Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 to 1935) was a German Jewish doctor who spent his working life arguing that people who loved, dressed or lived outside the norms of his time belonged to nature, not to the criminal courts. In 1919 he opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, the first of its kind in the world, where trans people found advice, paperwork, work and some of the earliest gender-affirming surgeries. On 6 May 1933 Nazi students and stormtroopers ransacked it, and days later its books were burned. Here is what the sources say, where they disagree, and why his legacy is still argued about.

Who was Magnus Hirschfeld?

Hirschfeld was born on 14 May 1868 in Kolberg, in Pomerania, a town that has been Kołobrzeg, in Poland, since 1945. He came from a Jewish family, studied medicine and qualified as a doctor in 1892. In 1896 he moved his practice to Berlin-Charlottenburg, and from then on sex, sexuality and gender were the centre of his work.

On 15 May 1897, with the publisher Max Spohr, the lawyer Eduard Oberg and the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow, he founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), usually described as the first organisation in the world to campaign for gay rights. Its main target was Paragraph 175, the section of the German criminal code that had punished sex between men since 1871. A first petition against it went to the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1898 and failed. In 1929 a Reichstag committee voted to abolish the paragraph, but the change never reached a full vote. It did win one important fight: from 1909 it helped defeat a proposal to extend the law to women.

His motto was per scientiam ad justitiam, through science to justice: he believed that if people understood sexuality better, prejudice would fade. His central idea was that of sexual intermediaries (sexuelle Zwischenstufen): nobody is entirely masculine or entirely feminine, and every person is a particular mixture of the two. In 1919 he co-wrote and appeared in Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), one of the first films to plead openly for gay men. It was banned in 1920.

He kept his own private life out of his public work, although his long relationship with Karl Giese, who ran the institute's library and archive, became an open secret.

What was the Institute for Sexual Science?

The institute opened on 6 July 1919 in a villa in Berlin-Tiergarten, on the corner of In den Zelten and Beethovenstraße, not far from the Reichstag. It belonged to the Weimar Republic, Germany's democracy from 1918 to 1933, when many people, especially in the big cities, challenged gender and sexual norms in public.

More than 40 people worked there over the years. It offered counselling, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, help with contraception and marriage problems, and public lectures and film evenings. It held Hirschfeld's library and archive, a museum that became something of a tourist attraction, and the offices of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the World League for Sexual Reform. Hirschfeld lived upstairs. People who could not pay were often advised or treated for free, and some of them lived and worked in the building.

Some visitors stayed: the writer Christopher Isherwood lived for a time in the complex and later wrote about it. For trans people it became something rarer, a refuge: a place to be seen by doctors who took them seriously, and sometimes to find a job and a bed.

What did the institute do for trans people?

Hirschfeld was writing about trans people long before the word trans existed. In 1910 he published a study called Die Transvestiten; he coined the German word in its title as a neutral medical term, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that it is widely considered offensive today. His category was broad. It took in people who occasionally dressed or performed in drag, and people whose gender was not the one they had been assigned at birth. Against most opinion of his day, he also argued that this was a separate matter from who someone was attracted to, which is close to how we now separate gender identity from sexual orientation.

The most concrete help was paperwork. Working with the Berlin police, Hirschfeld helped several people obtain special certificates that let them wear the clothes that matched who they were without being arrested for disorderly conduct. The institute also wrote medical attestations that allowed people to change their first name to one that fitted their gender.

It gave work to trans people who could find it nowhere else, as receptionists and domestic staff, although these were mostly menial jobs. And in the 1920s and early 1930s, doctors connected with the institute carried out some of the earliest modern gender-affirming surgeries. Hirschfeld had at first advised against surgery, then came to support it, in part as a way of preventing suicide. The historian Robert Beachy has described the operations as experimental and dangerous, and as developed largely at the insistent request of patients. The details belong to the people who went through them, and we leave them there.

The vocabulary moved on after him. A 1923 essay of Hirschfeld's is often cited as an early use of the word transsexual, but it only became a clinical category decades later, in the United States, through Harry Benjamin, a friend and colleague of Hirschfeld's, and others. Today transgender is the general word.

What do we know about the people who went there?

Less than we would like. Most of the people who came to the institute are not known by name. When it was looted in 1933, its clinical files were destroyed along with the books, and accounts of the raid say the students also carried off lists of names and addresses. Much of what we know comes from the few people who made their own stories public, or whose lives were traced much later. We name only people whose names are already part of the published historical record, and we leave out medical detail.

The best known is the Danish painter Lili Elbe. She came to the institute in February 1930, met Hirschfeld there, and went on to Dresden for further operations; she died in Dresden in September 1931. Our portrait of Lili Elbe tells her story, and how a novel and a film later reshaped it.

