Transgender people in Nazi Germany

Tens of thousands of books, including those taken from the Institute for Sexual Science, are burned in Bebelplatz Square on 10 May 1933.

In Nazi Germany, transgender people were prosecuted, barred from public life, forcibly detransitioned, and imprisoned and killed in concentration camps. Though some factors, such as whether they were considered "Aryan", heterosexual with regard to their birth sex, or capable of useful work had the potential to mitigate their circumstances, transgender people were largely stripped of legal status by the Nazi state.

Under the German Empire (from 1871 to 1918) and Weimar Germany (from 1918 to 1933), laws such as Paragraph 183 existed which were used to prosecute transgender individuals; however, these laws were inconsistently enforced, often leaving transgender people vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions of individual police officers. In 1908, thanks to the advocacy of Magnus Hirschfeld, Germany instituted the ability for transgender people to obtain transvestite passes, which shielded them from legal consequences for being publicly transgender. From the end of World War I until 1933, transgender people enjoyed previously unprecedented freedoms and rights. Large leaps were made in transgender medicine through the Institute for Sexual Science, and transgender culture flourished in Berlin.

However, following the Prussian coup d'état in 1932 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, transgender movements, gathering places and institutions, such as the first homosexual movement, the Eldorado nightclubs, and the Institute for Sexual Science were dissolved, often by force. Both trans men and trans women were targeted under renewed enforcement of Paragraphs 175 and 183, and their transvestite passes were revoked or simply ignored. Books and texts relating to transgender experiences or medicine were destroyed as "un-German".

Transgender people were imprisoned and murdered in concentration camps, though the exact number killed is unknown. According to historian Laurie Marhoefer, "The Nazi state reserved its worst violence for trans women." According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the German government "brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures."