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[Morgan] The night has just begun.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
You are exactly where you want to be.
You feel confident, excited and seen.
Finally, you are with people who feel like you.
And for a moment, you forget that you are different.
Tonight, everything is possible.
[Zavier] Berlin is the place where everything is happening.
[Morgan] It's the capital of sin.
[Robert] There were 80 to 120 cafes, bars, clubs
that were almost exclusively targeting LGBTQ people.
[Morgan] There are queer and trans people all around.
[Robert] After the Nazis come to power,
we see the worst homophobic persecution in world history.
[in German] There is scarcely another period in history
where freedom and oppression
are as close to each other as in the 1920s and 1930s.
Even today, you can have these liberties and they can be taken away from you.
These people were living the type of life that I live now.
But it's only for a moment.
[Walter in German] It was a calamity for humankind.
And I was part of that humankind.
[Morgan] You are coming up the street in Berlin
and you see a building on the corner
that has a fantastic sign out front.
And it says, "Here It Is Right!"
[cabaret music plays]
[she whoops]
[crowd cheer]
[Zavier] Of all the nightclubs that we have in the Golden Twenties,
the Eldorado is the most spectacular queer venue.
[Klaus in German] The Eldorado heralds a new freedom
where gay men, lesbian women,
trans men and trans women can be free and self-determined for the first time.
[Morgan] One of the people you will meet here is Charlotte Charlaque,
a Jewish American-German intellectual.
She's traveled the world, she's lived in America, in Germany, in France
and is about to become
one of the first people
to undergo sex reassignment surgery in the world.
[crowd cheer and applaud]
[Klaus in German] In Berlin's nightlife, we see two new faces:
Lisa and Gottfried, newly married, in their early twenties,
like so many who visit the Eldorado they are ready to just drift along,
to discover new things, to discover new loves.
[she laughs]
[Berno in German] Lisa, full name Lisa von Dobeneck,
and Gottfried von Cramm have known each other since childhood.
They grew up in neighboring castles.
Lisa was a born Dobeneck.
And they lived 15 kilometers from one of our estates.
[in German] It was called the "Babylon of Sin"
because it's where the Cramms were free to do anything.
[Klaus in German] Lisa and Gottfried want the big life.
And of course that eventually stops happening in this rural environment
but instead in the magnet of wild Berlin.
[Zavier] There's also quite a lot of freedom that comes in.
Rights for women are coming through.
There's a lifting of censorship
and press has much more freedom to print what it likes.
And that creates a whole flourishing of queer print media.
THE GIRLFRIEND WOMEN LOVE
[Zavier] You had specific ones for gay men and for gay women.
And you even had ones that were specific to transvestites.
It's possible to talk now about sex more openly than it had been before.
It feels to people
like there's this complete revolution of the sexual order happening.
[Klaus in German] This is the first time Lisa and Gottfried
discover a world unknown to them.
The Eldorado was synonymous with the fact that something new was beginning here.
[crowd cheer]
[indistinct chatter]
[tense music]
[Ben] So in the middle of this kind of fabulous glittering nightclub,
you'd probably be surprised
to meet someone who's on a first-name basis with Adolf Hitler.
This person is named Ernst Röhm,
has horrifying violent, anti-Semitic politics
and is one of the real key strategists and architects of the Nazi rise to power.
[Röhm in German] with swastika flags blowing all across the Reich today
[Ben] Röhm is a fanatical soldier devoted to and in love with war and killing.
And as a pure nationalist,
he never got over Germany's loss of the First World War.
[Röhm continues speech in German]
[in German] Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm
meet as early as 1919 in the right-wing movement.
They very quickly become friends on a first-name basis
and have a close friendship for years.
[Röhm in German] to stand strong for all eternity.
[Ben] They bond over the dream
of making the Nazis into a movement capable of taking power.
Which is far away, for now.
So Ernst Röhm is gay,
is rather careless about being gay,
has many gay lovers and contacts.
His homosexuality is one open secret and something that's gossiped about.
Hitler is likely aware of the rumors about Röhm.
But he seems to prioritize Röhm's potential usefulness to him.
At one point Hitler seems to have been quoted as saying,
"His private life does not interest me
as long as he maintains the necessary discretion."
But as we'll see, the necessary discretion was not always maintained.
[cabaret music plays]
[Robert] This club attracted
an incredible spectrum of people
in terms of their politics or their world views.
ELDORADO HERE IT IS RIGHT!
What the Eldorado really represents
is Berlin's window of queer life to the world.
[crowd cheer]
[Zavier] Some of the queer performers at the Eldorado
become really mainstream stars in this period.
And one of them is Claire Waldoff.
[sings] Men out of the Reichstag!
And men out of the Landtag
And men out of the manor
We'll make it into a women's house
[Morgan] If you showed up to the Eldorado alone,
you needed to pay for a taxi dancer to escort you around the floor.
You can really check out this gender illusion
that's so famous about the Eldorado.
One night, Charlotte meets someone like her.
Not only is this person an intellectual like Charlotte,
she's also trans.
And her name is Toni Ebel.
Unlike Charlotte, she does not know what to do about this.
She's just escaped a terrible marriage.
She's about ten years older.
But the two become inseparable.
These kinds of relationships between trans women
are actually really common,
where regardless of what our sexual orientation may be,
we develop these deep sisterhoods
that sometimes cross the line over into being lovers
or life partners.
In part this is because
we live in a world where there aren't a lot of people like us.
And so when we meet someone like us,
we form deep family commitments to each other,
regardless of what shape that takes.
Toni has been trying for many years to live her life as a woman,
but she doesn't know where to go.
Charlotte Charlaque has the answer.
She introduces Toni to Magnus Hirschfeld.
[Klaus in German] Magnus Hirschfeld also frequents the Eldorado.
