Sam (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we have an interview with a guest that we’re very excited about. Samuel Clowes Huneke is an award-winning historian of modern Europe and associate professor of history at George Mason University. His book, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany, was published this year and will be the topic of our conversation today. So welcome, Professor Samuel.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (00:38)
Thanks for having me on.

Sam (00:39)
So we’ll get right into the questions. In the introduction of your book, you touch on the topic of your own identity and the way it intersects and doesn’t with the topic of your book, Queer Women. And it was interesting to me that you addressed that because I’ve noticed it come up more often these days. Obviously we have a history podcast, so we talk about the books we’ve read at length with other people. This idea that someone with a shared identity with the topic might be better equipped to write about that identity. And I wonder if you could talk a little about that. Did it impact your approach at all? What was the reason you felt compelled to address it?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (01:11)
Yeah, I mean, I think over the last, I don’t know, twenty, thirty, fifty years, there’s been an increased interest in identity-based studies and identity-based histories. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that traditionally history was sort of written by elite white men. And so all of these other people who didn’t see themselves in this kind of history writing started to write the histories of all these marginalized groups. You know, starting with histories of women, histories of non-white people, histories of working class people, and so on and so forth. And this history writing was an important part of how these groups came to create and assert a kind of group identity. And that’s very much true for queer people: the way that we historically over the last fifty years have created a common sense of identity and social place and culture for ourselves is through writing and reading and engaging with our history. So it’s really tied up in this very emotional way.

At the same time, as a professional historian — where I went and got a PhD, I do this for a job — there’s a resistance to that idea. There’s this idea that the study of history is scholarly and it’s scientific, it’s objective, and it shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or contemporary concerns. And obviously that’s sort of an artificial view, but it is in some ways how I was trained as a historian. And so these two things, when I actually sit down to write books like this, come into conflict.

On the one hand, this is a topic I’m deeply interested in, both as a queer person and as a historian of modern Germany. At the same time, I’m very cognizant of the fact that for queer women, especially queer women in Germany, this history is deeply important to them as people. This isn’t academic. This isn’t a matter of scholarly interpretation. This is wrapped up in who they are. And so I didn’t want to decide not to write this book for that reason, but I thought it was really important to step back and talk my reader through the kind of thought process of why is this so significant and why should an author at least have this on their mind and be willing to address it?

And I think it also has to do, in some sense, with conversations about cultural appropriation. The straw man argument about cultural appropriation is that we’re not allowed to be inspired by other cultures anymore. And I think that’s not what the argument is intended to be. It’s much more about people swooping in and claiming credit for what another culture has produced. And so in this case, I really wanted to emphasize that I know this is something that’s really important to people who belong to a community that I am adjacent to, but not part of. And moreover, to really give credit to all of the feminist and queer historians who came before me and made it possible for me to write the book that I did.

Maartje (04:10)
Why women instead of men?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (04:13)
A couple of reasons. The central one is that there wasn’t a law that criminalized female homosexuality in Nazi Germany. I sort of stumbled onto this topic serendipitously. I was doing research for my dissertation, which became my first book about gay men in post-war Germany, and I came across these four files in the Berlin Regional Archive, each one detailing a lesbian couple or alleged lesbian couple who was denounced to the Nazi police as lesbians. And as soon as I saw those, my ears perked up and I thought, wait a minute, this wasn’t illegal. There wasn’t a law. What are the police doing investigating these women for doing something that isn’t illegal? And I wrote an article about it. I kept researching it because the topic had grabbed me.

And really at base, one of the central questions was: how does a persecuting society like Nazi Germany treat an outsider group for which it does not have a clear policy or law? And so with gay men, we sort of already know what that story is. We know that there was a law against male homosexuality. We know that about 50,000 men were prosecuted under that law in the Nazi period. We know that about 10,000 men were sent to the concentration camps where many of them wore a pink triangle. And the history of lesbianism and queer women wasn’t as well known. It wasn’t as well researched. And so that kind of conundrum is really what grabbed me about the topic.

Sam (05:42)
You went down a rabbit hole.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (05:44)
I really did. I went down a side quest.

Sam (05:46)
So can you talk a little bit more about the difficulties of researching this topic in particular? Because I know some of this ground is very well trodden, and this obviously is not.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (05:55)
Right. So again, I really want to emphasize I benefited from a lot of important work that was done on this topic by generations of lesbian and feminist historians going all the way back to the nineteen seventies, when many activist historians started looking for evidence of lesbian experiences in the Nazi period.

Essentially my method was to look for police records and court records of the Nazi state actually uncovering queer women and trying to figure out what to do with this person or this couple. And so what I would do is go to or write to different regional archives around Germany. These are the archives that hold police records and court records, and essentially say, do you know of any files that might be relevant?

And the difficulty here is that unlike gay men, where you can write to them and say, I want to see all of your Paragraph 175 cases — Paragraph 175 was the law that criminalized male homosexuality, and all those files are labeled that way and they’re very easy to find and access — conversely, because queer women were investigated and prosecuted under a whole gamut of different non-consistent laws, some women might be prosecuted for causing a public nuisance, others might be prosecuted under laws dealing with sex work and prostitution. And so really it’s up to whether or not archivists properly labeled these files as having something to do with female homosexuality. And so I’d write to these archives, and sometimes the archivists would write back and say, well, everyone knows that lesbians weren’t persecuted, and so no, we don’t have anything. And I would sort of say, okay, thank you for your time. That is not helpful.

