Doctor gay hitler

But there were gay masculinists in Weimar Germany too. This proudly gay man almost single-handedly elevated JD Vance to the vice presidency. As it became clear that his science was falling out of fashion, he was sort of disregarded in Germany as well. He was an awful guy in many respects, but he was a genius, and he was an eccentric and I, you know, I’ve always been attracted to those kinds of characters.

The historian Robert Proctor calls Nazism a national hygiene experiment inflicted on the Jews.

Warburg, of course, wanted to literally conquer disease and Hitler, in his own mind, was attacking disease by lumping Jews into that same category. He spoke to The Jewish Week from his home in Wynnewood, Pa. This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

I hate asking the “why this book” question to start any interview, but when I remember your first book — about an eccentric Austrian shepherd who happens to sing Yiddish folk songs — I wondered why you would want to spend so much time with a person as unpleasant as Otto Warburg.

I came to the topic of cancer metabolism before I came to Warburg.

The ISS—and Hirschfeld—were validating, promoting, and encouraging a whole new Berlin. 

 

 

 

Art by Patti Pogodzinski from Current Affairs magazine, Issue 54, July-August 2025

 

 

Reading Brook’s account provokes a longing for those Weimar years, if only to see the sudden blossoming of a queer city—to witness a parent marching their gay child to the known sexologist for affirming therapy, or a transgender man finally marrying his longtime girlfriend.

He created his own word, “intermediaries,” to describe people who existed between the stark masculine and feminine categories that were then available in Germany. In one flash of fire and hate, it all comes down in ash. 

 

 

Brook focuses more on Hirschfeld’s death as an exile in France, bereft of his life’s work and separated from a place in time to which he could never return.

He ends up giving her these terrible, painful treatments and he later described Hitler as the most distraught person he’d ever seen.

But cancer was a very large part of Hitler’s hypochondria. Every one of us needs to be a hero, distributed instead of singular, impossible to pin down because there are so damn many and we’re so damn loud.

Hirschfeld’s answer to that question was not, generally speaking, what the German majority wanted to hear. Even as Hirschfeld struggled against the laws that technically made gay sex a punishable crime, the whirlwind of social progress alone makes Brook’s account riveting. He had literally been changing the world.

By promoting Berlin as a sexually tolerant place, Brook shows, Hirschfeld’s institute empowered LGBTQ+ people financially and socially. He opened his own research institute in Berlin, where he brought in surgeons to conduct some of the world’s first gender-affirming surgeries, and suddenly, Berlin began to bloom as one of the queerest cities in the world.

We call it toxic masculinity these days. He stood up to the Nazis when they came to his institute, and basically screamed at them, saying, “I’ll burn down this institute before I let you interrupt my work.” He wasn’t particularly worried, however, about what they were doing to everybody else. Queer life was a must-see in Berlin, and once seen, it was impossible to escape the fact that queer life was not just normal, but fun.