He loves observing queer life.
[Ben] He is, in his own right, a celebrity.
Everyone knows who he is.
[Morgan] He's a sexologist.
He's fascinated by studying human sexuality
and gender roles.
He fundamentally believes
that gay people and trans people
can achieve liberation and their rights
through the tools of science.
[Ben] He publishes, at a maddening rate,
books, pamphlets, his lectures.
He founded the world's first gay rights organization in 1897.
[Klaus in German] On the queer city map of Berlin,
there is one focal point for progressive thinking:
Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.
[Morgan] There's a museum where you can see things like some frilly panties
that a German soldier wore in World War I.
You can find dildos, all kinds of things.
[Robert] It included space for a range of services for all people
who need counseling about their relationships,
any kind of STD, information on abortion and pregnancy,
the list goes on and on.
The Institute is also a social place for people.
It was a hub for queer people to go, a kind of a community setting.
[Robert] Just knowing that the Institute is there
is an important piece of information for many in the Berlin community.
One of the things that it specializes in
is trans identity and trans treatments available for those
who are struggling with their gender that was assigned at birth.
[indistinct conversation]
[Klaus in German] For Ernst Röhm, Magnus Hirschfeld embodies the enemy.
He is Jewish, a social democrat,
and he championed the rights of trans men and trans women.
As such, he is the opposite of the masculine ideology
that Ernst Röhm adheres to.
But both have something in common, they are not openly homosexual.
Magnus Hirschfeld knows that he would lose his reputation as a scientist.
And Ernst Röhm knows that he would be expelled from the Nazi Party.
[Ben] Ernst Röhm seems to have had an enormous degree of confidence
that his personal friendship with Hitler
and his long personal history with Hitler would protect him.
Both in terms of the public at large and in terms of the Nazi movement.
And this allows him to be quite careless about his private life.
[Röhm in German] "Dear Dr. Heimsoth."
"A handshake first of all."
"I can remember a number of same-sex feelings and acts
reaching back to my childhood,
but I have also associated with many women."
"Never, however, to my particular enjoyment."
[Ben] There's not much evidence of Röhm's interior life.
But we do have one real sort of treasure trove of that.
And it's a series of letters that he wrote to a friend
named Dr. Karl-Günther Heimsoth.
[Röhm in German] "All women are loathsome to me."
"I am not at all unhappy about my disposition,
even if it has caused me considerable difficulties at times."
"Internally, I may even be proud of it."
"At least I believe so."
[Ben] And in these letters,
Röhm seems to become more and more confident
in identifying as homosexual.
This is a moment when the idea of sexuality itself,
heterosexuality, homosexuality, whatever,
the idea that a sexuality is a coherent thing that a person has,
is really quite fresh and being developed.
[Klaus in German] But there is also another reality.
After all, Germany does not only consist of cities,
but a large part of it is towns, villages.
For those, what is happening in Berlin and other major cities is alien.
The also feel intimidated by this rapid change.
[Ben] The pace of change
is a source of frustration for just about everybody.
If you're a radical, then change is happening much too slowly for you.
On the other side, if you're a conservative,
you're watching everything that gives your life depth and meaning washed away.
And it's that experience of being threatened by this change
that gives fascists fertile ground in which to spread their poisonous ideas.
[Hitler in German] We want to school the Germans
insofar as that there is no life without law
and that there is no law without power
and there is no power without strength
and that any strength has to be rooted in our own nation!
[Walter in German] He sounded to me like Hitler always sounded
when he gave a speech,
like a madman.
The yelling and the things he said.
And of course he talked about the Jews, yes.
It was a horrible thing to listen to.
I didn't concern myself with it any further.
I was an innocent young man.
I had fallen in love, you see.
[plays piano]
[transitions into gentle piano music]
We had a villa in Sauerbrunn
where we spent our summers.
And someone else who went there on holiday every year was Lumpi.
That's how I met him.
He lived in Budapest and I lived in Vienna.
Lumpi and I became friends.
We did a lot of stuff together.
I loved him. After all, why not?
[they laugh]
We were both Jewish.
But we didn't give it much thought.
We were pretty removed from it all, as you'd put it.
But the trouble was in the air.
Not just in Berlin or in Germany, but everywhere in Europe.
[tense music]
[indistinct chatter]
So in 1931, Hitler appoints Röhm to be head of the SA.
The SA is the Nazis' paramilitary. They do the dirty work.
They destabilize democracy,
they fight other people on the street, they beat people up outside events.
Under Röhm, this force would grow to three million members.
That's an enormously important kind of backbone and insurance
for the Nazi movement.
The SA is a really huge part of the Nazis' plan to take control of Germany
and to establish a racially pure empire
free of Jews, free of communists, free of disabled people,
free of Roma and Sinti people and free of queers.
[tense music]
[Kathrin in German] The SA recruited its members
mostly among young men from lower class and lower middle-classes.
Because of its relatively low-threshold admission criteria,
it didn't consist of only radical nationalists,
but also of outsiders, eccentrics and quite a number of criminals.
[Ben] Karl Ernst is a storm trooper
who Röhm probably meets and recruits
out of this Berlin nightlife world.
And Ernst ends up joining the SA
and becoming a right-hand man of Röhm in the organization.
[Kathrin in German] The storm trooper, Karl Ernst, worked in Berlin,
sometimes as a doorman in gay and lesbian nightclubs, sometimes as a bellhop.
[Ben] After joining the SA, Ernst begins to develop his own political ambitions,
even as he's living a gay double life.
So if we think about Röhm's life
in the military, in these right-wing paramilitaries,
he's someone who creates around himself an entirely single-sex environment.
You're living together, you're showering together.
You're going out in the streets and beating up Jews and communists together.