But then many times archives would get back to me and say, yes, we have one or two or three files. Typically they were very generous and were willing to scan it and send it to me. In some cases, they had a couple dozen files, and then I would actually go in person and read through all of these files. But it really was a matter of looking for needles in haystacks. And then in some of these cases, particularly the stories that I decided I really wanted to focus on in the book, I would go to other archives and try to trace the life stories of these women and figure out both what had happened to them before they came to the attention of the Nazi police and then what happened to them after they were let go or convicted or sent to a concentration camp, as the case may be.

Maartje (08:21)
So many of them I think aren’t yet digitized, are they?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (08:24)
They’re unevenly digitized. But in general, you need to go in person, unless if it was one or two files, in some cases they would just scan it and send it to me. In some cases I had to pay. And so if it was like a 10-page file, I might pay twenty or thirty dollars to have it scanned and sent to me. That seemed worth the cost compared to a flight to Germany from the US. But in some cases, if it was many files, it wouldn’t have made sense to try and do that. And so I actually went and got to read them in person.

And you know, sometimes this makes me sound like a bit of a fuddy duddy, but I really do like reading these files in person. When I’m there, I always take notes. I really don’t like this modern practice of just taking photographs of everything and thinking, well, I’ll read it and take notes on it later. Because you get something oftentimes from physically handling the paper, from actually seeing the context of how is it written, what is the letterhead, also just where is it stored physically in the file. Not always does it give you anything, but it sometimes can give you important context clues.

And moreover, I think there’s this quality that the novelist Hilary Mantel would talk about of being able to feel the past through your skin. And I think there really is something about that when you’re actually touching the same paper that the people who you’re writing about touched or wrote themselves. It allows you to, I think, have a deeper sympathy with their experiences and ultimately write more convincingly about them.

Sam (09:58)
I was fascinated to read about how Weimar Germany and Berlin in particular was a sort of hub of queer culture in Europe prior to Hitler’s rise to power. And it’s just so interesting to see that level of liberation and then the brutal backlash that obviously followed. So can you take us through how that happened and why the ensuing reversal was so intense? I suspect some might see some similarities with some of the current backlash against trans rights, although obviously it’s not a one to one comparison.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (10:26)
Yeah, there’s a lot there. So Germany occupies this really strange place in the history of queerness. Some people say Germany is where modern sexual identities are invented. And in some sense that’s correct. I mean, the word homosexuality is a German invention from the 1860s. The word transvestite, which for a long time is how trans people were referred to and referred to themselves in this period — it didn’t have the same derogatory connotations that it does today — that is also a German word invented by the progressive sexologist and reformer Magnus Hirschfeld. So it intellectually is really important. It has these burgeoning queer subcultures starting in the 19th century, and also in the 19th century you start having homosexual rights groups, kind of the first gay liberation movements, if you want to think about it that way.

In 1919, when the Weimar Republic gets started, Germany’s first real experiment with republican democracy after World War One, the queer scene just grows exponentially. You have clubs and bars and publications, you have more and more of these rights groups. There are actually a couple of trans rights groups that are founded in this period. And it really is seen as the locus of queer culture in the world.

Christopher Isherwood, who is best known for Cabaret, obviously, famously wrote when he visited Berlin in the late twenties, early thirties, that Berlin meant boys. It was this hedonistic, queer place. Of course, the Nazis in part campaigned against that. They see the Weimar Republic as this libertine, decadent place. For them it’s associated with women’s rights, with feminism, and also with their antisemitic view of the world, and they clamped down on it very quickly.

My colleague Lori Marhoefer wrote a really wonderful book about this backlash specifically. He argues that while there was this backlash, it didn’t actually drive people to vote for the Nazis. This is still an open point of contention among historians of this period.

When it comes to trans rights today, I think the comparisons unfortunately write themselves. I think there’s similarly a question about whether this is actually a good electoral path for the right. At the same time, it’s clear that right-wing groups are positioning themselves as trying to clean up a kind of moral degeneracy or error in their view, in terms of the embrace of trans rights and trans people. And I think the comparison is deeply disturbing. My only kind of hope is that these things aren’t criminalized in the way that they were even in the 1920s. They are much more a part of a public conversation that ordinary people are engaged in than they were in the 1920s or early thirties. I think many more Americans today know a trans person or gay person or a lesbian than the equivalent would have in the early thirties. And so I do have hope that we aren’t going to see the same exact kind of backlash, but I do think the fundamental components are there.

Sam (13:51)
Yeah. Scary stuff.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (13:53)
Yeah. Not cheery.

Sam (13:54)
Yeah. One of the things that I found really unsettling when I was reading was that because these women existed in this kind of gray space within the law, it wasn’t like a guarantee that you get arrested and charged with this or that. A lot of the times what it would do was just put a target on their back. So you’re gonna have the Gestapo watching you, you’re gonna be followed, you’re gonna be harassed, all this kind of stuff, and you’re just living in this uncertainty and you don’t know what’s gonna happen to you. I’m wondering if you could tell us kind of how more broadly, what was the treatment like for queer women, even outside of Germany at the time? Like how would this have compared to what people were going through elsewhere?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (14:28)
That’s a really good question. First and foremost, it is very typical of most countries that female homosexuality wasn’t explicitly criminalized. In most countries, whether or not they had sodomy statutes, in general, female homosexuality would not have been part of that law. One of the notable exceptions is Austria, which had a law that criminalized both male and female homosexuality. When the Nazis take over Austria in 1938, they actually keep that law on the books in Austria. And historians who study this history have documented cases after 1938 of lesbian women continuing to be prosecuted under the law, even after the Nazi annexation.

