The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany

The history of women and gender has undergone profound transformations and elaborations since Tim Mason began his work on 'Women in Germany' for the Ruskin History Workshop in 1973. At that time women's history barely existed as an academic field, and what most of us knew about women in Nazi Germany was still largely drawn from Clifford Kirkpatrick's 1939 book on women and family life.¹ In German women's history, the two British pioneers were Jill Stephenson and Richard Evans, both of whom were completing dissertations on the subject that were published shortly before Tim's two-part essay appeared in History Workshop Journal in 1976.² He began with one of his overriding concerns, the mobilization of resources for war, and with a characteristic question: why did something not happen that might have been expected to happen? In this case, why were women not mobilized to meet the wartime demand for labour? Typically, his answer led him into a wide-ranging and thoughtful account that took in the social history of women and the family, as well as the economics and politics of women's waged labour between the 1920s and the 1940s. As always, he was sceptical of large-scale theories of determination - here, prevailing ideas about patriarchy, the family and capitalism that ignored, as he put it, 'all the questions about Vermittlung [mediation] . . . It won't do to postulate even the most plausible of concordances between capitalism & 19-20c family organization & then simply assert that the latter was determined by the former'.³ I will return to this point at the end of this essay.

I decided to use my contribution to this feature to pick up Mason's cue of explaining why something expected didn't happen, and in an aspect of women's and gender history that had barely got started in the 1970s: 'outsider' sexualities in Nazi Germany. Serious research on this began to appear only in the 1990s, with an agenda of questions arising from both feminist and gay history.⁴ Since then a lot of painstaking research has recovered histories of persecution and survival, and has mapped the multiple and not altogether consistent operations of gender and sexuality in the power circuits of National Socialism.⁵ This essay explores one of these inconsistencies which appeared at the far margins of outsider sexual behaviours and gender identities. Obviously the most important thing to acknowledge about anyone caught in these situations is what he or she suffered and why. But I will take a rather different approach here: to see how sex and gender became entangled in networks of official categorization and bureaucratic transactions.

My starting-point was a documentary accident. I was working in the Berlin archives on the proof and policing of individual identity under the Nazi regime, but also looking sideways at files on police encounters with women suspected of homosexuality. Since this behaviour was never criminalized, ⁶ records on women are minimal by comparison with the prolific documentation on male homosexuals. My eye was caught by an even smaller sub-group of women in these files: women who were issued with police permits to cross-dress, or in other words, to appear in public wearing the clothing of the sex to which they had not been assigned at birth. Let me summarize some of the cases.

In January 1938, Erna K., a fifty-year-old worker, was taken into 'protective custody' for 'endangering public security and order' by wearing men's clothing in public, 'despite the fact that the permit previously issued to her had been withdrawn in the year 1933'. Erna K. was sent to the women's concentration camp in Lichtenburg, but was released in October 1938, armed with temporary permission from the camp's Political Department to wear men's clothing pending the issue of an official permit by the Gestapo. This permission was based on a medical examination which she had undergone while in the camp. The Gestapo issued their permit shortly after her release, on the condition that she could not use public conveniences or baths when wearing...