In May of 1933, Nazis stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and walked off with cartloads of books from their library, which they then burned, publicly. This is one of the most famous photographs of the pre-war period, illustrating their process for purging “Jewish” literature from Germany.
On May 6, 1933, Nazi demonstrators raided the libraries of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a German name that roughly translates to the Institute of Sexology. The Institute was a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality. More than 20,000 books were taken from shelves and burned days later in the streets by Nazi youth groups.
A book publisher named Rubin Mass afterwards found a few scorched pages that survived the fire, and preserved them to remember the criminality of the right-wing mob.
They were from Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie. Hirschfeld was Jewish, gay, and a scholar, so of course he was hated by Nazis. Most people who know anything about the rise of Hitler’s regime know this — it’s common knowledge that the Nazis regarded anything to do with deviations from a Christian heterosexual norm as degenerate. You have to be soaking in the anti-intellectual, ahistorical circle-jerk of right-wing apologetics to be totally unaware of these facts.
Cue JK Rowling.
J.K. Rowling is once again making ignorant and anti-trans comments online. On Wednesday, the Harry Potter author’s name began trending on X thanks to an ill-advised post in which she denied the claim that Nazis burned “books on trans healthcare and research.”
“I just… how?” Rowling wrote above a screenshot of a nameless user’s post. “How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?””
I wish the murder of six million Jews, gays, transexuals, Romany, and political opponents had been nothing but a “fever dream,” but it wasn’t. It was a horrible reality that now a famous author of children’s fantasy books would like to bring back.
I’m ashamed to say that I contributed to her coffers years ago, by buying several of her books for my kids. That was before she grew the invisible toothbrush mustache and started openly courting fascists, though. At least I never paid to see any of those Harry Potter movies, and never will.