Queer Women in Nazi Germany

There were three primary reasons that the Nazis viewed queer and trans people as threats to the National Community: (1) They claimed that LGBTQ+ people didn’t do their “duty” of having children. In other words, they viewed homosexuality as a threat to the German birthrate. (2) They believed that “the homosexual lifestyle” reversed the “natural” gender roles by turning men feminine and women masculine. (3) They argued that queer and trans people would only be loyal to each other, not to the government. 

 

Nazi leaders did not believe that people were born queer or trans. They believed that engaging in the “homosexual lifestyle” was a choice. Their policies against LGBTQ+ people, therefore, were officially aimed at “curing,” “converting,” or “reeducating” them, not killing them. But, as this essay demonstrates, the Nazis' anti-LGBTQ+ policies were violent and ultimately killed thousands of queer and trans people. 

 

Out of everyone in the LGBTQ+ community, the Nazis viewed queer men to be the most dangerous. This was because men had access to positions of leadership in national politics, the economy, and the military. So, a queer man could “infiltrate” Nazi organizations and do damage in a way that a lesbian woman could not, because those leadership roles were not open to women. As a result, the Nazi regime focused most of its resources and efforts on hunting down and finding queer men. Evidence shows, though, that the Nazis also harassed, tortured, and arrested queer women and gender nonconforming people when they learned about their existence. 

 

This essay focuses on how the Nazis treated queer women specifically. The regime often labeled all men who engaged in same-sex activity as “homosexuals,” regardless of how those men understood their own identities. We use the term queer women to encompass lesbians, bisexual women, or women who were otherwise not straight. Explore our additional thematic essays to learn how the Nazis treated other members of the LGBTQ+ community.

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The Nazis never enacted a law that explicitly criminalized lesbians. That being said, the Nazis had other ways to persecute queer women. 

 

The Nazis debated at length whether to include lesbians when they amended Paragraph 175 (the national anti-gay law) in 1935. Ultimately, they decided against it for four main reasons: 

1. First and foremost, the Nazis did not view lesbians as an equivalent threat to queer men. This was because women did not hold positions of power and authority in Nazi Germany, while men did. 

2. Additionally, the Nazis believed that women were, by nature, more affectionate with each other, even in public. This would take too many police resources, which could be used to locate and convict queer men, to figure out what actions were acceptable and which were “indecent”. 

3. Furthermore, Nazi lawmakers believed that those women who had engaged in sexual encounters with each other just had not met the “right man” yet, and that they would give up their indecent behavior when they did.

4. Finally, considering that the ultimate goal of the Nazi regime was the procreation of the “master race,” women weren’t viewed as the main threat. As Otto Georg Thierack, a man who would become justice minister in 1942, stated, “women are always prepared for sex.” Officials in charge of the criminal code ultimately asserted that the purpose of Germany’s laws against sexual offenses was to “protect fertility,” and that women could always get pregnant, by force if necessary.

 

Despite the lack of a law explicitly targeting queer women, the Nazis still harassed and arrested queer women under other laws when the regime was made aware of their existence. Other laws the Nazis used included: Paragraph 74 (sex with dependents), Paragraph 176 (child abuse), or Paragraph 183 (public disturbance). It is important to remember that the regime needed no law at all to send someone to a concentration camp under “protective custody.”  Ultimately, the Nazis had multiple tools at their disposal and did not need Paragraph 175 to convict lesbian and queer women.

 

“In the history of Nazism, the word persecution evokes an explicit state program,” writes historian Laurie Marhoefer. Instead of a systematic, top-down state persecution, the persecution of queer women and trans people consisted of a “complicated interaction between the prejudice of neighbors and acquaintances and the Gestapo’s methods” that put them in extreme danger. The risks that queer women and trans people faced “did not stem from a single law or from a dedicated police division. They were nevertheless quite real.”

Although there was no distinct prisoner group for lesbian and queer women, they, too, were sent to the concentration camps. Most were sent to Ravensbrück, the all-female concentration camp. They were  most often labeled as “asocials” and assigned a black triangle. Intersectionality explains why and when queer women were sent to the concentration camps. In most cases, being a lesbian was not the only reason a woman was sent to a camp. Queer women sent to the camps were often also Jewish, political opponents, or non-conformists to the regime. 

 

For a full overview of the Nazi persecution of queer and trans people, read our introductory essay. 

 

SOURCES

For a list of English-language, peer-reviewed sources used for this essay, visit the Pink Triangle Legacies Project's bibliography. For works in additional languages, visit the Bibliography on Lesbian and Trans Women in Nazi Germany (maintained by Dr. Anna Hájková)