{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute That Knew Too Much","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/69304179d6bc23eda246da43/d4a65e1f-88e0-4bda-bbd2-09f42157db49.jpg?height=200","description":"In 1897, a German Jewish doctor named Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee — the world's first organisation dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights. By 1919, he had opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin: a clinic, research centre, archive, and refuge that housed the world's most extensive collection of material on human sexuality. It offered gender-affirming care decades before the term existed. It employed trans people. It campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It was extraordinary. On 6 May 1933, the Nazi German Student Union raided and occupied the Institut. Four days later, on 10 May 1933, students and SA members carried 20,000 books from the Institut to the Opernplatz and threw them onto a bonfire. The famous photographs of Nazi book burnings? That's Hirschfeld's library. He was in Paris when it happened — he watched his own library burning in a cinema newsreel — and never returned to Germany. He died in exile in Nice on 14 May 1935, his 67th birthday. Decades of research, thousands of patient records, irreplaceable archives — gone in an afternoon.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}