.760And that is a historically contingent opportunity where you need to be able to support yourself without a husband or without necessarily having to rely on a father.
00:22:17.480And that's something that happens a little more in industrialized and urban societies when, you know, suddenly women can go out and work for a wage instead of, you know, getting married to the boy next door and having seven children in quick succession, like the way that some of their mothers might have.
00:22:35.260You know, so there's also there's a confluence of historical forces, not just a bunch of men dying in World War I, but also these economic developments encouraging women's independence.
00:22:44.480Yeah. I mean, one example of this would be that during the Weimar Republic, the parts of the economy that suffer the most, I think, are farming and sort of small, like, rural businesses. Those are the ones where women tend to be working women, but they're working in the home or around the home and around their family. And those are on decline. Once on the rise are industrial jobs, are administrative jobs where you're working away from your family. Yeah.
00:23:08.960Yeah, it's a little easier to convince papa to let you go to, you know, Dusseldorf or whatever it may be and work in a factory for a couple years.
00:23:17.160And, you know, this already happens during the war where huge numbers of women, because the men are all off fighting, a huge number of women enter the industrial workforce during World War I, which sort of, you know, spurs this.
00:23:32.980And it also guarantees, I mean, in a sort of slipshod way, this is always more promise than reality, but it also guarantees, you know, equality between the sexes. It's not nearly as robust as what comes later after the war, but there is sort of a new sense of female emancipation, both economic, political, social, that makes this kind of a subculture possible.0.75
00:23:52.240Also, one way to tell the story of same-sex desire and association in Weimar Germany is, of course, that part of the visibility is about whether or not you're visible as a queer person.
00:24:06.740And I think one of the funny things is that, like, with the famous haircuts, with the kind of Freikörpercouture, so the nudism, etc., etc., I do also think that, like, it might have just been hard for your average German to distinguish between that is a woman living by herself and living her best life, and that woman is a lesbian, right?
00:24:25.360Like there is a kind of invisibilization that goes along with it, whereas like gay male spaces would be very much noticeable, especially in the contradistinction to these like homosocial spaces that were all about like shooting each other in the face or punching each other, which was like the big thing the men got up to in the 1920s was like joining weird paramilitary organizations and, you know, having a male loneliness epidemic or something.
00:24:50.000So there is also something about, like, visibility means something different depending on whom you sort of are talking about in Weimar.0.55
00:24:57.280Right. No, I mean, I think that's right.
00:24:59.400And, you know, there's this interesting kind of confluence on the right and the far right where they don't like any of these changes.0.92
00:25:15.540They shouldn't be having these short little haircuts and these short little miniskirts, and they certainly shouldn't be going out partying at night.0.99
00:25:22.240You know, so it's a broader kind of horror at the gendered politics of the Weimar era.
00:25:27.820And there's always sort of a debate going on within that about, is this, are they all lesbians or not?
00:25:34.820And there are some Nazis who just think, yeah, they're all, they're clearly all lesbians.
00:25:38.680Any of these kind of feminist movements are lesbians.0.92
00:25:41.340There's some, very few, but some accusations that even the Bundeutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, which is sort of the Nazi parallel organization to the Hitler Youth for young women and for girls, you know, that that's all infested with lesbians.0.58
00:25:56.000And so, whereas with gay men, it's harder for them to sort of hide.
00:26:00.300And there's also not the same broader anxieties as there are with women in the Weimar period.
00:26:07.260So the status of queer women in the Weimar period sounds like it's, you know, sort of ambivalent acceptance or ambivalent growth of possibilities, especially in these urban centers, mixed with a lot of popular anxiety, particularly on the political right, about the status of women more broadly, right?
00:26:25.940And like lesbianism being seen as sort of a byproduct of a breakdown in the family or sort of excessive loosening of women's traditional roles.
00:27:09.180There's not a sense that, oh, we're about to be shut down.
00:27:12.160I mean, in fact, Die Freunden, which is sort of the biggest, I think, women's periodical in that space, has a whole, like, don't worry, guys, this isn't going to be so bad on February 15th.
00:27:22.120And three issues later, they're just gone, right?
00:27:24.460It, like, goes from, like, I think this is going to be fine to, like, nothing, just nothing.
00:27:30.480And that's a delusion that was broadly shared at the time, right?
00:27:33.420I mean, people really, you know, and it's sort of reminiscent of how people were kind of trying to normalize or rationalize Trump before January of 2025.
00:27:45.240Hey, someone should write a book about that.
00:28:02.720He's a longstanding member of the Nazi party, and he's known to be a gay man or, you know, to be a man who has dalliances with other men.
00:28:11.360Long-time listeners will remember that the reason people knew that was not because there were tons of rumors or because someone had accused him, but because someone had published letters in which Ernst Röhm, like, basically quoted Magnus Hirschfeld.
00:28:23.700It's like, yeah, that's pretty much me.
00:28:25.140And, well, not a whole lot of ambiguity there.
00:28:28.440It's just like, he's like, yeah, I'm an otter, really, you know?
00:28:31.800And Ernst Röhm understood his own homosexuality as sort of like a proof of his masculinity, right?
00:28:37.980It was an extension in his mind of his Nazi credentials.
00:29:40.440In the middle of 1934, end of June, beginning of July, there's a huge purge, an internal party purge, of perceived enemies of Hitler and his coterie.
00:29:51.680and the sort of main target of this purge
00:29:55.060is Ernst Röhm and the people around him.
00:29:57.520And what's interesting is that the reason for this purge
00:30:20.980Now let's take over the banks. Let's take over big industry. Let's put working class people in charge. Hitler and Goering and Himmler and all these people in charge now, they're now buddy-buddy with the bankers and the industrialists and the aristocrats who run the military. And they don't want this. So they essentially move against Röhm as well as other enemies. I mean, like Franz von Papen, he gets arrested and is sort of yelling about how he's the vice chancellor. Doesn't matter. Some of his aides.0.86
00:32:40.060So people who say don't like somebody or want his job can be like, this person's a homosexual, get him out of here.
00:32:46.440Yeah, Sam and I were talking before we were recording about a particular case in Hanover where the owner of a, what is it, a gymnastics school is like, this woman is a lesbian and a secret communist, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:59.360And two things are really funny about it.0.51
00:33:01.180First off, she's like, I'm only passing along what this other person gave me.
00:33:04.560But it's very clear she is that other person.
00:33:07.100And I think they were lovers, weren't they, at one point?
00:33:45.800And it turns out the woman that she's accusing is a Nazi Party member.
00:33:48.620So they're like, yeah, we don't know what to do with this.
00:33:51.440But it just creates a lot of discourse around homosexuality, right?
00:33:54.600And then you get in November, I think November 13th, the Law on Habitual Criminals, which you already alluded to,
00:34:01.740which this might require some glossing for our listeners.
00:34:04.520It's a law that basically says that judges can impose for people that they deem to be habitual criminals a prison sentence that is no longer tethered to the actual act.
00:34:15.760This is a softening of the standard nulla pöne sine lege, right?
00:34:20.000Like you cannot sentence someone to something that isn't spelled out in the law books.
00:34:24.380Nazis say you kind of can, not in every case, but like the judge has a certain amount of discretion there if they think they're going to reoffend.
00:34:31.780So there's protective custody, right, which the Nazis have been using for eight months already at that point.
00:34:37.360But still, a lot of it is applied to people already in prison.
00:34:41.640They find out, like, you're not getting out at the end of your sentence.
00:34:44.440And this is another chunk of Nazi propaganda is that Weimar was this lawless place with all these habitual criminals running around and that they were going to clean up.0.60
00:34:53.460They were going to bring peace to the streets.0.56
00:34:55.720And part of that is anyone who they deem to be a habitual criminal, they're not just going to go to prison for a specific crime.
00:35:02.960They're going to go to prison for the offense of being a habitual criminal.
00:35:07.080And this was framed explicitly as victim's rights, too, which is interesting given the history of that phrase in the United States.
00:35:12.620And this is applied a lot to gay men because, like, if you like cottaging in a public restroom, you're going to rack up some encounters with the law, right?0.51
00:35:21.660And so habituality is really easy to infer.0.55
00:35:26.420The law is sort of written, I think, in a way that it makes it sound like this is a person who steals all the time or whatever.
00:35:31.960But, like, the third subparagraph is already like, oh, and we can also castrate you if you're a habitual sex offender, right?
00:35:37.980So very quickly, sexuality is part of that anxiety about Weimar lawlessness.
00:35:42.920It's not just like people were walking off with merchandise.0.96
00:35:45.840It is like, no, it's about perverts out there.
00:35:49.900And I think this is part of the very rapid Nazi consolidation of the legal system, right?0.85
00:35:56.480We were talking about what was legal and what wasn't.0.90
00:35:58.480And they are really obsessed with making sure that everything they're doing has at least a veneer of legality.0.51
00:36:04.600And, you know, this is one of the key contact points between the traditional normative legal system with judges and prosecutors and the police and the kind of extrajudicial world of the concentration camps.
