Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

Physician and founder of the Institut, and the most important figure in the history of gay rights before Stonewall. Hirschfeld coined the word “transvestite,” catalogued thousands of case histories of sexual variation, and founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897 — the first organisation in the world to campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. He believed that sexual variation was natural, not pathological, and that science rather than morality should govern society’s response. He was abroad giving lectures when the SA burned the Institut. He saw the photographs in a cinema newsreel and never returned to Germany.

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist who led the Institut’s clinical department, treating patients whom other institutions refused. A sophisticated theorist working across psychoanalysis and phenomenological psychiatry, he was also one of the first to publish analyses of fascism as a form of mass psychopathology. He fled Berlin in 1933, eventually reaching Moscow. In 1941, as German forces approached, he and his wife took their own lives together.

Physician at the Institut who performed among the earliest gender-affirming surgeries in medical history, working alongside Hirschfeld and in close collaboration with patients. His 1931 paper documenting two such operations is one of the first clinical accounts in the published medical literature. He fled Germany after the Institut’s destruction, eventually reaching France, where he is believed to have perished during the Nazi occupation.

Physician and sex educator who ran the Institut’s public counselling services, bringing sexual health information to working-class Berliners who had no other access. His books were deliberately written in plain language — a political act in an era when sexual knowledge was the exclusive property of the educated. After fleeing Germany he served as a doctor in the Spanish Civil War, spending his final years in exile in Sweden.

Writer and the Institut’s most aggressive legal strategist in the campaign to repeal Paragraph 175, the statute criminalising male homosexuality. Hiller argued that the state had no legitimate interest in regulating private sexual conduct between adults at all — a position more radical than Hirschfeld’s medicalising approach and a source of frequent disagreement between them. He was arrested in 1933, sent to a concentration camp, survived, and continued writing and campaigning until his death at 87.

Feminist philosopher and founder of the League for the Protection of Mothers, which campaigned for legal recognition of unmarried mothers, contraception access, and an end to the stigma of illegitimacy. Stöcker argued that the authoritarian structures of conventional marriage and military culture shared the same psychological root. She left Germany in 1933, spending her final years in exile across Europe and the United States, where she died in 1943.

Hirschfeld’s partner and the archivist who built and maintained the Institut’s collection: 20,000 books, 35,000 photographs, thousands of case files. He was in the building when the SA came, watched the archive he had spent fifteen years assembling carried into the street and burned, and escaped with what he could carry. He died in exile in 1938 — five years after the destruction of everything he had built.

German-American endocrinologist who carried the Institut’s work forward in exile, becoming the first physician in the United States to treat transgender patients systematically with hormone therapy and to advocate for gender-affirming surgery. His 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon shaped medical practice for decades. He lived to 101, spending most of a century advancing what Hirschfeld had begun.

A domestic servant who became, in 1931, one of the first people in recorded history to undergo a complete gender-affirming surgical transition, documented by Felix Abraham. She was living at the Institut when the SA arrived on 6 May 1933 and is not known to have survived. Dora Richter is the human record at the centre of what was destroyed — not a theory, not an archive, but a person who had found the only place in the world where she could be who she was.