And all of this can have
a kind of erotic or sexual charge.
There is this hyper-masculinity.
"We are so much men
that we are actually disgusted by women."
"We don't want to look at them."
"And that doesn't make us effeminate, that makes us even more like men."
[Röhm in German] To the movement!
[indistinct chatter and shouting]
[Kathrin in German] There is one man in the Nazi movement
whose dangerousness Ernst Röhm underestimated for a long time.
That is the Reich Leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.
As a young person, Heinrich Himmler was very interested
in this kind of fraternity-based comradeship.
But at the same time he always feared the danger inherent in the possibility
of these manly friendships giving rise to erotic attraction.
At this point in time, Himmler was the leader of the SS, the Schutzstaffel.
[Ben] The smaller paramilitary SS is below Röhm's much larger SA.
So Röhm and Himmler are competing in some way.
[Kathrin in German] To distance himself from the SA,
which is widely decried as homosexual,
he plans to forge this SS into an elite organization.
For him, that includes that its members should ideally be blond and blue-eyed.
So he invariably seems to consider external criteria
to be an ostensible proof of "good Aryan blood".
[crowd cheer]
[indistinct conversation]
[Klaus in German] Gottfried von Cramm becomes a star during those years.
[commentator in French] After two extremely close games,
the German champion tears a muscle,
and from then on cannot really resist Perry.
[Klaus in German] Gottfried started playing tennis at the age of ten,
and at 13 he decided that he would become the best tennis player in the world.
The moment he gets to Berlin,
he immediately joins this very famous tennis club, "Rot-Weiß".
And one of its members is Hermann Göring,
the eventual Interior Minister of the Nazi government.
Gottfried is a handsome man, a tall man.
He has blue eyes, blond hair.
He embodies the prototype of an Aryan.
And he gets prompted early on to become a member of the Nazi Party.
We know that Gottfried refuses,
and of course over the years that becomes more and more of a problem.
[indistinct conversation]
[optimistic music]
Of course we don't know any details about how the meeting comes about.
But we do know that Gottfried meets a young man,
of a similarly young age as Gottfried.
This young man is called Manasse, Manasse Herbst.
Gottfried and Manasse certainly come from very different worlds.
Manasse comes from a Jewish family in the poor Scheunenviertel.
He's an actor.
But to make ends meet, he works as a bartender at the Jockey,
a small jazz bar a few blocks from the Eldorado.
Maybe there was a moment of recognition.
[indistinct chatter]
[tense music]
There exists a genuine threat for homosexual men: Paragraph 175.
FORNICATION BETWEEN PERSONS OF THE MALE SEX IS PUNISHED WITH IMPRISONMENT
The paragraph criminalizes homosexual relations between men.
But it is tricky in its application
since many courts demand proof of coital acts.
And that isn't exactly an easy task for the police.
[Ben] Instead of actually busting up bars or conducting raids,
what they do is they maintain "pink lists."
And these are lists of people that they suspect or know to be homosexual.
[Klaus in German] A lot of the time you didn't know you were on them,
because you never ended up being charged.
But we know that the pink lists eventually had thousands of names written on them.
FIRST NAME: JOSEF CRIMINAL CATEGORY: § 175
But Gottfried possesses this inner freedom,
that if he falls in love,
he pursues that love.
[gentle jazz music]
After their first meeting, Gottfried and Manasse see each other regularly.
Of course, Lisa knows all about it.
There is no being secretive; instead it is all being lived out in the open.
[in German] What are you doing?
[they laugh]
Come here! Come on!
[Klaus in German] And the three of them now start a new type of relationship,
that seems to work.
[indistinct chatter]
For Lisa, the move to Berlin is also liberating.
She wants to live independently and experience herself in a new way.
And she very quickly forms friendships
with the modern women that this Berlin has created.
With female authors, with female athletes, with female photographers.
It's important to note, Lisa also does photography herself.
She's an avid jazz dancer, she's an avid equestrian,
she plays hockey and even becomes the German champion.
And this stems from a deeper movement that began even before the 1920s
where you free yourself
from this "being confined by clothes, by houses."
So she has this tough way of speaking and goes her own way.
Relatively quickly, she had affairs, also with lesbian friends.
She was curious, had a sexual thirst for adventure that she lived freely.
["You Do Something to Me" plays]
♪ You do something to me ♪
♪ Something that simply mystifies me ♪
♪ Tell me, why should it be ♪
♪ You have the power to hypnotize me ♪
[song continues]
[Klaus in German] The relationship between Gottfried and Lisa
is characterized by this almost endless trust in each other,
that whatever one does, it is okay.
♪.. so well, oh you ♪
ELECTION CAMPAIGN IN GERMANY
[Ben] So it's the spring of 1932.
Hitler's running in the presidential election.
The Nazis are running in the Parliamentary election.
[Kathrin in German] Shortly before they seize power,
the Nazis once again significantly increased their street terror.
There were massive street fights with fatal casualties.
The purpose behind all of this
was to attempt to demonstrate the instability of democracy.
And they presented themselves as the part of law and order
that, after winning the election,
would once again restore security, order and peace.
TAKE TO THE STREETS! ADOLF HITLER
[Klaus in German] It is not so much fear
that the people associate with the Nazis
but the hope for a reinvigorated Germany
and the promise of a golden future.
[in German] Hello, good evening.
[Zavier] So Charlotte, Toni and another woman,
Dorchen Richter, they have their surgeries now.
And they are only three examples that we know
had gender reassignment surgery at the Institute
and survived those surgeries initially.
These surgeries and these different procedures
were incredibly risky, they were very experimental.
These were some of the first times
when multiple surgeries were being performed on humans in history.
People would want to come to this place
precisely because there was no other alternative.
So its renown was global.