00:36:17.400where people who are now labeled as not just having committed a crime,
00:36:22.500but being habitual criminals can be shuttled off into a concentration camp
00:36:28.180and kept there for an indefinite amount of time.
00:36:31.440It is also the other place where the Federal Republic of Germany
00:36:35.080just keeps the law on the books, right?
00:36:36.600Like, I think you still have Sicherheitsverwahrung for offenders today.
00:36:41.300So like paragraph 175, this survives the war.
00:36:44.560And it's probably not an accident that these two things don't get revised after 45, even though it's obviously rife for abuse.
00:36:53.040I can see how this legal climate would create a really hostile environment for queer people broadly.
00:36:58.140But what was the specific impact on queer women?
00:37:01.980Because I think if this is so historically contested, it would occur to me that it's one of the reasons why might be that these legal regimes are being really selectively targeted at the people the Nazis consider most important.
00:37:14.560You know, another thing about lesbian history is that the trivializing misogyny often sort of redounds to the benefit of lesbians because homophobes just kind of don't take them as seriously.
00:37:26.640And I wonder if that might be one element in like sort of the Nazi prosecution priorities, right?
00:37:32.880If they're like, well, you know, what are they even doing, like braiding each other's hair or something?0.91
00:37:36.760Like we got to go after these guys who are forming like gay male cabals in our brown shirt gangs.1.00
00:37:42.520So I think the habitual criminal law in 1933 is an important first step, but then seven months later when you have the Night of Long Knives, that's really kind of the starter pistol on real homophobic persecution.
00:37:54.800And that's also the other reason for that is that marks then the ascent of Himmler into kind of the upper echelons of Nazi leadership.
00:38:01.800I mean, he was already the head of the SS, but it really marks this kind of shift in the balance of power between the SS and the SA as the two Nazi paramilitary groups.
00:38:11.220And Himmler is personally deeply homophobic.0.64
00:38:14.460We have his university diaries, and he is obsessed with any kind of sexual, you know, in his mind, perversion.0.90
00:38:21.660And we have speeches he gives later where he's sort of bemoaning that they can no longer do what the old Germanic tribes did and simply drown queer people in bogs.
00:38:31.940So he's deeply homophobic, and it's sort of under his auspices that a lot of the kind of radicalization takes place.
00:38:39.100the following years when they have this amendment to paragraph 175. And it's really interesting,
00:38:44.960your point about trivializing misogyny, that's exactly the reason that they don't sort of decide
00:38:50.220to explicitly criminalize female homosexuality. They say, okay, women are now back in the homes,0.75
00:38:55.580their mothers, their wives. They don't have chances to, quote unquote, seduce young people1.00
00:38:59.760into homosexuality. Even if they do, those bands of lesbians, they don't have any political clout.1.00
00:39:05.560they don't pose the same sort of risk. And then there's just this sort of inability to grasp or1.00
00:39:11.060accept that women have independent sex drives. And this, again, is a longstanding misogynistic
00:39:17.180trope. And they explicitly say, these Ministry of Justice officials say, well, even if a woman has
00:39:23.280sex with other women, they can still reproduce. It's not that big of a deal. And so they really
00:39:30.440are just thinking about women as kind of vessels for reproduction. And what's really interesting0.98
00:39:34.400is that the people who want to criminalize lesbianism,
00:40:32.500And, you know, I think if you put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary German who is being fed all of this homophobic propaganda, it would make sense to you to think, oh, these two women having sex or living together or whatever, surely that is also a crime, and surely I can denounce them and they will also face punishment.
00:40:54.820Yeah, I mean, it gets to this interesting status of women in Nazi eugenics, too, right? Like, it's eugenics that is a lot less interested in women, ultimately, right? It's like the problem is that the men are taking their sperm elsewhere. And so basically, we need to shut that down. But like, in some way, well, what else are they going to do? Like, eventually, they're going to get pregnant from a man. So like, it's all good, right?
00:41:18.740It's a very curious form of eugenics that strikes me as very different from our own day, where, like, the question of what women do with their bodies is central, maybe way more central than anything that they see men doing.
00:41:30.340But that is not the way the Nazis thought.
00:41:32.860Right. It's curious because in other ways, they are deeply concerned, right?
