Transgender Life and Persecution under the Nazi State: Gutachten on the Vollbrecht Case

In July 2022, Marie-Luise Vollbrecht, a biology graduate student at Humboldt University in Berlin, got into a debate about history on Twitter. The thirty-two-year-old Vollbrecht had already gained national attention in Germany for her anti-trans, “gender-critical” feminism. She was no stranger to heated exchanges on the social media platform. On this occasion, the debate was about the history of the Holocaust. In a series of tweets, Vollbrecht disputed that the Nazis had persecuted transgender people. To describe trans people as victims of the Nazi state “mocks the true victims of the Nazi crimes,” she wrote. In fall 2022, Laurie Marhoefer was asked by a transgender NGO to write an expert statement (Gutachten) on this case for the court in Cologne. This is the expert statement they wrote for the case.