In terms of the legal situation more broadly, you certainly have a variety of penalties in other countries that are designed to keep women in line, to keep women in appropriately feminine roles. And I think that’s what you see both in Nazi Germany and in a lot of these other cases: that the animus against lesbians is typically first and foremost about their role as women in patriarchal societies and a desire to make sure that women are conforming to these feminine norms.

These are societies where women either only recently got the right to vote or, in the 1930s, still didn’t have the right to vote in many countries, where women oftentimes aren’t able to own property independently, certainly not if they have a husband. They aren’t able to make economic decisions for themselves independently. And so when we talk about the persecution of lesbians, it’s not just about whether female homosexuality is criminalized or not, it’s about the entire misogyny of the society in question and the desire to make sure that all women, not just queer women, are slotting into what the men who run the society see as the appropriate place for women.

Sam (16:40)
Right. Yeah. If you don’t need a man, that’s very threatening.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (16:45)
Right. And for the Nazis, they said, well, if a gay man is out there, he’s never going to be a father. And in fact, we probably don’t want him to be a father. But they said for lesbians, because they didn’t really see women as having independent sex drives — which again is a long-standing stereotype in Western culture — they said, well, even if a woman has had an affair with another woman, she can still become a wife and a mother and raise good Aryan children for the Reich. Again, it all comes down to this misogyny where they aren’t taking women seriously as agents, they aren’t taking women’s sexuality seriously. And as a result, they see female homosexuality as a problem, but not as dire of a problem in their mind as male homosexuality.

Sam (17:30)
A major driving point of the book is that queer women were victims of the Holocaust too, despite the fact that, as we’ve said, there were no specific laws banning female homosexuality. And why do you think people find this to be a contentious topic? And I was wondering if you’ve noticed that this has impacted the reception of the book at all.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (17:47)
So there’s a few things here. First of all, for a long time there was this assertion, particularly in Germany, among activists, historians, even some politicians, that lesbians were not victims. And one of the main arguments of this book is to contradict that, to say yes, lesbians were persecuted. They were victims of the Nazis.

It took a long time, a lot of spade work, in particular by historians who started working on this topic decades ago, to show that yes, there were women who were investigated by the police, a few of them who were imprisoned for being lesbian. And there are a couple of examples of lesbians who were sent to concentration camps as lesbians. Now, much more prevalent is what I’d call intersectional persecution, where a queer woman comes to the attention of the police and the police officer isn’t writing down that they’re a lesbian therefore they’re going to a concentration camp. It’s much more complicated than that. Maybe they’re denounced for being a lesbian. The police says, okay, well, that’s problematic, but it’s not something we can charge them with. But we’re going to look into them and find other things. And then maybe they get charged with something else.

One of the cases that really structures the book is that of a young woman named Waltraud Hock. She was an Afro-German woman. She was sent to prison for being so-called “work shy,” which was another designation the Nazis used. If you didn’t want to work or you were seen as underemployed, you could be labeled as work shy and sent to prison or a workhouse or a concentration camp. She was imprisoned for being work shy. She and her mother were both accused of being oversexed. Her mother was accused of being, quote, animalistically libidinal, by the party, and was actually forcibly sterilized. And Waltraud was also accused of being a lesbian. And so all of these things together combined to the party saying, okay, this person is what they termed asocial and should be sent to a concentration camp. And that’s exactly what happened. She was sent to Ravensbrück, which was the principal female concentration camp just north of Berlin. And from there she was sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

And again, you can’t look at her file and say, here is the one reason why she was persecuted. Instead, it’s this intersection of all of these different reasons that conspired to make her seen by the party and its officials as asocial. And being lesbian and being sexually deviant, in the words of the party, was a big part of that.

Now, the reason that it’s contentious. I mean, again, there are a few reasons. I think first of all, it has a lot to do with misogyny. This isn’t something that people love to talk about, but gay men can be misogynistic too. Particularly in the activist groups that cropped up in Germany starting in the early nineteen seventies. There was a huge amount of misogyny. I wrote about this a lot in my first book. And many of the activists I interviewed would talk about this. And one of their big points was to press for recognition of homosexual victims of Nazism. And I think part of it is just a general dismissal of women and women’s history. I think part of it is also that they had an anxiety that if they in their minds diluted their claim to have been persecuted by the Nazis by including women where there wasn’t a specific law against female homosexuality, that might make those claims or their activism less legitimate to the heterosexual majority of West Germany.

I think in general there’s also a homophobic allergy to talking about any queer victims of the Holocaust. In fact, just a couple of days ago there was a comment on a video I did for a Holocaust museum in New York about this topic. And the person essentially said, well, everyone knows that lesbians weren’t persecuted and they weren’t sent to concentration camps, but we should go back to criminalizing them. And it was this incoherent statement, but I think it gets at the heart of some of the hostility here.

