Today in Labor History May 6, 1933: the German Student Union, organized by the Nazi Party, attacked the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin, destroying nearly everything inside, and looting everything else. Four days later, its extensive library was destroyed in a massive public book burning, along with books by leftists and Jews. The Institute was the first LGBTQ health center in the world. They provided gender affirming health care to trans patients and performed the first sexual reassignment surgeries. Dora "Dörchen" Richter (the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female sex reassignment surgery) may have been killed in this or a subsequent attack on the institute. Visitors to the Institute, prior to the Nazi raid, had included René Crevel, Christopher Isherwood, Harry Benjamin, Édouard Bourdet, Margaret Sanger, Francis Turville-Petre, André Gide and Jawaharlal Nehru. Magnus Hirshfield, the creator and director of the institute, who was both gay and Jewish, managed to escape, to France, where he died of a heart attack in 1935. For an interesting read on this event and the decades leading up to it for the LGBTQ community in Weimar Germany, check out “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity,” by Robert Beachy, 2015.
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