00:41:40.420Unless, you know, unless they've decided to sterilize you and then abortion is encouraged.0.95
00:41:45.200There's the Lebensborn program to basically take unwed, quote-unquote, Aryan mothers and make sure that they give birth to these children, that they don't seek out an illegal abortion.0.83
00:41:55.900So there is this deep obsession when it comes to childbirth, but outside of that, they're kind of like, eh, whatever, you know, do what you want, up until, you know, they aren't.
00:42:04.700But, you know, I'd say another piece of this, another sort of place of overlap is the very ambiguous or ambivalent policy towards sex work and prostitution in Nazi Germany.
00:42:13.580where, again, this is part of kind of cleaning up Germany's streets.
00:42:17.440They want to be seen as being against prostitution.
00:42:20.740At the same time, they understand that sex work has a useful social function.
00:42:24.960It helps to kind of regulate these urges.
00:42:27.940People are going to seek out sex work whether or not the government allows it.
00:42:31.960And so they, again, kind of regulate it.
00:42:34.280They impose new burdens on sex workers.
00:42:37.860They say you can't be streetwalking, but if you're in a brothel and it's regulated, that's okay.0.99
00:42:42.220But this becomes another kind of venue to persecute or to clamp down on young, single women. And you see, again, a lot of these lesbian women who I write about were accused also of being sex workers. And in many cases, it seems that they were sex workers.
00:42:59.500Let's maybe dive into a couple of these cases that you talk about in the book.
00:43:28.540Right. And then usually there is, at a minimum, an interview. They bring these people in for questioning. And, you know, these are written in dry German prose. We don't get a lot of color. At a minimum, though, I think you can imagine it would probably be pretty scary to be called in.
00:47:12.240What I'm getting to, though, is he then files for divorce.0.55
00:47:15.600And in order to help this divorce case along, right, I mean, oftentimes, and not just with lesbians, I mean, with everyone in the Nazi period, when you are denouncing someone, you're usually doing it because you want something.
00:47:26.380You are angry at your landlord, you're angry at your lover, you're angry at your ex-spouse, you name it.0.85
00:47:34.000So he denounces them as prostitutes and as lesbians.0.99
00:49:33.620The, like, pettiness of, like, kind of banally bad or selfish people is given such incredible stakes under this regime, right? Like, if you just are mad at somebody who got a job that you wanted, you can turn him in as a homosexual or as a communist or as a Jew and get him sent to a concentration camp. And if, yeah, if you're just, like, you're in kind of, like, a dysfunctional thruple, you can also get the Gestapo involved.0.94
00:50:00.560Yeah, like the dishes are in the sink one too many times.1.00
00:50:33.420I mean, a husband can beat up his wife.1.00
00:50:35.720A wife who wants something out of her husband has to make recourse to an exterior source of force.0.78
00:50:40.960Well, to the secret police, of course.0.97
00:50:43.500Well, I mean, poison in the United States, secret police in Germany, or also now the secret police in the United States, too.
00:50:50.320Well, it's also, I mean, like, there is an element here of, like, this stuff all gets suffused, right?0.99
00:50:55.960Like, as the Nazi period wears on, the number of Germans who owe some of the shit they have, right, the nice job they got at the university or at the police, the nicer apartment that they suddenly got, like, to having been, like, complete rat bastards.0.99
00:51:14.520And it makes sense that, like, that's one of those things that takes on a life of its own.0.99
00:51:18.260It becomes easier once everyone sort of takes recourse to this.
00:51:22.960It's one of those things that's completely abnormal the first time someone does it and becomes completely normalized by the time everyone around you is done.
00:51:29.240It's, hey, you know you could denounce him.
00:51:31.960I mean, I always come back to what Hannah Arendt wrote about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem where she said that the Nazi moral order was completely flipped on its head.0.68
00:51:41.880And in a normal system, we are tempted to do evil.0.72
00:51:46.020But in the Nazi system, people were instead tempted to do good.0.84
00:51:50.140And, you know, the normal thing to do in the Nazi system was evil.0.85
00:51:54.320And so it actually took a great deal of kind of moral fortitude to, in spite of that, try and do good or do the right thing.0.88
00:52:02.480Right. To say, I want to talk to the Gestapo and I want to say my husband's beating me rather than all this other stuff that's not true.
00:52:08.780Can we just please do it on that basis because that's bad enough, right?
00:52:12.620Like everything sort of takes the place of something else.0.66
00:52:15.180And that's often sort of how homosexuality also sort of functions, right?0.76
00:52:19.420It's, like, often in conjunction with something else, the famous book burnings sort of talk about sexual perversity as, like, submission to Jewishness.