This obviously also ties in with modern transphobia. There has started to be some resistance to thinking about trans people as victims of the Holocaust and victims of Nazism. J.K. Rowling a couple of years ago said — I’m forgetting the exact quote — but basically said it was in her words a “fever dream” that trans people had been persecuted. We again have evidence, some of which I talk about in my book, that trans people were in fact persecuted and sent to concentration camps.

I’ve been very lucky though so far. Other than that one example, people generally seem very interested in this topic and very receptive to these arguments.

Maartje (22:54)
This might be really obvious, but how did you find out that these women were queer if there wasn’t specific evidence?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (23:01)
So in general, I was really interested in focusing on women who came to the attention of state authorities because of their alleged queerness. And so usually what I’m looking at are police reports, court decisions, detectives’ notes, interrogations of people, the sorts of records that are compiled by state authority.

In all of these cases, you have to be skeptical. You have to read all of these sources with a grain of salt. At the same time, I think you can generally piece them together and get some sort of sense of what is the truth of this situation? What’s actually going on here?

So that still leaves the question of: okay, I have evidence collected by a hostile state agency about this individual. What does that mean about the truth of their identity, of how they understood themselves? And there I’m engaging in my own kind of detective work, trying to piece together essentially circumstantial evidence to make a best case determination about how they maybe thought about themselves.

I think a really good example of this is the case of Ilse Totske. This is someone who lived in Wurzburg, who is actually fairly well known as these cases go, because they tried to flee with a Jewish friend of theirs into Switzerland. They ultimately were unsuccessful but did survive the Nazi period. They are relevant for this topic because they were denounced multiple times by neighbors for a whole host of reasons, including both alleged lesbianism and for being someone born female who went out in men’s clothing. Now, we don’t really have any direct evidence from them about their sexual identity or their gender identity. And so what we’re left with are these denunciations that describe their behavior.

And so when I talk about Totske, you’ll notice I’m using they/them pronouns for them because I don’t want to make an assertion without evidence about what their identity was. Maybe they were a trans man, maybe they were a lesbian, maybe they identified in some other hybrid way. We just don’t know. And so in those cases, I tried to exercise a degree of historical humility, describe what we knew about the person, make the case that they properly belong in a book of queer history, and then essentially leave it up to the reader to make their own determination about what they think about this individual.

Maartje (25:41)
Did you find any family members or people that knew them?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (25:46)
No. In general, I didn’t go looking for family members. That can be quite difficult to track down. And second, family members don’t always want to hear about this history or talk about it. The one effort that I was interested in and did pursue a little bit, with the help of my colleague Anna Hajkova, was to see if I could find the daughter of Waltraud Hock. I wasn’t able to.

Sam (26:14)
You did so much careful, painstaking work of painting pictures of these women who otherwise would have been lost to history. That is one reason I definitely would recommend our listeners to read your book because if you take nothing else away, you’re gonna read about all these vivid, brilliant women who once lived. And if you hadn’t written this book, we wouldn’t know anything about them. So I really like that.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (26:34)
I was really cognizant of that when I was writing. And I think that’s something I try to do in all of my historical writing: bring the people I’m writing about to life in three dimensions and not to turn them into two-dimensional heroes or villains, but to do my best to make the reader and make myself feel like they’re standing right next to me. And that I could imagine having a conversation with them. And obviously that’s a hard thing to do if all you have are some police interrogations with someone. But I think it’s an exercise in both taking empirical evidence and also taking imagination and actually trying to build out what this person’s life would have been like. So I very much appreciate you saying that.

Sam (27:16)
You talk about how it’s impossible to tell trans history and the history of homosexuality in isolation from one another. And after I read your book, all the pieces kind of fell into place for me. So I was wondering if you could explain that to our listeners.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (27:28)
Yeah, I mean, this is something I feel pretty passionately about. This isn’t first and foremost a book of trans history. I was really interested in lesbian experiences, in the phenomenon of female homosexuality and what the Nazi state did with it.

And I’ll briefly say that the present-day context for this is that with all of the transphobia we’re facing today, there is a vocal contingent, oftentimes of gay people, who say, well, trans people have nothing to do with us. These are the LGB-without-the-T type people. And I politically disagree with that, but also I think when you actually go back and look at the evidence, it is simply false. And so I really wanted to impress on my readers: you absolutely cannot write the one without the other.

The reason for that, fundamentally, is that the ideas of trans, transvestite, transsexual, gay, lesbian, homosexual, all of these are recent inventions. They’re recent ideas, historically speaking. They are all coined starting in the mid-1800s up through the mid-1900s. And before that, these ideas and the concepts of sodomy and transing gender, there are all sorts of terms that people used in the past for this, and they’re very much muddled concepts. They flow into each other, they’re not intellectually distinct.

And even in the early 20th century, as you start to have a differentiation, they’re still very much interconnected. And in some cases, there are literal individuals who identify as both a homosexual and a transvestite, such as the club promoter Lotte Hahm, who’s a character in the book. In other cases, as you’re reading these police reports, you can’t easily distinguish these two. You can’t easily say, okay, this person’s trans, this person’s homosexual.

