Corresponding article.

The other law that was used, again, in particular against trans women was paragraph 175. If you’ve […] come to other lectures or read about this, you maybe already know about paragraph 175. It was Germany’s […] national law against… what was called ‘sodomy’ or what we would call consensual adult male–male sex—was illegal. Um… lots of countries had laws against male–male sex, […] also a number of countries had gender neutral laws against same‐sex sex. So Austria, for example.

[…]

And paragraph 175 predates [1933], but the [Fascists] rewrote it and made it harsher, and often trans women, when they got into trouble with the police, they would be accused of 175. Although they were women, the [Fascist] police refused to sex them as women, and if they were having relationships with [cis] men, then those would be construed as gay relationships and they could be charged.

[…]

Let me talk through just a number of cases that I’ve found, to kind of show you the level of violence, but also the kind of twists and turns that could happen. The first is a case of a woman, […] her name was H. Bode, she lived in Hamburg, she had had a transvestite certificate under Weimar. When the [Fascist] state came in they no longer respected that certificate, and she had a number of arrests and convictions for… um, or in charges for crossdressing and also for having sexual relationships with [cis] men.

The arrest that lead to her murder took place when one night she went out to a bar with her aunt. Bode was dressed [in women’s clothes] and passed as a woman at the bar. They got chatting with some soldiers who had just come back from the war in Poland—this is […] in [1939]—and they were all having drinks together at a table, and then suddenly one of the soldiers jumped up and said, ‘Oh wait, you’re not a woman, you’re a man dressed in a woman’s clothing!’, and the soldiers grabbed her and brought her to a police officer who was walking ab[ou]t, and she was arrested.

And she was eventually charged under paragraph 175, and they also brought a crossdressing charge against her. She had several convictions already, so the police decided to escalate her case, they called in a medical examiner, the medical examiner wrote […] this horrible report where he finds that she’s a ‘transvestite’ and a ‘homosexual and a ‘psychopath’ and all kinds of bad things. And they start using this kind of language in her file, which is always a really bad sign for people.

So […] at one point they wrote in her file, quote—this is the police writing about her—‘It cannot be denied that a man going about in women’s clothing is not in keeping with prevailing concepts of discipline and morality. Under the current state, a state of manly outlook, it is not permissible that a man counterfeit the other sex by wearing women’s clothing.’

So, to me as a historian, this was really interesting because they’re referring directly to the fascist state here, the state of ‘manly outlook’. In fascism, […] male dominance and masculinity were really important, so what they’re saying is like, look, we have fascism, we can’t have this kind of stuff—behavior going on, we can’t have a trans woman, it’s in direct violation of what fascism is, so we have to do something about her.

And indeed they…decided to send her to a concentration camp. They sent her to Buchenwald, where she was murdered in 1943.

See also: Transgender Experiences in Weimar and Nazi Germany & Trans Liminality and the Nazi State.