[Morgan] Charlotte and Toni must feel a huge amount of relief
that they were able to access surgeries while those surgeries were possible.
Now, having had the surgeries,
they feel much more content in their gender
and more solidified in their femininity.
Charlotte frequently proclaims
that the surgery has made her the happiest she's ever been.
[gentle piano and string music]
[Morgan] I can't think of another piece of film from this time
where you see not just one trans person,
but multiple trans people together,
really quite happy and joyful.
[indistinct chatter]
[Morgan] In Germany at this time,
if one of the drag acts at the Eldorado
walks out the door still in drag,
they can be arrested for causing a public disturbance.
[indistinct chatter]
This means that most trans people aren't able to live as themselves
without facing police repression.
Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute
come up with a negotiated solution with the police,
which is to provide these people
walking papers or the "trans pass."
WORKER, EVA KATTER IS KNOWN TO WEAR MEN'S CLOTHING
Basically an ID card that indicates to police:
You shouldn't arrest this person because they're under the care of a doctor.
And they are legally entitled to move through the public
dressed as the gender they identify with.
This is the first time in the world
that there's legal recognition for trans people's genders.
And now people like Charlotte and Toni,
they can walk freely, carrying this pass,
without worrying that a policeman is going to stop them
and say, "you're doing something illegal."
[Morgan] Queer and trans people can live in the light, in public.
And it happens right here in Berlin.
[peaceful piano music]
[train whistles]
[Walter in German] A few years later I went to Budapest
to spend my Easter holidays there
and I stayed with Lumpi, in the Andrássy út,
I don't remember the street number, near the opera.
During that first visit, we were up to so many shenanigans.
They didn't have a real bathroom.
They had this, what we in Vienna called a lavor.
His mom would fill it with water
and put us both, naked, into this bathtub, see?
And as Lumpi saw me, he got a boner.
As he saw me naked. I did notice it.
But we didn't touch each other sexually.
But I was always very flustered.
[he laughs]
[peaceful piano and string music]
[Kathrin in German] In the early 30s,
Hitler tries to come to power through legal means
by using as much propaganda as possible to get people's votes
and to take over parliament in order to then destroy it from within.
[Ben] The Nazis' biggest enemies
in some sense are the social democrats and the communists.
And the social democrats need to come up with a campaign,
something to do to try to stop the Nazis from coming to power.
[Röhm laughs]
CUPID IN THE BROWN HOUSE
RÖHM APPROVES THE SA PARADE
[Ben] Social democratic journalists get their hands on copies
of Röhm's letters to Dr. Heimsoth
and publish what they call "the love letters of Ernst Röhm."
[in German] "Revelations about Hitler's chief mercenary."
"Welt am Sonntag is publishing a letter by Lieutenant Colonel Ret. Röhm "
[Ben] An enormous scandal is made of this.
The social democrats really think that they have their silver bullet here
that's going to help them win back some elements of this base.
In March of 1932, as the scandal is breaking,
Hitler gets 30 percent of the vote in the presidential election,
which is a whole lot.
In July of 1932, after the scandal has been raging for a few months,
he gets 37 percent of the vote.
And so you can see, the scandal didn't work.
It's kind of a failed political tactic.
[he laughs]
Same sex!
I think if you're Röhm,
when this breaks in the newspapers, you're probably terrified.
When it doesn't have an effect
and the Party still cruises to this victory in the elections, its first ever,
you feel vindicated.
And even more importantly, you feel really unstoppable.
[upbeat jazz music]
[crowd cheer and whoop]
fellow members of the German Nation.
On January 30th,
the die has been cast in Germany.
And I do not believe
that the enemies who were laughing back then are still laughing today.
Sieg!
Heil!
-Sieg! -Heil!
[Kathrin in German] On January 30th, 1933, Hitler is appointed chancellor.
[brass band plays march]
REICH CHANCELLOR HITLER!
[Klaus in German] Hitler becomes the Führer of his totalitarian regime.
[brass band plays march]
[crowd cheers]
[ominous music]
[Kathrin in German] The Nazi ideology has no use at all anymore
for determining your life individually.
Instead everything is only ever subject to a higher idea.
Every individual in this national community
has to defer to this higher purpose.
[Ben] The Nazis are enormously invested
in ideas of racial and social and sexual health and hygiene.
And that, of course, means producing racially pure and healthy babies.
Anything that gets in the way of growing the population
is bad and a threat to the nation.
[Klaus in German] Shortly before the Nazis even seize power,
the Eldorado is closed down.
No farewells, no send-off.
And the queer community loses one of its most important ports of call.
[Zavier] A lot of the people that were employed by the Eldorado
had a lot of their protections taken away from them
as well as job opportunities.
[Klaus in German] And then, to go from bad to worse,
the Eldorado is used as advertising space for the Nazis.
ELDORADO HERE IT IS RIGHT!
VOTE FOR HITLER - LIST 1
[Morgan] It must have caused people's blood to run cold
to think that you could go so far in the extreme opposite direction
in the same building.
The Eldorado is closed
and all of the social spaces that had flourished for ten years before,
disappear almost overnight.
People are still queer but they haven't got the same kind of venues
where they can meet with each other.
They have to do this in a much more secretive way.
[somber music]
[Klaus in German] In 1933,
the life that Gottfried and Manasse had led also changes drastically.
Manasse very quickly loses all his theater engagements
because as a Jew he is no longer allowed to work in the theater.
He realizes very early on that he is no longer safe in Germany.
Everyone is aware that the situation is quickly escalating.
More and more, the relationship is overshadowed by the question,
how can Manasse safely get out of Germany?
But Gottfried wants to play tennis.
And if that means he has to play tennis in Nazi Germany,
then he will play for Germany.
The pressure is mounting.
He has a romantic relationship with a homosexual Jew.