Dora Richter's story shows how much can still be found. She was born in 1892 in a village in Bohemia then called Seifen, now Ryžovna in the Czech Republic, and from 1923 she worked at the institute as a domestic worker. Researchers describe her as the first known trans woman to have had gender-affirming surgery. After the raid of May 1933 she vanished from the record, and for decades researchers assumed she had died in the attack or in custody soon afterwards.

She had not. In 2023 and 2024 the researcher Clara Hartmann traced her through church, census and archive records. They show that the regional authorities in Prague approved her change of name in April 1934; that in 1939 she was living in her home village, working from home as a lace-maker; that she was expelled with other German speakers in 1946 and settled in Allersberg, in Bavaria; and that she died there on 26 April 1966, aged 74. Other patients are known by name from later research. Most are not known at all, and that silence is part of what the destruction took.

What happened to the institute in 1933?

Hirschfeld had been a target for years, as a Jew, a gay man, a socialist and a public voice on sex. He was badly beaten in the street in Munich in 1920 (the US Holocaust Memorial Museum dates the attack to 1921), and in February 1929 the Nazi paper Der Stürmer put a caricature of him on its front page. In 1930 he left on a lecture tour that took him to the United States, Japan, China, India, Egypt and Palestine, leaving Karl Giese in charge of the institute. Warned to stay away from Germany, he settled in Switzerland, and he never went back.

On the morning of 6 May 1933, students of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, the national student union, marched to the institute with a brass band, broke in and began to smash and loot it. Members of the SA, the Nazi Party's stormtroopers, came later that day to continue. On 10 May the library and archives were burned on the Opernplatz, today's Bebelplatz, along with books taken from libraries and bookshops across Berlin, and a bust of Hirschfeld from the institute was carried to the fire. Estimates of how many of the institute's books were destroyed range from more than 10,000 to about 25,000.

The institute was forced to close. Hirschfeld, in exile, watched the burning of his work on a newsreel in a Paris cinema, and the Nazi government later revoked his citizenship. He tried to found a successor institute in Paris, gave up in 1934, moved to Nice, and died there on 14 May 1935, his 67th birthday.

The persecution went on. In 1935 the Nazis rewrote Paragraph 175 to make it broader and harsher, and some of the men prosecuted under it were sent to concentration camps, where many had to wear a pink triangle; our guide to LGBTQ+ symbols explains how that badge was later reclaimed. The institute's building did not survive the war either, although sources differ on whether it was destroyed by bombing in 1943 or in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.

Why is his legacy still argued about?

Hirschfeld was a pioneer, and he was a target of Nazi violence. For a long time that was most of the story. Historians have since looked harder at the rest of his thinking, and they do not all weigh it the same way.

• His science. His theories rested on biology, and several have since been discredited. The Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld, a foundation named after him, notes that his purely medical and biological way of classifying people did not hold up, and that his ideas played little part in sexology after the Second World War.
• Eugenics. Like many scientists of his time, he was influenced by eugenics. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that he rejected ideas of racial hierarchy but accepted that people diagnosed with chronic alcoholism or certain mental disabilities should not have children.
• Race and empire. In Racism and the Making of Gay Rights (2022), the historian Laurie Marhoefer argues that he held racist and sexist views, including anti-Black passages in his writing, even while he publicly denounced racism. Marhoefer credits him with helping to make a world in which many queer people are better off, and concludes that he "does not make a very good gay hero". The scholar Heike Bauer has also criticised how little attention his work paid to colonial violence.
• Outing. In a 1907 libel trial, part of the scandal known as the Eulenburg affair, he testified as an expert that an army general was homosexual, hoping it would help the case against Paragraph 175. The trial set off a wave of antisemitic and anti-gay hostility instead, and he later concluded that it had set the movement back.
• The clinic itself. Trans people found real help at the institute, but the jobs it offered them were mostly menial and the surgeries were experimental. It also worked within the rules of its time: one expert opinion it wrote in 1924 presented a trans patient as intersex, what Hartmann calls a common tactic then for getting officials to cooperate.

The organisations that keep his memory alive stress what he built and what was destroyed; critics such as Marhoefer stress the ideas that came with it. You do not have to choose between them. It is possible to honour what the institute meant to the trans people who went there without pretending its founder was right about everything.

How is Hirschfeld remembered today?

Much of his work was lost in 1933, but not all of it. In 1982 researchers and activists founded the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft in West Berlin to research and preserve his legacy and that of the institute, and it has since tracked down many scattered records and objects. A memorial plaque was put up near the institute's former site on 6 July 1994, 75 years after it opened. In 2008 a promenade in the city was renamed Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer, and on 27 October 2011 the German federal government set up the Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld to fund research, education and remembrance.

His influence also travelled. Harry Benjamin carried his work on trans people to the United States, and later American researchers, Alfred Kinsey among them, used the kind of questionnaire Hirschfeld had developed in Berlin.

October is LGBT History Month in the United States, started in 1994 by a Missouri teacher, Rodney Wilson, and the institute is one of the stops in our guide to the month and the trans history to know. For the longer view, read who was the first transgender person?