They share social space. So I have one chapter on these fabulous balls that continued to take place in Nazi Berlin. You have these remarkable lesbian women who kept hosting giant balls of around 300 queer people in central Berlin all the way up through 1940. And at those balls, you have lesbian women, gay men, trans men, trans women. And again, you can’t sort of neatly separate them into corners. I mean, they were all mixing and mingling. And so this effort to say, okay, these are actually different phenomena with different histories is just completely wrongheaded and politically motivated. And so it was really important for me to stress these histories as interconnected.

Sam (30:50)
Man, I would love to snag an invite to one of those fabulous balls.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (30:53)
I know. I mean, that chapter was the most fun to write. And you know, writing about Nazi Germany is fundamentally depressing. And so when you get to write about these fabulous parties happening, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Sam (31:06)
Yeah, absolutely.

Maartje (31:07)
What’s your connection to Germany?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (31:09)
A few things. In terms of my own biography, my parents are both professors, and they were on sabbatical at the University of Bonn in Germany in 1998. And so I lived there with them and started learning German. It was a sort of magical semester for me, and I just kind of fell in love with the country and the culture. I kept studying the language when I got back to the US. I eventually became a German literature major in college. Obviously my interests have shifted a bit from there, but this deep interest I have in the country has remained.

In terms of my longer family biography, I have this strange family attachment to Germany that has nothing to do with any German heritage. My mother and her mother and her mother all studied German. I have a book of Heinrich Heine poetry from my great-grandmother. My grandmother actually lived in Germany in 1938 as a foreign exchange student, which, you know, was the height of the Nazi period. And so there’s this abiding family interest with the country and the culture. And I guess I’m the latest expression of that.

Sam (32:13)
That’s so interesting.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (32:15)
Yeah. And you know, again, this goes back to your question about what personal investments people have. Because on the one hand, I do think you don’t need to belong to a group to write about it. I don’t need to be German to write about Germany. At the same time, there usually is a reason why people write about the things that they do, and there’s usually some kind of personal investment. And so people accurately assume I’m a gay man, but then inaccurately assume I’m from Germany. And I sort of have to explain to them, no, I have all these other reasons why I’m interested in the country.

Maartje (32:46)
I did wonder briefly if your name had Germanic influences in it as well.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (32:52)
Yes, so my last name is German. That side of the family came over to the US about a century and a half ago. And the Hunekes are, as far as I know, from a small village outside of Bremen. It’s not a super common name. Every once in a while I’ll come across another person with the same name, but it’s not typical.

Sam (33:11)
When I read about queer people voting for Hitler in 1933, I thought about how it’s quite common for people to assume that queer people are a left-wing monolith, especially in this day and age, when in reality not all queer people see their identity as interwoven with progressive politics. Do you think those voters who voted for Hitler viewed it as voting against their self-interest in some ways, but that it would be worthwhile in other ways, or did they maybe not perceive that they themselves would be endangered?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (33:35)
They were voting for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party.

I think it varies from person to person. I think this idea we have that sexuality defines political preference is actually a very recent vintage. I write about that in my first book. It really is a product of intentional activism to convince queer people that they ought to vote based on their sexual identity. And the success of those movements really only bears fruit in the eighties, nineties, up to the present. So at that point, there’s just no overarching agreement.

And so that’s why you find this incredibly fragmented voting landscape where a bunch of queer people are social democrats or communists, voting for parties that are kind of sexually progressive. But then around a third of voters who were polled by one of these groups were adherents of right-wing or far-right parties that were certainly hostile to their interests as queer people. I think most likely they didn’t see their voting interests as having anything to do with their sexual preference, or they thought, okay, I’m in favor of these parties for other reasons, and those are more important to me than the sodomy law.

What’s interesting about the Nazis specifically is that although they never went out and said, yeah, we’re pro-gay, we’re pro-homosexual, there was nonetheless a perception among many people that they were kind of tacitly friendly to queer people, in part because of Ernst Rohm, who was the head of the Nazi SA, the Nazi stormtroopers, and a close personal friend of Hitler’s. He was not an out gay man, but an outed gay man. In 1932, the Social Democratic Party printed romantic letters of his in an attempt to embarrass the Nazi Party and Hitler specifically. And at that point, Hitler basically stood by him. He wasn’t ousted from the party. And so many people sort of had this idea that Nazism was secretly a kind of gay movement.

This then seeps into communist thinking in particular. There are Soviet thinkers who say, well, basically homosexuality and fascism are the same thing. And in that case, they’re not just looking at these one-off examples of gay Nazis, but they’re actually looking at the overarching homoerotic, homosocial nature of fascism. If you look at fascist posters, they tend to be quite homoerotic. When you look at the structure of fascist parties and paramilitaries, it’s all men. And so I think there were certainly people who were voting for the Nazis in part because they thought the Nazis aligned with their other political views and didn’t actually see the Nazis as being particularly hostile to homosexuality.

Sam (36:44)
Dear pick-me’s, you will never be picked.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (36:47)
Yes. But as a historian, I generally don’t try to second guess or make moral judgments about the people I’m writing about. Now, if we’re talking about people who perpetrated the Holocaust, I’m perfectly happy to make moral judgments. But if we’re talking about who ordinary Germans were voting for in 1933, I think that’s a harder thing to do. I mean, it’s very easy for us to sit back in 2026 and say, well, I never would have voted for the Nazi Party. But who knows? I mean, Germany was a highly educated, highly functional society. And over a third of the country, ordinary people who did not see themselves as bigoted, antisemitic, genocide-mongering individuals, still voted for Hitler and the Nazi Party. And I think it’s very much worthwhile to try and understand why they did so. But it generally isn’t helpful to assume a moral high horse position and say, well, I never would have done that, and these people were clearly evil.