But at the same time his popularity also grows,
both nationally and internationally.
And maybe he's thinking that as long as he keeps winning,
the regime can't touch him.
And with Cramm's decision to play for Germany, there was no other option.
[tense music]
[Zavier] Despite the Nazis having already come into power in '33,
Charlotte and Toni felt comfortable going outside,
presenting themselves on the street,
having photographs taken
and even talking to a journalist really openly about themselves.
[Morgan] Everything seems to be okay.
You could still go to the Institute
Charlotte is deeply enmeshed within Hirschfeld and his circle.
She provides advice to new trans people
who don't even know how to pick out dresses.
She helps people get access to housing.
Charlotte and Toni are finally living lives
and not just completing a medical process.
[Klaus in German] Magnus Hirschfeld meanwhile is on a tour of the world.
While he can't make public appearances in Germany anymore,
he's still being celebrated internationally.
[Morgan] He's already notorious
for being the Jew who's effeminizing Germany
and seducing the youth into homosexuality.
So he's really Nazi enemy number one.
Charlotte and Toni are starting to feel the heat.
The two of them make a decision to leave the Institute.
They move into a squalid one-room flat elsewhere in Berlin.
These two women
develop such strong feelings to each other
that Toni converts to Judaism.
I find it hard to believe
that anyone would be converting to Judaism at this time
if they didn't really love the person they were with.
After they've left, this is when the Institute is attacked.
[Robert] On the morning of May 6th, 1933,
a group of Nazi students ransack the Institute.
Nazi youths pull down all the shelves, they throw ink all over the research.
[Zavier] They destroy the library, they destroy the rooms.
This includes some 20,000 books.
[Morgan] They take pictures of themselves
gleefully destroying everything Magnus Hirschfeld has built.
[Robert] This must be one of the most devastating experiences
in Hirschfeld's life.
Hirschfeld is not at the Institute when it's attacked.
He is in Paris.
There are still employees at the Institute when the attack happens,
like Dorchen Richter.
The Institute was her home and place of work and it was destroyed.
And from what we know, she might have been destroyed along with it.
[Nazi in German] I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann,
Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner.
I consign to the flames the writings of the School of Sigmund Freud
[Robert] Four days later, at the infamous book burning,
books from the Institute are burned on the Opernplatz.
[Nazis sing in German]
[Robert] There's even a photograph
of one of Hirschfeld's busts being carried to the flames.
[Morgan] These photos
are deeply terrifying to look at to me.
Because they are actively trying
to destroy all evidence
that queer and trans people exist.
Once the Nazis are in power,
this also dismantles a lot of the opportunities
that were within Germany at the time for gender expression,
for playing with gender.
Women are meant to be in the domestic sphere at home.
They're meant to bear children for the country.
And men are meant to kind of embody masculine virility
and be able to go to war.
So this experimental,
expressionist, tolerant period is now over.
And it's been replaced with very, very rigid gender roles.
[Ben] In September of 1933, Karl Ernst,
who's one of Röhm's top deputies
and who he met in gay nightclubs,
very suddenly marries a woman.
[military march plays]
[Ben] The two best men at this wedding are Röhm and Hermann Göring,
who's Hitler's Minister of the Interior.
They walk down the aisle behind the bride and groom,
flanked by rows and rows of SA officers.
You can imagine why it might be very strategically useful for Röhm
to put on a big public show
and have a major SA officer like Karl Ernst marrying a woman,
as if to say, "No, no. These are all just rumors,
these paramilitaries have nothing to do with dirty or impure homosexuality."
In January of 1934,
Röhm receives a very warm personal letter from Hitler.
"I feel compelled to thank you, my dear Ernst Röhm,
for the imperishable services
and to assure you how very grateful I am to fate
that I am able to call such men as you my friends and fellow combatants."
"In true friendship and grateful regard. Your Adolf Hitler."
[tense music]
After getting this letter, Röhm is confident enough to demand, openly,
that he be made Minister of Defense.
And he be made minister in such a way
that would take the 100,000 strong German Army
and fold it into the SA and put all of that under his command.
[Kathrin in German] At the beginning of 1934,
the SA has reached its highest member count
with approximately 4.5 million members.
It has become something that is increasingly causing Hitler problems.
[Ben] And the idea of Röhm running the German military
horrifies conservatives in the German Army
who had enabled and gone along with the Nazis' rise to power,
but did not want to go along with losing their titles,
with losing their roles in this hierarchy.
And so this had to be stopped.
[Kathrin in German] It seems to Heinrich Himmler that the moment has come
to lead his SS out of the shadow of Ernst Röhm and his SA
and to expand his own position of power.
[Ben] Röhm's opponents in the Nazi movement,
like Himmler,
begin to propagate the idea that Röhm is planning to actually take over,
depose Hitler and pursue his own further revolution.
They end up succeeding in convincing Hitler
that this threat is imminent and he really has to act.
And Röhm's sexuality became a tool that they could try to use to stop him.
So it's the summer of 1934.
Hitler invites Röhm and the other top SA lieutenants
to take a well-deserved break on the Tegernsee in Bavaria.
And these guys are having a great time during these summer days.
[whimsical music]
[Ben] And so you can see, Röhm is not off in this lake
planning a takeover.
He thinks he's on vacation.
It's early in the morning on June 30th, 1934.
Ernst Röhm is asleep in his hotel room.
But Hitler and Goebbels are on their way to Bavaria.
So Hitler immediately goes to this hotel on Lake Tegernsee.
And together with this SS troop
personally bursts through the door of Röhm's bedroom.
When he gets into the room, he accuses Röhm of treason.
[Nazi in German] Get dressed!
[Ben] At this point, Röhm is maybe confused,
thinking this is all some kind of misunderstanding.
