Cross-Dressing Nazis

“If the photos did not exist, you would not believe it”

– Martin Dammann, cross-dressing Nazis

 

 

The Nazis made a virtue of murdering people they were envious of. The Jews, the race whose unique history of influence over Europe and Christianity, were the main target of the evil. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he banned all gay groups. Gay bars were raided. Gays were locked up. In 1935, the Nazis banned male friendships based on homosexuality without any homosexual acts. Gays were sent to the death camps and forced to wear pink triangular badges. Thousands died.

And as they meted out the horror, male Nazis also dressed as women.

Artist and photograph collector Martin Dammann found amateur photographs of soldiers in the German army who dressed as women.

“Without exception, all these men seem to be completely abandoned to the moment and to their own desires, in a unique state of bliss that makes itself evident in all the photos, no matter how different the situations in which they came about,” says Dammann of the photographs.

 

Jordan Teicher adds more context (via):

Viewing these images in particular, it’s hard not to recall just how much danger cross-dressing posed for enemies of the Reich. In the Weimar Republic, those inclined to cross-dress were often issued “transvestite passes” by physicians, which kept them safe from police harassment. One of these physicians was the gay Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who advocated for gay rights and researched gender and sexual identity through his Institute of Sex Research. The same year Hitler became German chancellor, one of the Nazis’ first orders of business was to destroy the Institute and burn its contents. Many “transvestite pass” holders, in all likelihood, were subsequently murdered.

 

Soldier Studies: Cross-Dressing in der Wehrmacht, with essays by Martin Dammann and Harald Welzer, available via Hatje Cantz.