And the converse side of that is I also try to be very honest about the people who I do see as heroic or remarkable, and how they also had to at times make decisions that might make us uncomfortable or not sit well with us today.

Maartje (38:12)
I think people often kind of forget what you would lose too if you didn’t vote for the Nazi party. Like you could lose anything from your reputation to your career to your land.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (38:25)
Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m also talking more about the kind of the last free elections where there wouldn’t necessarily have been that pressure. But I mean, certainly later on, where you have ninety-nine percent of people voting for Hitler, there, you know, absolutely. But I think even in the March 1933 elections where the terror has started, Hitler has become chancellor, what’s remarkable is that there’s immense pressure on voters to vote for the Nazi Party. And they only get about 43% of the vote at that point, despite the fact that these are not free or fair elections. And so conversely, it’s very interesting to try and figure out what gives people the courage to behave in that way. But again, in all of these cases, I think the job of a historian is to try and take people as they are, and starting from a place of moral condemnation rarely allows us to do that.

Maartje (39:17)
So earlier you already brought up Ernst Rohm and how initially Hitler stood by him. Can you tell us a little bit about how that changed and why afterward the fact that he was a homosexual was weaponized?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (39:34)
So Rohm is this really fascinating character. He’s a veteran of the First World War, as were many Nazis and people who joined the Nazi Party. And for him, he actually sees a connection between his wartime service, his homosexuality, and fascism. To him, this homoerotically charged all-male atmosphere of the front parallels the kind of fascist paramilitary. And moreover, unlike today, where we say, okay, if you’re gay, that means you’re progressive, for a lot of queer men in this period, being homoerotically inclined and desiring other men makes you more masculine than straight people. It is seen as extra-manly because you don’t want to be around women. And these people tend to be deeply misogynistic, deeply racist.

So Rohm is the head of the SA. Hitler takes power in 1933. And essentially very quickly comes to an accommodation with many of the traditional elites, with big industrialists and bankers, with the military. And the problem with Rohm and the SA is that they are street brawlers, they’re rabble rousers, and they were immensely effective in getting the Nazi Party into power in the first place. But once they’ve taken power and are now setting about governing, they’re kind of useless. They don’t really have much to do.

At the same time, they have swelled immensely. By 1934, there are about four million members of the SA. A lot of these are also former socialists and communists, and so they’re sometimes called “beefsteaks” — brown on the outside, meaning the color of Nazism, and red on the inside, meaning they’re secretly communists. And so they are calling increasingly for what they call a second revolution. They want the SA to essentially take the place of the army. And obviously if you’re the leader of the military, or a big banker or industrialist, you don’t like the sound of this.

And so Hitler and other leading Nazis decide, okay, we’ve got to put a stop to this rabble-rousing. And in late June, early July of 1934, there’s essentially an internal party purge of Rohm and other people like him in the SA. Rohm himself is arrested at a gathering of SA leaders. He’s taken to Dachau concentration camp, given the opportunity to kill himself. When he doesn’t take it, two SS officers murder him.

Now, this is a huge, wide-ranging purge. It also catches up other political enemies of Hitler. The current vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, is arrested. Some of his aides are killed. The former Chancellor Kurt Schleicher is murdered along with his wife. And so Hitler has to go to Parliament, which is now Nazified, and explain himself. And what he does is say that Rohm was not just gay, and the other leaders of the SA were not just gay, but that they were actively pursuing a gay conspiracy to overthrow the government.

This sounds totally bananas to us today, but it becomes a really important element of Nazi homophobia: that essentially queer people are inherently cliquish, they’re conspiratorial, and given the chance, they will overthrow the government. And this is very similar to the homophobia that informed the Lavender Scare during the Cold War in the US and in other countries, where lots of government employees were purged for being gay on the theory that they might be spies.

And this really informs what the Nazis think about queer people. It informs a revision they make to Paragraph 175 two years later, where they make it much easier to get convictions and expand the range of punishments available. And it also has to do with why they decide not to criminalize female homosexuality, because they basically say women in fascist Germany don’t have a public role. They don’t have prominent political roles. They’re not members of the military or the paramilitaries. And they therefore, even if you have lesbian cliques, don’t pose any kind of political threat to the Nazi order.

Maartje (44:22)
That does make a lot of sense. I didn’t even think about the fact that he spun it in that way, to say look, they are gonna overthrow us.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (44:28)
This is entirely fabricated as a way of justifying a political purge. But then it becomes very real in Nazi propaganda, and it becomes very real in the way that Nazis talk about homosexuality. And what’s ironic is that decades later, as I talk about in my earlier book, it sort of becomes real in a way, where I found evidence that Cold War spy agencies started recruiting gay men in Cold War Berlin because they thought that they were inherently conspiratorial and therefore would make good intelligence agents. And so it’s sort of how ideas can take on a life of their own.

Maartje (45:09)
And if anyone wants to read more about the purge, it was known as the Night of the Long Knives, correct?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (45:16)
Yes, exactly.