A lot of the other top SA men and Röhm are arrested
and brought to the Stadelheim prison in Munich.
Six of these men are shot immediately on the spot.
[Kathrin in German] Two days later Hitler decided
to make Röhm the offer that he should shoot himself.
[Ben] Röhm's response was,
"If I'm going to be killed, then let Adolf do it himself."
[Kathrin in German] Only after Röhm refuses to kill himself
is he shot dead by two SS captains.
On June 30th and the following two days,
a total of around 90 people are shot,
around 1,000 people are arrested.
Among them aren't only Ernst Röhm and some of his SA men,
but political opponents and members of parliament.
It is the regime's first state-sanctioned mass murder.
The public had been told
that all of these people were planning a coup against Hitler,
but that wasn't necessarily a story that people were going to believe.
[in German] Hitler welcomed the SA murders,
saying that the sexual debauchery inside the SA had recently increased so much
that it supposedly damaged the reputation of National Socialism.
THE BROWN HOUSE OF HOMOSEXUALS
[Ben] Hitler gives a speech which reads, and I quote,
"I would especially like every mother to be able to offer her son to the SA,
the Party or the Hitler Youth
without the fear that he might become morally or sexually depraved."
"I want to see men as SA officers and not disgusting apes."
[crowd applaud]
[Walter in German] It was a huge, a huge scandal.
It was on the front page of every newspaper.
[Hitler in German] I gave the order to shoot
the chief culprits of this treason,
and I gave the order to burn out these ulcers of our internal well poisoning
and the poisoning from foreign countries.
[Walter in German] I must have heard it on the radio,
because I have a very clear memory of that moment
that I found out what happened there.
It, it frightened you.
No matter if you were homosexual or not homosexual.
As a human It could have happened to anyone.
And it showed who Hitler was.
[Kathrin in German] Due to the SS committing the murders of the SA,
Himmler has once again clearly proven his loyalty to Hitler.
And Hitler thanks him by satisfying Himmler's wish
and separating the SS from the SA.
It is now directly under Hitler's command.
Which is what Heinrich Himmler had wanted all along.
This ultimately creates the basis of Himmler's rise and career.
After the Röhm murders,
he bit by bit takes over the leadership of the political police in all German states
until he eventually becomes both chief of the whole of the German police
as well as Reich leader of the SS and Gestapo.
[Klaus in German] Heinrich Himmler becomes the leader
of the fight against homosexuality.
His goal is to eradicate homosexuality.
[Kathrin in German] "Homosexuality tears down any accomplishment
and destroys the state in its very foundation."
"For only the nation that has a great many children
has an entitlement to world power and world domination."
"Homosexuality has to be combated at all costs,
otherwise it will be the end of Germany, the end of the Germanic world."
[Himmler in German] It is the sword of the revolution
that the only enemy no longer causing damage
is the one who is dead and who is annihilated.
[Klaus in German] The pink lists previously compiled by the police
now not only fall into the hands of the German police,
but also the hands of the Gestapo.
There is then a wave of persecution and sentencing like never seen before.
[Zavier] Gay men are persecuted directly through paragraph 175.
But trans people and lesbians are also persecuted under the Nazi regime,
but through more indirect and complicated ways.
They could be targeted by being called "asozial"
or for not fitting into the Volksgemeinschaft.
[Klaus in German] Many, I think, were also surprised
by how quickly the police stepped in,
how quickly you ended up in court.
They don't yet know how to protect themselves.
They have address books at home
that suddenly turn up as evidence in court.
Denunciations are expressly encouraged.
And the German people deliver.
Neighbors monitor if you get a visitor
and pull the bedroom curtains closed.
Neighbors make statements on women wearing pants and looking lesbian.
So the police are called upon to remove these individuals
that one no longer wants to tolerate within Nazi Germany.
Thus you see between 1933 and 1936,
Manasse tries again and again to find a place where he can keep living,
a place outside Germany.
And they try to meet up, whether it be in Berlin
or in cities where Gottfried plays tennis,
in order to be able to keep seeing each other.
It must have been very, very exhausting and also very oppressive.
They are young lovers after all.
And that easiness suddenly changes to this intense,
"How can I get out of here? How can I get to safety?"
[tense music]
And there is one last meeting.
And for many years, that is the last night they can spend with each other.
Gottfried transfers prize money he won in various tournaments to Manasse,
so that in early 1936 Manasse is able to emigrate to Palestine and be safe.
[melancholy music]
He also loses Lisa that same year because Lisa files for divorce.
We know from her later letters that she often regretted this step,
but is also convinced
that she couldn't exist
alongside this huge love that Gottfried has for tennis.
She says that if she had continued to live this life with him,
she would have had to give up everything important to her.
Because there was barely room for her anymore.
One of the biggest tennis matches in Gottfried von Cramm's career
is the 1937 Davis Cup at Wimbledon
against his American opponent, Donald Budge.
At this time, Gottfried is one of the most popular athletes in the world.
The Nazi regime expects their tennis player,
the German player, to win.
There are 15,000 spectators, Queen Mary herself
and part of the global public watching.
There had never been anything quite like it.
And to this day,
this match is remembered as one of the greatest games of tennis of all time.
There is an anecdote by Donald Budge
that Gottfried had a call shortly before the match,
supposedly from Hitler,
threatening him that if he did not win this match,
they could no longer protect him.
[announcer] Wimbledon finals,
where the big men's championship match
sees Baron von Cramm, German Davis Cup ace,
serve to California's Donald Budge,
Wimbledon Champion and this year's unbeatable Yankee.
Budge in the near court.
Deuce.
[crowd applauds]
[Walter in German] A match unfolds where it looks for the most part
as if Gottfried would be the winner.
[announcer] Advantage von Cramm.