00:52:28.900Like, it's this, like, chain of signifiers.
00:52:31.100And no one can ever, like, really say what the problem is supposed to be with homosexuality without, like, invoking, like, 15 metaphors that are, like, I don't know what any of this means.
00:52:46.240I'm sorry, you're still losing me.0.85
00:52:48.080But, like, it just becomes this thing where, like, you tug at it and it's the entire system of kind of made-up values that the Nazis substitute for things you'd want to encourage with a legal code, right?0.60
00:52:59.440leg. No, and I think that you really see that with lesbians, right? That this is something that0.93
00:53:06.000they don't like. When it comes up with the police, they are not happy, and they want to do something
00:53:11.500about it. And in fact, a lot of the police officials that I write about explicitly say,
00:53:15.380hey, we need a law. We need a way to deal with this. And sometimes in quite vivid language.
00:53:21.160And yet they can't ever quite say what the problem is, right? What actually is the issue here? I mean,
00:53:27.680There's another whole chapter I've written about these lesbian balls that happen in Nazi Berlin from the mid-1930s until at least the early 40s and, you know, into World War II.0.82
00:53:38.920And the reason we know, or the reason I know so much about them, there's a giant police file from all of these detectives going and spying on them.
00:53:47.560And you think, okay, you have a few hundred lesbians who have rented out a dance hall and they're hanging out for a few hours and drinking.
00:53:56.780Why are you devoting so many police resources to surveilling them and, you know, trying ultimately to shut them down?0.97
00:54:05.060And then there's sort of this irony that they can't shut them down.
00:54:08.480But right, they're always able to point to certain things.
00:54:11.960But it's always, I mean, one of the creepiest elements of this file is a letter written from a group of teenage girls.
00:54:19.660They write to the Gestapo and they say, hey, we're these innocent Aryan girls.
00:54:25.940And we noticed there are some old lesbians in our neighborhood who are having parties, and you really need to put a stop to this.0.95
00:54:33.500You know, it's high time that we clean up in this new Germany.1.00
00:54:36.760And it's just so profoundly creepy that you have these teenagers writing to the secret police to complain about fairly innocent partying that's going on.0.97
00:54:48.540Well, I mean, the SFPD famously devoted a disproportionate amount of manpower and man triple underline to, you know, sting operations where, you know, officers kept getting handjobs from gay men.0.77
00:54:59.940And you're like, yeah, did people volunteer for the study chance?0.94
00:55:04.260I mean, I'm remembering when I was a teenager and I learned about the existence of lesbian bars.
00:55:09.000And I also found this information like very alarming and important, you know, and it's there's there's a I imagine a confluence of motivations.
00:55:55.080So one of the really interesting things about the story you tell is that like queer women sort of come into the story of Nazi Germany at the boundary between the prerogative and the normative state.0.64
00:56:06.940It's a place where the normative state takes itself still much more seriously than in some other respects.0.99
00:56:11.400But it's also like they wouldn't be persecuted if they read their own fucking laws.0.97
00:56:15.900So it is also like, there's got to be against the law, you know?0.98
00:56:19.940And I'm really interested in the fact that that actually makes for a very different kind of insecurity than what gay men experience in Nazi Germany, which is, it's completely unpredictable.
00:56:31.020After 35, as a gay man in Nazi Germany, you know not to, if the Gestapo says, like, please come visit us, like, yeah, no, that's, no.
00:56:43.460But queer women sort of live in this liminal space in two ways.
00:56:46.600One between like invisibility, but everyone kind of like being all up in your business and trying to figure out what you're doing, denouncing you, et cetera, et cetera.0.99
00:56:55.120But also in this other way where you're never quite sure which part of this dual state you're going to be meeting that day.
00:57:02.520Am I going to be detained while they question me?0.53
00:57:05.840Or will they find some kind of prostitution charge to hang on me?
00:57:10.060Or will they just say, all right, well, you told us all your dirty stories and, you know, we enjoyed that.
00:57:22.600And I guess this sort of gets at one of the real intellectual puzzles of the book and one of my motivations for writing it at the end of the day,
00:57:30.480which is how does a state like Nazi Germany, a persecuting state, take a group that it has no love for,0.53
00:57:37.940That, in fact, it does want to see stamped out, like lesbian women, and how does it deal with that group in the absence of having a written-down policy or law or kind of, you know, systematic, you know, way of dealing with them.