Maartje (45:17)
It’s very depressing though, so buckle in.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (45:20)
It is. I mean, all of this is deeply depressing. And I actually oftentimes find this when I’m teaching courses in queer history. Students will enroll thinking it’s all going to be like the movie Milk or something. It’s going to be uplifting and optimistic. And in fact a lot of it is just histories of persecution and violence and it’s very grim and depressing.

Sam (45:45)
You mentioned in your book two women who are being interrogated by the police about their relationship, and one of them said that in spite of the prohibition of the two of them working together by their employer, quote, “we have not abandoned each other because we love each other.”

Of course the title of the book is I Will Not Abandon You and I thought that was really powerful. So why was it important to you that rather than simply being a history of suffering, this book is also about resistance and hope?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (46:10)
So a few reasons. First is the fact that so much of queer history is a history of violence and persecution and can be really depressing. I really didn’t want this book to leave the reader feeling hopeless, especially given the current moment that we’re living through.

I also think in general, when we’re writing about periods like the Nazi period, it’s important not to fall into the trap of assuming that simply because people were living under a violent authoritarian regime, they had no choice. This is in fact an excuse that many Germans gave after the war, where they said, we didn’t have a choice, we couldn’t have resisted. And historians over decades have shown that people who engaged in, who were perpetrators in the Holocaust, absolutely had choices. There is no recorded evidence of someone refusing to participate in mass murder in the Nazi period and being punished for it. So absolutely people had choices.

Now I’m mostly not talking about perpetrators of the Holocaust here, but the same principle applies. I wanted to show or unearth how these women, whoever they were, however they were being treated by the government, had choices. And they were able to make consequential choices about their own lives as well as the lives of the people around them.

And then ultimately that gets back to my commitment as a historian of trying to bring to life the people who I’m writing about. I don’t think it serves our interests in understanding the past to depict people as two-dimensional straw men. And so what that means is there’s a lot of discomfort with these people because in some cases they are both resisting and engaging in Nazi rhetoric. There’s a case I talk about of a woman who ran a sanatorium and used it to create this little lesbian subculture in the countryside outside of Berlin. At the same time, she was a Nazi party member. And it seems to me very plausible that she might have been involved in the so-called euthanasia program of murdering disabled patients. And so I didn’t want to decide, okay, this person’s a hero, this person’s a villain, and ignore choice, ignore the complexities of their lives.

And so for all of those reasons, it was really at the core of this book to make sure it wasn’t just a history of persecution and of victimhood, but also a history of choice and agency.

Maartje (48:37)
You’ve talked to us about a number of women from your book, but I wonder, are there any other favorites of yours that you want to talk about or that were really fun to research?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (48:50)
I think my other favorite couple, who have been with me since the beginning, since I first came across those four files in 2015, are Marta Haloza and Margot Liu. And I don’t want to ruin their entire story, but basically in a nutshell, Margot was a Jewish woman, Marta was a so-called Aryan, and they had been in a relationship since before Hitler came to power. And one of the turning points in their relationship is in 1941. The Holocaust proper has begun at this point, the Star of David has been introduced, and Margot gets a summons that she is going to be deported to the East in a couple of months. And of course, they know what this means.

And so Margot meets a Chinese man, which already is extraordinary because there are about 1,600 Chinese citizens living in Germany at this point. She’s a quick thinker. She starts wooing him. And she was a bombshell. They were both dancers. They start going out on his birthday, October 11th. They consummate the relationship. And the next day, Margot comes to him and says, I’ve missed my period. I’m pregnant. I’m going to kill myself if you don’t marry me. And so he very dutifully goes out and buys two rings and proposes. And they convince a local bureaucrat to marry them the day that Margot is supposed to be deported. And this gives her Chinese citizenship, which protects her from deportation.

Now, you might think, okay, great. But her husband, this Chinese waiter, is understandably kind of confused when that night, their wedding night, Margot never comes home and she spends the night with Marta. And then eventually, when she does move in with him, she brings Marta with her, and the three of them share a bed together. And then they start moving to try and escape him, and eventually go underground, and he can’t find them. And then he sues for divorce. And eventually this is how the case winds up in front of the Berlin criminal police. And that’s how I first found it. I won’t ruin what happens to them after that. But I think they are one of the most remarkable sets of characters in the whole book, and really important for my own understanding of queer experiences under fascism.

Maartje (50:55)
Another reason for people to read your book.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (50:58)
Their story is ultimately a happy one.

Maartje (51:00)
Thank you.

Sam (51:01)
I love it. I love how it’s like, yes, queer people have always been here and we have endured, and these women had this relationship, but also women have always been a hot mess. I loved reading about it. It was so entertaining.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (51:12)
Part of trying to make this comprehensible and bring it to life for people and make it relatable to people’s experiences today is to kind of make people aware that what these historical figures were dealing with is not so very different from what we are also dealing with in our own time. And I mean, my sister-in-law was reading this and texted me and said, you know, I’m really mad at you because you keep talking about all these things that the Nazi government did and I keep drawing parallels with today. And I thought, yeah, well, that’s part of the point. But then reading about people like Marta and Margot, my hope is it gives you energy and gumption and courage to go out and to not just sit in your house and be afraid of doing anything. So I really hope this book gives people at least some modicum of courage and hope.