[crowd cheer]
Quiet, please.
Budge now in the far court.
[crowd cheer]
[Klaus in German] At the very end, in the fifth set,
he ends up losing eight to six
and does what he has also become famous for,
he honors the victor.
My dear Don, I want to congratulate you on your splendid playing.
I think you deserve to win every championship in the world now.
But I'll do what I can to prevent that.
You're such a grand sportsman.
That is very kind of you, my dear Donald. Thanks very much indeed.
[Klaus in German] That delighted the audience.
And everyone understood that this tennis player,
while he might play for Nazi Germany, is not identical with Nazi Germany.
[crowds cheer and shout]
Which then poses the question:
does that still serve the regime?
After the defeat, Gottfried goes on a tour of the world
where he rushes from one tennis tournament to the next.
At a press conference,
he is asked what he thinks about the persecution of Jews in Germany.
And he clearly states that he does not agree with it.
So he makes no bones about his distaste for National Socialism,
which means he puts himself in more and more danger.
FREE GERMAN AUSTRIA GREETS YOU!
ONE PEOPLE, ONE REICH, ONE FÜHRER
[Walter in German] The Austrians became Nazis overnight.
[crowds cheer]
He had 400,000 people at Heldenplatz
cheering for him.
[Hitler in German] As Führer and Chancellor
of the German Nations of the Reich,
I now declare before German history,
the accession of my homeland to the German Reich!
[crowds cheer]
[crowd] Heil! Heil!
[oppressive music]
JEWRY IS GANGSTERISM
[Walter in German] When you went out into the street,
the whole city was full of these posters: "Jews banned."
There were posters everywhere you looked.
NON-ARYAN SHOP HERZMANSKYARYAN AGAIN
But I still went out into the street.
I really was just wandering the city.
Suddenly I see a crowd of people.
And there's my Aunt Gretel on her knees,
made to clean the pavement with a toothbrush.
JEW
[gentle piano music]
The day after Hitler came here, this letter comes in a blue envelope.
[Lumpi in German] "Dear Walter,
Since you visited me, everything has become so dreadful in Budapest."
"You wouldn't recognize it anymore."
"I also hear dreadful things out of Vienna."
"How are you? Are you safe?"
"My parents have to give up the business, even though we converted."
"They're trying to get us out of the country."
"But we have no family or close friends."
"Except you."
"The Nazis are ever-present everywhere and I am very scared."
"Can you help us somehow?"
"What will you do?"
"If you go,
please take me with you and write to me quickly."
"Your Lumpi."
[Walter in German] It was a desperate letter.
But I didn't answer the letter because I…
At the time the letter arrived,
we were already in a very, very precarious situation in Vienna.
And then, that night,
they came into our apartment at two in the morning
and took my father
and sent him to Dachau.
It was terrible. How could I have helped him?
Yes…
That was the end of Lumpi for me.
[melancholy piano music]
[in Hebrew] Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe.
who has sanctified us with His good deeds,
and commanded us to light a candle for the Sabbath.
[Kathrin in German] During the nights of the 9th and 10th of November, 1938,
the Pogrom takes place in the entire Reich.
It was long called the Night of Broken Glass,
downplaying its severity.
During those nights, synagogues burn all over Germany.
Jewish stores as well as homes
are looted, robbed and destroyed.
Many, many Jews are arrested, and sent to concentration camps.
[Morgan] It must be an incredibly anxious time for Charlotte and Toni.
They make the decision to flee to Czechoslovakia
where they think it might be safer.
For now.
[Klaus in German] It's a cold March
when Gottfried returns from his six-month world tour.
And on the first evening back,
he sits down with his mother and his brothers for supper.
[in German] There was a dinner in Brüggen, where everyone came together.
And then suddenly, like knock, knock, knock on heaven's door.
Grandma went out and returned all pale, saying,
"Gottfried, they're asking for you."
It was two Gestapo officers, they immediately took him with them.
And so he was in prison.
[in German] The arrest| was really theatrically staged.
They could just have written a letter telling him to come to the police station.
But I think the Nazi regime pretty deliberately chose
to do this very publicly.
On May 14th, 1938,
Gottfried is sentenced to one year in prison for violation of Paragraph 175.
The basis for that is his five-year relationship with Manasse Herbst.
"We had to consider the aggravating factor
that the accused engaged in homosexual activity
so quickly after his wedding."
"But most egregious was that the accused,
with his standing in German sports
with his world-renowned name and his overall position,
didn't shy away from engaging
in homosexual intercourse with a Galician Jew."
It's lucky that Manasse had already left Germany at that time.
Or he would not have survived that.
[Robert] During the period of the Third Reich,
it's estimated that 100,000 men
were charged under the German anti-gay law.
Some 50,000, it's estimated,
were successfully prosecuted.
Somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000
perished in concentration camps.
[Klaus in German] From the beginning,
concentration camps were an instrument of Nazi terror.
[Kathrin in German] Prisoners marked as homosexual
faced particular cruelty
and rarely experienced solidarity from other prisoner groups.
BADGES FOR PRISONERS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS
[Klaus in German] Homosexuals have to wear a pink triangle.
EMIGRANTS, BIBLE SCHOLARS, HOMOSEXUALS
[Kathrin in German] They are forced to do hard labor
under the harshest, most terrible conditions.
The rations are disastrous,
so that many, many of the prisoners
die from the unspeakable conditions of imprisonment.
[Klaus in German] Some of them are abused in medical trials,
not all of them survive.
There's also the option to get castrated
with the offer or the promise
that you get to leave the concentration camp afterwards.
However, we know from various documents
that a lot of them were not released despite that.
[somber music]
Many prisoners who were accused of homosexuality,
often based on denunciations,
don't survive imprisonment in the camps.
