Oh look, Tony is trivialising the Holocaust (again!).
@ErinInTheMorn, tweet 1661747125271814147 (
archive)
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · May 25, 2023 · 2:52 PM UTC
90 years ago this month, Nazis burned books.
The books they first burned were the books from the Institute of Sexology, decades of research in transgender medicine and health.
History doesn't always repeat, but it certainly rhymes.
Erin Reed (@ErinInTheMorn) · May 25, 2023 · 2:53 PM UTC
These famous book burning pictures were of those very books being burned.
The fires you see in this picture are consuming the earliest modern medical and psychological understanding of transgender people.
90,000 books burned, trannies most affected.
Tony's claim is that "the books they first burned" were those taken from Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin. I collected together several informative posts about the institute last July:
So, Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Sexualwissenschaft variously translated into English by different sources as Sexual Research, Sexual Science, or Sexology). The history of sexuality is not one of my interests, even (as here) as a footnote in the history of fascism and Nazism specifically. Thankfully I've seen various informative points made about Hirschfeld and his institute and so I thought I'd collect them here as a response to Tony's video.
One thing Tony hasn't said about the institute is that the surgeon who carried out the first vaginoplasty, Erwin Gohrbandt, conducted the hypothermia experiments on inmates at Dachau.
Judy Maltz said:
In these experiments, inmates were immersed in ice water to test how long the human body could survive in freezing temperatures. Those who survived the icy temperatures were often subjected to various body “rewarming” procedures that also involved immersing them in boiling water.
Horror of Nazi Medical Experiments Emerges in Holocaust Survivor’s Account (
archive)
Anyway! Were the books of the institute the
first to be burned, as Tony claims? Certainly the institute was looted several days before the book burnings, on May 6 1933.
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | 6 May 1933: Looting of the Institute of Sexology (
archive)
However, the books were not burned until May 10 1933, in the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" organised by pro-Nazi student groups.
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said:
Several days later, on 10 May, the entire contents of the library were removed to Berlin’s Bebelplatz Square. That night, along with 20,000 other books across Germany, they were publicly burned in a symbolic attack by Nazi officials on their enemies.
This had been planned for over a month, during which these groups compiled blacklists of un-German works, which most prominently featured socialist works (including those of Marx, Bebel, Brecht and others), those by Jews, but also those of German novelists including Thomas & Heinrich Mann and Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), and many many others (even Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway!).
Book Burning | Holocaust Encyclopedia (
archive)
In university towns, tens of thousands of books were piled into pyres. In Berlin (where the Institute books were burnt), Joseph Goebbels addressed the crowd: “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner.” (All German fiction writers.)
Were the books of the institute
among the first books to be burned? Yes, quite probably. Where they
the first to be burned, in some kind of symbolic attack highlighting trans-identified people as Enemy No 1? Absolutely not.
Thanks Tony, I don't get to do much historical research these days. More confidently wrong Twitter posts about history please!