Nazi Policy and Gendered Violence:

The Suppression and Invisibility of the German Lesbian in the 20th Century

Helene Stocker 1903 and Anna Ruling. Photos from wikipedia

By Photographer not credited — Berliner Leben, Jg. 1903, Heft 07., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90830370l

Throughout the Nazi Third Reich lesbians did actually exist. They were “perpetrators, victims, followers, and bystanders (Gisela Bock, Ordinary Women)” much like all other Germans caught up in Hitler’s plans for the creation of the ultimate Master Race. While Nazi Policy set up rules in order to control everyone, those specific controls over women were the attempt to create a masculine world-view that would always maintain belief in the superiority of one master race over everyone else, and those men over every other living human in the world.

Those controls began with a slow suppression of physical limitations, then worked on mental and emotional controls until everything that makes up a human being was stripped from their lives. The pain moved from the physical realm to much more intangible realms that threatened the existence of the soul.

What this kind of policy took away from humanity is just an exaggerated version of what we see in everyday patriarchal life. There was not some great and immediate evil that…