Their prosecution reaches its peak between 1937 and 1939,
Immediately before Hitler starts the war against Europe.
It's not like the genocide of Jews.
The Nazis don't think that they need to kill all homosexuals.
What they want to do is eliminate homosexuality.
[Kathrin in German] In 1941, Hitler puts Heinrich Himmler in charge
of the so-called "final solution of the Jewish question."
That means Heinrich Himmler is tasked
with the order to exterminate German and European Jews.
In Czechoslovakia, the Aliens Police come for Charlotte.
[Morgan] She gets arrested
while Charlotte and Toni are celebrating their 10-year anniversary.
And she is about to be interned in a concentration camp.
[Morgan] Toni panics. And she runs to the Swiss Consul.
And alerts the authorities to the fact that Charlotte is actually American.
[Morgan] Eventually Charlotte is put on a boat and sent to New York City.
Toni thought on her feet about how to get her out of the situation.
Otherwise she would have been sent to an extermination camp.
It separates them for the rest of their life.
They never see each other again.
[melancholy music]
[somber music]
[Walter in German] I searched for Lumpi all my life.
I wanted to know where he was, what had happened to him.
Only now have I seen this pictures.
And only now has it all come out.
He was in a labor camp and starved to death.
It was terrible to me that he died like that.
Not only… The only thing you can say is that he didn't deserve that.
[gentle piano music]
VICTIMS OF HARKA
Terrible.
And what do I see?
This, this large stone, the photograph of this large stone that says,
"Fülöp Loránt", 24 years old or maybe 25.
FÜLÖP LÓRÁNT 25 YEARS
[sighs]
In Vienna you say that there's a lot to verkiefeln.
It's something you can never accept if you can't verkiefeln something.
Yeah.
I'm glad that if Lumpi is remembered by history,
I did my very small part in that.
[Klaus in German] Not knowing what happened to a loved one
is unfortunately very common for many Jewish victims.
For many of them we learn only much later or sometimes never at all
where they were murdered.
Homosexual survivors want to, but can't share their stories.
It's too dangerous.
After 1945,
the state-sponsored persecution of homosexuals
is not recognized as an injustice.
West Germany adopts the Nazi Paragraph 175.
Society considers homosexuals to be criminals and perverts.
Families remain silent, historians don't ask questions.
The persecution continues.
CRIMINAL CASE AGAINST GOTTFRIED VON CRAMM
In 1951, Gottfried tries, incidentally like many other homosexuals as well,
to have the conviction according to Paragraph 175
deleted from his record.
Without an expungement,
he can't receive a visa to be able
to participate in tennis tournaments in the US, Great Britain or France.
There is a trial
for which Manasse Herbst also returns to Germany
for the first time in 1951.
That means he returns to the country that had wanted to kill him.
And it is the first reunion between Gottfried and Manasse.
[tense music]
Lisa is also questioned.
She confirms the relationship between Manasse and Gottfried.
For one moment, they fearlessly rebuild
on the freedom that they lived in the late 20s.
And all that in the extremely conservative 50s in a German court.
Like for other convicted homosexuals,
Gottfried's expungement is denied.
He can't get a visa for the most important tennis tournaments.
He does win other tournaments in countries where he's admitted,
but the really important ones he can't play in,
exactly because he has a previous criminal conviction under Nazi Paragraph 175.
[Walter in German] I emigrated to the US
and have lived here since 1939, happily.
I became a composer and have spent my whole life composing.
[crowd applaud]
[Walter in English] I met someone in 1959, I believe it was.
His name is Howard Myers.
Thank you.
I have no idea why you buy such a huge cup of coffee.
[Howard] The truth was, we were shameless.
We didn't feel any shame.
We went to dinners with six married couples and us.
I wasn't shameless because I never doubted
that I'm able to do what I'm setting out to do.
[Howard] Walter did live for me.
He did everything for me in our first decades,
when we were younger.
And now he's 100 years old,
and only in the last 15 years
has he needed me to do anything for him.
Okay, it says, "The city of West Hollywood marriage certificate."
"This certifies that Walter Arlen and Howard Myers
were lawfully wedded on the second day of July 2013."
It didn't change anything.
It was just a quiet satisfaction.
He wouldn't have anybody to quarrel with without me.
[laughs]
[Morgan] Charlotte spends the rest of her life in Brooklyn.
She ends up becoming an actress.
But even though she's separated from Toni,
she creates new friendships among the artistic community.
And a lot of them don't know that she ever was trans.
[Zavier] She even managed to get her US documents
to certify that she was a woman with a feminine name.
And this was really important to her
as it cemented her kind of legitimate female identity.
[Morgan] I think about what I would do in that situation.
Do I need to flee? You know, where would I go?
[somber music]
After the war, Toni is able to return to Berlin
where she lives out the rest of her life as a painter and an artist.
[Zavier] We can see this period in the 20s, a hundred years ago,
as really exemplifying how fragile some of these liberties are.
Even today with the kind of progress
that has happened for queer rights and even trans rights,
that you can have these liberties and they can be taken away from you.
ELDORADO HERE IT IS RIGHT!
PANTRY AT THE ELDORADO
[Ben] The Eldorado's final venue is now a very fancy organic supermarket.
You can go to the place where people used to watch drag shows
and buy expensive avocados.
[Klaus in German] I think the queer life in Berlin
had to completely reinvent itself.
And that has worked out pretty well
when you look at how queer life in Berlin is really thriving
and how multifaceted and diverse it has become.
But drawing on something?
I don't think we could draw on anything.
For a long time,
we didn't even know anything about the persecution of homosexuals.
And in that sense, today's queer Berlin
certainly isn't a…
a continuation in any shape or form of the 1920s.
That really was lost.
No names. No memory. Nothing.
[peaceful piano music]