Among the Nazi regime’s many victims, as many as 15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps. But there hasn’t been much information on how the regime treated lesbians.
Samuel Clowes Huneke, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, stumbled across four files on lesbian couples tucked away in the Berlin State Archive in 2015. To his knowledge, historians haven’t explored most of these files in extensive detail beforehand, though they may have been mentioned in some writings. Regardless, the files paint a detailed, if small, portrait of how Nazi officials treated lesbian women in Berlin.