Hitler Erased Science First. Then He Erased People
Sexual health research was destroyed during the Nazi regime. History is now repeating.
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It’s funny how history repeats, isn’t it? Not in the way we expect, with the same villains cast in identical roles, but in the more insidious way that the masses, generation after generation, fall for the same well-worn script. The names change, the rhetoric is updated, but the essential structure remains: a scapegoat is othered, knowledge is vilified, and the people, convinced of their righteousness, take up the torch — sometimes literally.
Scary case in point. I have been tracking Kansas’ recent TB outbreak — the largest tuberculosis outbreak in recorded history. I have a selfish reason for tracking TB. I have monthly infusions of Remicade — a biologic that makes TB get frisky. Or at least frisky enough to kill me and others on Remicade.
Well, this morning, I could no longer access AtlasPlus — the CDC’s interactive site that allows users to analyze trends and patterns in data on HIV, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and tuberculosis (TB). The Trump administration took down the entire shebang during their recent science purge.
I can’t describe the level of panic I am feeling right now. The CDC’s once-vibrant repository of sexual health data…gone. Erased as if it had never existed. The Trump administration, in its fervor to rewrite reality, has burned the records.
AtlasPlus wasn’t the only section throwing a 404 error. The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) has not been released since Trump took office. So, if a pandemic begins killing people, we will not know. How convenient.
I suspect this is part of Project 2025’s agenda to erase all sexual health information and censor scientists. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time knowledge has been turned to ash.
On May 6, 1933, a violent throng of fascist students stormed Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) — the intellectual hub for local and foreign scientists and academics researching sexual health. A swarm of brown shirts thundered down hallways lined with decades of research — works on gender, homosexuality, and sexual health. Hands, fevered with self-righteous destruction, tore books from their shelves, rifled through medical records, and upended desks.
Then came the fire.
At Berlin’s Opera Square, the institute’s entire library — tens of thousands of volumes — was hurled into a public conflagration. The blaze licked the night sky, pages curling and blackening as knowledge turned to embers. Into the fire, the students threw the bust of Magnus Hirschfeld — the founder of The Institute for Sexual Research.
Luckily, the real Hirschfeld was still on tour during the lootings. He watched the flames consume his life’s work on newsreels from the safety of a Paris theater.
But the real carnage had not yet begun.
Two months before the institute burned, in March 1933, the gates of the Dachau concentration camp opened. The first prisoners? Not Jews, not yet. Political dissenters, journalists, trade unionists — those who spoke too loudly and thought too freely.
Then came the second wave: LGBTQ people, arrested en masse under the iron weight of Paragraph 175 — the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual acts between men. By 1935, between 10,000 and 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps and branded with pink triangles. Many were castrated. Most never came back.
And yet, ask an American student about Magnus Hirschfeld, and you’ll likely get a blank stare. His name has been scrubbed from our curricula, his contributions buried beneath the polite omissions of history books. But worldwide, Hirschfeld is remembered as a pioneer, a scientist, and a man who dared to defy the narrow cages of his time.
The Einstein of Sex
German-Jewish physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was born in Poland in 1868. He studied medicine and language and got his medical degree in 1892. In 1897, he co-founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee — the first gay rights organization.
As his popularity grew, his activist voice also grew louder. In 1908, he was an expert witness in one of Britain’s biggest homosexual scandals — the Harden–Eulenburg affair.
The trial centered around journalist Maximilian Harden’s homosexual relationships with several of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s cabinet members. Hirschfeld not only testified that Harden was gay but also that it was perfectly natural, inborn, and scientific.
The last argument was the one that got him dunked in hot water. At the time, homosexuality was viewed as a perversion. Thus, by grounding homosexuality with science, Hirschfeld’s ideas became a growing threat to conservatives.
Hirschfeld knew the risk he was taking. At the time, “Paragraph 175” declared homosexuality illegal, and psychologists classified it as a mental health illness. Hirschfeld opposed these beliefs and was the first research physician to describe nonbinary identity.
Hirshfeld’s ideas will sound eerily modern, considering it took almost a century to get here. He believed nonconforming individuals had “sexual intermediaries” — what we know today as gender fluidity.
Unfortunately, many of his progressive ideas were too advanced for Weimar Germany. And as a gay Jew, it wasn’t long before conservatives came for his head.
In 1920, he was beaten up by right-winged Germans in Munich and left for dead. He survived and read about his obituary in the newspaper the next day.
Unshaken, he pressed on. In 1919, he realized a lifelong dream and founded the Institute for Sexual Research, an expansive complex housing the world’s first sexology library, medical offices, and lecture halls. It was here, in 1930, in those bright, untamed years of the Weimar Republic, that the first gender-affirming surgeries took place. Danish painter Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients, underwent her transformation within its walls. Four more surgeries followed.
Sadly, Lili died of an infection when her body rejected her uterus at the final surgery.
But gender reassignment surgery wasn’t Hirschfeld’s only groundbreaking work. In the early 1930s, the Institute of Sexology marketed the first drugs to treat impotence. The drug was called “Testifortan” (later called “Titus-Perlen”), and although its main ingredients were testicle tissue from bulls, it did have some marketing success. (Testosterone was not discovered yet.) These drugs were administered in the first gender reassignment surgeries.
Realizing he wasn’t making strides in Germany, Hirschfeld left for a world sex tour in America, where he became an instant celebrity. On November 22, 1930, he traveled to New York to lecture on his research and was proclaimed “The Einstein of Sex” by American authors and scientists.
During this time, he made it his life mission to decriminalize homosexuality in Germany and got thousands of signatures from scientists, researchers, and physicians.
That life’s dream would end once Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933.
When Hitler seized power in 1933, Hirschfeld’s name was inscribed on a list of those who must be silenced. But it was not Hirschfeld himself that Hitler feared. It was knowledge.
Because knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge means choice. And the most dangerous choice of all? The right to define oneself.
By burning Hirschfeld’s research, the Nazis sought to undo a revolution. They wanted a world where sexuality and gender were fixed, immutable, and dictated by the state. It took six decades after Hirschfeld died for Germany to finally abolish Paragraph 175. Sixty years lost. A chasm of suffering where progress should have been.
And now, nearly a century later, we stand at the edge of another erasure.
CDC data is gone. Scientific data on sexual health — wiped from existence. The echoes of 1933 reverberate, ghostly and insistent. In a time when access to knowledge should be easier than ever, forces conspire to make it impossible. To make us forget. To make us unlearn.
But history has already burned once. We have no excuse to let the flames rise again.
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” — Oscar Wilde
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.