00:57:52.840And when we're talking about Jews or gay men or the Roma and Sinti, it's all written down.1.00
00:57:58.640We know exactly what they were doing and what they wanted to do.1.00
00:58:01.560With other groups like lesbians, it's much more amorphous.1.00
00:58:05.500And so, ultimately, I think that this isn't just about lesbians, right?1.00
00:58:09.060This is about how do similar societies treat groups of people,
00:58:13.120outsider groups of people, in the absence of law,
00:58:15.800and getting us to recognize that persecution is a kind of emergent quality of these societies.
00:58:21.400And I think you don't have to look far in the U.S. today to see that that is true.
00:58:58.360it all kind of radicalizes and ramps up.
00:59:00.940And you start having, again, particularly in the war years, women being sent to concentration camps, either in part because they're lesbian or in at least a couple cases exclusively because they're lesbian.
00:59:12.420There's something about this, this maybe speaks to your point, Adrienne, but there's something about this kind of unreliability and the sort of arbitrariness and discretionary nature of the prerogative state that seems very scary, right?
00:59:30.280The inability to know what the rules are and whether you're going to be lucky or not seems like something that has a psychological toll on women in this era.0.99
00:59:41.340No, 100%. And so part of my aim was in showing that terror and the kind of underlying anxiety that living in a society like this creates. And again, not just among one group of people, but it really permeates the society.
00:59:57.780At the same time, like, something I wanted to show in this book was how these women not only continued to have agency, right?
01:00:04.740I mean, Nazism, we talk about it as being a totalitarian system, but that doesn't actually mean it exercised total control of people's lives.
01:00:12.840And people have this agency, and how there are these cases, these sort of bright lights of cases of women fighting through that terror, and in many cases, actively resisting.
01:00:24.900And so, I actually would love to come back to Marta and Margot, who, you know, they get off, they are let go, and you would think, okay, you're a Chinese-Jewish-German, and her female lover, maybe lie low, maybe just wait until this war is over.
01:00:40.820But, of course, they don't do that.0.77
01:01:12.080You know, the Soviet Army has surrounded Berlin, and all of these Gestapo officers realize the jig is up, and so they are busy burning files.
01:01:48.340And the guy says, okay, you can go.0.79
01:01:51.140And so they get out of there as quickly as possible and ride out the last few days of the war in a friend's house and then wind up settling in London and spending the rest of their lives together.
01:02:02.520And so, you know, while there is the persecution, and that I think is really important to understand, and I think this is a broader point also about queer history and actually just histories of persecution in general, that these people still had lives full of opportunity and joy and agency.
01:02:17.900And that is equally important to understand and to not, I think, kind of give in to the despair that is all too frequent when we're talking about a historical moment like Nazi Germany.
01:02:30.460That's such a lovely way to put that, because in some way, the official version that we were long told, which is that lesbian women were not prosecuted in Nazi Germany, compounds one indignity, indignity of having to live in that system in that way, with the indignity to then not be recognized as the victim of a system whose victim you obviously were.
01:02:51.400And I love that you're returning dignity twice over.
01:02:55.000You say, well, no, just because you ended up getting lucky in some ways doesn't make you not a victim.
01:03:04.180And so that's, we have to hold on to that too.
01:03:07.040You were quick on your feet when it really mattered.
01:03:09.080And you waited it out until the Red Army got there.0.83
01:03:12.240Right. And again, I think this is broadly sort of going back to what we were talking about at the beginning,
01:03:16.980about the political utility of being a victim group.
01:03:20.380That obviously is important and one of my motivations for writing this book.
01:03:25.680But I really worry about what it does to groups of people as well as to individuals to kind of flatten identity into one of victimhood.1.00
01:03:34.400And this is something you see a lot of in queer history.0.99
01:03:38.000And there's good reason for it, a kind of relentless focus on persecution.0.57
01:03:41.560And so I really wanted to make sure that front and center were these women's lives, right?
01:03:48.760Not just the fact of their persecution.
01:03:52.540And so I think in cases like Marta and Margo, you see that so vividly, the kind of interplay of how these people are doing what they can to kind of forge a life despite the relentless persecution that they're facing.
01:04:08.700Ladies, when the secret police comes for you, just grab the nearest foreign national and seduce him.0.79
01:04:29.540And again, the book is I Will Not Abandon You, Queer Women in Nazi Germany, which is out April 14th, 2026.
01:04:35.980Depending on when you're listening to this, you can pre-order it, which is very important to authors, or you can buy it if you've held off on listening to this.