Maartje (52:13)
It’s perspective, I think too, that where there’s darkness there is also always light. And I think that’s the hopeful thing.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (52:20)
Yes.

Maartje (52:23)
You’ve already briefly mentioned something you were working on currently. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (52:32)
Yeah, so I’m about two-thirds of the way through my next book, which is tentatively titled Queer a History of the World. A small, modest project. It goes all the way from the ancient world up to the present day and at least aspires to tell the reader how queerness, and by that I specifically mean transing gender, so people who through a variety of means and methods lived as a kind of different gender than their birth gender, and homoerotic desire, how these two things have changed over the course of human history, how they have been embedded in different civilizations and cultures and societies, and how at times they’ve played really important roles in those societies. So I’m hoping that manuscript will be done in about a year and then hopefully published a year after that. So you can look out in summer or fall of 2028 for that book.

Maartje (53:28)
That’s amazing. How long did this book take you to research and write, by the way?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (53:33)
This is a book that has been gestating for a while. And unlike I Will Not Abandon You, this really comes out of my teaching. I have a graduate seminar on global queer history basically, and have taught it many times. I also took a course like it as a graduate student. And sort of as a result of reading and teaching all of these different texts, I both came to my own view of how this history is shaped and how it changes. And then at a certain point, I thought to apply it to the moment we’re living through today.

I think there’s understandably a lot of fear that queer people have, particularly trans people, but not just trans people, about this current moment. It feels very ahistorical, right? Because for most of our lives, at least in the US and Western Europe, we’ve been living through this trajectory of greater rights. I mean, for my entire life up until fairly recently, this history was one of one gain after another. And when you’re living through it, it feels irreversible. It feels like the arc of moral justice is finally bending in the right direction. And I think in response to that fear and anxiety that I also feel, I wanted to historicize it and essentially tell people: no, in fact, this very much fits into the long history of queerness and how societies and governments have treated queer people and how queer people have responded. Both as a way of tempering our own expectations and being aware that no gain, no granting of rights, is irreversible or eternal, but at the same time to give us hope that these things are temporary, that things will turn back again, and that we shouldn’t lose hope for a better future.

Maartje (55:11)
To almost close us out on this fabulous interview, are there any World War II books maybe that you discovered in your research that you would recommend to people to read? Next after your own book, obviously.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (55:24)
Yes. There are two that really spring to mind. The first, my colleague Anna Hajkova, who I mentioned earlier, also recently came out with a fabulous book specifically about queer people in the Holocaust, so specifically queer experiences in the camps, called People Without History Are Dust. It’s a short, lovely, also depressing at times, read that I definitely recommend. And then the other that did a lot to help me grapple with the Holocaust and what we know and what we don’t know and what we think we know about the Holocaust is my colleague Dan Stone’s Holocaust and Unfinished History. That is remarkable in that it intentionally doesn’t try to draw pat, easily digestible morals from the Holocaust. It really sits with the moral horror of the Holocaust and resists efforts, now that we’re getting close to a century on from the rise of the Nazis, to kind of reduce the Holocaust and come up with easy takeaways. Some museums sort of tell people who visit that they should be a resistor or they should stand up. And Stone really wants his readers to sit with the calamity of it. There’s a lot in it. So that I would also recommend.

Maartje (56:42)
Thank you. Maybe a little bit of a side quest, but we also watch a lot of World War II movies and shows. Do you know of any queer stories about World War II that’s on film?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (56:54)
There’s a famous book that was turned into a movie, Aimee and Jaguar, about a lesbian couple in Nazi Berlin. So there’s that. I’m sure there are other ones that aren’t springing to mind, but that’s the one that immediately comes to mind.

Maartje (57:05)
I think the only hint of it we’ve seen so far has been an esoteric one in Jojo Rabbit. I think there’s a queer character. At the end it’s kind of revealed that he’s queer.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (57:17)
Okay.

Maartje (57:19)
Other than that I don’t think we’ve seen much of it.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (57:22)
Yeah, I mean, World War Two as a topic tends to be a very heterosexual topic, at least how it’s portrayed in popular culture.

Maartje (57:30)
Yes, and very masculine as well. Like women in general are also not as heavily featured.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (57:38)
Yes, very much so.

Sam (57:39)
We often watch movies and we’re like, give that woman something to do. Why is she just like a hat stand?

Samuel Clowes Huneke (57:45)
They what is it? The Bechdel test that they —

Sam (57:48)
Yeah.

Maartje (57:49)
Yep.

Sam (57:49)
Yeah, definitely. Well, we’ll probably check that movie out because we’ve been meaning to do some kind of queer story. I have a copy of the book Coming Out Under Fire that I haven’t read but it’s been on my list forever.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (57:59)
Wonderful. Yeah.

Maartje (58:02)
First of all I want to thank you for being on a podcast with us.

Samuel Clowes Huneke (58:06)
Yes, thanks for having me. This was great.

Maartje (58:08)
Thank you again for listening to yet another episode of Rosie the Reviewer. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You can rate us five stars, we would appreciate it very much. You can send this episode to your friend and you should. You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast, or you can visit our website, Rosie the Reviewer dot com, for more information. And I will put all of the links to the book on the website as well if you wanna go give that a read and a buy. And we’ll see you next week.

Sam (58:38)
See you next week.

Maartje (58:39)
Bye.