Episode 128 -- Queer Women in Nazi Germany
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 662 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2026
⏱️ 65 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Expanding on our Project 1933 series, for this episode we talked to historian Sam Huneke about the fate of queer women in Nazi Germany, 1933 and onward. This is a surprisingly contested history, because there was, for a long time, an assumption that women were not really persecuted for being queer in Nazi Germany. While the treatment of female homosexuality (and transgender people) in the Nazi state indeed diverged from that of gay men, this episode shows that this assumption has a lot to do with what you think of as persecution. Sam's book, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany will be out in April and can be preordered here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In these interrogations, they are going into great detail about the sexual histories of these women. |
| 0:08.0 | And I should point out in the gay male interrogations, they are similarly getting all of the details about who did what to whom and how many times you came. |
| 0:18.0 | I mean, Nazis are thorough. |
| 0:20.0 | You're saying like, this is weird. This makes |
| 0:22.1 | perfect sense. We want to get to the bottom of it. Or the top of it. Wrong phrasing. Yeah. |
| 0:32.6 | Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Moyer-Donigan. Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the |
| 0:37.4 | right. |
| 0:39.8 | So, Adrian, today we have a very special guest, returning guest, to the show, who is going |
| 0:47.7 | to tell us a little bit about his new book, I Will Not Abandon You, Queer Women in Nazi Germany. |
| 0:53.6 | I think this is like catnip for us, so I'm so excited for this one. |
| 0:57.5 | Exactly. |
| 0:57.9 | This is a kind of follow-up to 1933, although it's going to go way beyond 1933, |
| 1:03.5 | and we're going to be talking to Sam Hunakeyke, who has just spent a lot of time in the archives, |
| 1:09.5 | researching the fates of women who love women in Nazi Germany, |
| 1:14.0 | but also thinking about what's at stake in asking that question in the first place. |
| 1:18.4 | So welcome, Sam, to In Bed with the Right. |
| 1:20.4 | Thanks for having me back. |
| 1:22.1 | So today is all about the fate of LGBT populations in Nazi Germany, but I also wanted to briefly talk about |
| 1:30.7 | something else, which is the fate of LGBT populations in post-war memorial discourses. |
| 1:37.8 | Because gay people, for listeners who mostly have followed us through 1933 and don't know |
| 1:42.7 | that much yet about 1945, right? Like, a lot of people are released from prison, |
| 1:47.0 | from camps in 1945, and then the question becomes |
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