German socialist physician who brought sex education to working-class youth from Hirschfeld’s institute
Arrested by the Gestapo after the Reichstag fire in 1933, he went into exile and served as a doctor with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War in 1937–1938.
A physician and sex educator from Neisse, Silesia. As municipal medical officer of Berlin-Reinickendorf he also ran the sexual counselling service of the Institute for Sexual Science from 1926 to 1929, bringing sex education to working-class youth and campaigning for birth control and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Expelled from the SPD, he went on to chair the League of Friends of the Soviet Union. Arrested by the Gestapo after the Reichstag fire in 1933, he went into exile, served as a doctor with the International Brigades in Spain in 1937–1938 and died in Stockholm in 1946.
Activities and affiliations
- 1922–1926
-
1922–1933
Education
-
1927–1931
Workers International Relief (IAH / Mezhrabpom)
Social movements and organizing
Related historical events
Sex education and exile
Born in Neisse, Silesia, the son of an army doctor, he studied medicine in Berlin and at the end of the First World War worked in a workers’ and soldiers’ council. He met Hirschfeld in 1915 and was drawn to socialism by discussions in the Kautsky household. In 1917 he co-founded Leonard Nelson’s International Youth League; he was briefly in the USPD and joined the SPD in 1922, but was expelled in 1926 as a member of the youth league and never joined a party again. From 1922 to 1933 he was municipal medical officer of Berlin-Reinickendorf, and in 1923 he opened Berlin’s first counselling centre for mothers. From 1926 to 1929 he ran the sexual counselling service and the eugenics department of the Institute for Sexual Science and held public question evenings. In 1928 he became chairman of the League of Friends of the Soviet Union, and from 1927 he sat on the national board of Workers International Relief until his expulsion in 1931 for criticising the Soviet Union. He shared the left’s view of the time that eugenics was a task for socialist society. His sex education books such as Geschlecht und Liebe (1927) were seized as obscene, and the Nazi press attacked him with a mocking nickname. Arrested after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and held in protective custody until June, he emigrated to Switzerland in November and was stripped of his citizenship in 1935. He served as a doctor with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War in 1937–1938 and died in Stockholm in 1946.