The Nazis Who Wore Drag

Martin Dammann's amazing photo collection

“Springtime for Hitler and Germany / Deutschland is happy and gay”

Your eyes do not deceive you. That is a Wehrmacht soldier wearing women’s clothes and prancing around under a Nazi banner to entertain his fellow German soldiers. Some readers might wonder if he was perhaps an autogynephile, and whether Frida Kahlo was his autoerotic target, but the resemblance is almost certainly an accident, for his purpose was performative, not paraphilic.

According to Martin Dammann, German artist and collector of amateur photography, this picture was taken somewhere close to the infamous Eastern Front. Drag performance was a morale-booster for men who did not get to see German women anymore and might not see ever a German woman again. “When there are no women in the emotional world of young men to be desired and dreamt of, then some have to be invented,” German social psychologist Harald Welzer writes in his foreword.

Not all Germans were Nazis, of course, just as not all SS Nazis were even German. However, no broad-brush generalizations are necessary to understand what you see in that photo. It is exactly what it looks like: a German man in drag entertaining German men under a Nazi banner. There are other scenes like it, or similar, from basic training barracks, Wehrmacht unit celebrations, French chateaus, North African POW camps, all available in this one handy book.

Dammann’s Soldier Studies: Cross-Dressing in der Wehrmacht is a cumulative collection, curated and presented in 127 pages. By his reckoning, there are “one or two” such photos in every “twenty to thirty” albums of amateur World War II photography that he has bought over the years. They are a small, though very interesting, subset of his vast collection.

Drag was an escape from routine. In one photo from a camp in Libya, four German men in drag sit surrounded by German men in formal dinner attire, with this party further surrounded by desert scrub, all prisoners escaping their prison through pretending. “Elaborate theater plays” were “often rehearsed and staged for larger audiences” in “these isolated male societies,” Dammann writes.

We see a mock double wedding with “brides” in white trouser-suits with white tails and white ties. A trio of German men wear the costume of German milkmaids in an Egyptian camp alongside campy snapshots of drag comedy acts on small stages. The enemy being conquered in these pictures is boredom. (War includes an incredible amount of boredom in between all the exciting deaths and injuries.)

Almost every photo in the collection contains a clear example of cross dressing, but there are a handful of photos in which men dressed as men, being in uniform, are clearly on the verge of a passionate, probably drunken, kiss. The most dangerous images in these pages are the few that do not show men in any women’s clothes at all, for they are the ones that could have gotten a German citizen in actual trouble.

As a category, Dammann conflates homosexuality, a thing that the Nazis punished, with cross dressing, which was quite acceptable to Nazis. Very different things have been swept into the discursive construction known as “gender nonconformity.” This is how the mandarins of queer theory revise history to make the Nazis into the original “transphobia.” They are committing academic fraud when they do this.

One of the reasons they get away with that fraud is that we have a great hole in our historiography of the Holocaust. Anti-homosexual laws predated the Nazis in both Germany and Europe more broadly. Those laws were still on the books when the concentration camps were liberated. As a result, numerous gay and lesbian survivors of the camps were returned to prisons in their home countries across the continent after the war.

Anti-homosexual oppression continued until the success of the gay liberation movement decades later. We have a dearth of primary sources, testimonials from gay and lesbian camp survivors, because so few of them were ever free to record their experiences in the postwar world.

Alleged academic historians use this absence of evidence, and the conflation of everything “gender nonconforming,” to re-frame the Holocaust as a “trans genocide.” They are skinwalking the Jewish experience of genocide. Indeed, these are the same “Queers for Palestine” who want to call Israel a “Nazi state.”

To date, not one of these geniuses can name a single person who was sent to any concentration camp solely as punishment for cross dressing—because “transvestites,” as they were called in Germany, did not get sent to the camps. Lesbians and gay men, as homosexual people, were sent to the camps. They became targeted because the state deemed homosexuality unacceptable, not because of their clothes.

Dammann could not have made this book at all if cross dressing itself had been unacceptable to Nazis. This book would simply not exist. The mere existence of Dammann’s book is a refutation of the equivalence between opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour™ and Nazism.

National Socialism was, in fact, fine with cross-dressing. That is why we have a whole book of cross-dressing Germans, some unknown number of whom would have been ideological Nazis. They were Nazis in drag. They existed.

Welzer refers to homosexual acts between two German POWs as knowing “when and how to switch roles.” That sort of nonsense used to be understood as homophobia. It is a weakness of this book that reflects our bizarre, inside-out 21st century politics.

Nevertheless, Welzer and Dammann acknowledge that if ‘trans people’ have always existed, then some Nazis must have been ‘transgender.’ A few of these photos do indeed appear to show men simply enjoying female costume.

“One day after the celebration for our son and heir Hans Joachim,” reads the inscription under a sailor still having a good time. He is posed somewhere on a warship, standing behind a plant in a fetching one-armed dress with a blossoming fascinator in his hair. “The celebration remains firmly in the memory of everyone on board.” He had such a good time, dressed like that.

A man poses for a series of photographs as la comtesse du cheateau (the lady of the castle) “on her way to the tennis court.” Perhaps this is a familiar character trope being lampooned, or perhaps this man is raiding wardrobes to conquer the absent French womanhood, as other German men seem to be doing in adjacent pages.

Did the one man posing behind the accordion player in the group photo, while wearing the short skirt and flapper top and makeup, lose a bet? Or is he enjoying himself? We have no way to be sure about any specific man in these photos, so we must simply assume that some of them must have experienced ‘gender euphoria.’ After all, this is what we are assured to be true of the past. Of all humans, ever. Surely that includes Nazis.

Military context matters. A German officer seems to appreciate the man in ‘womanface’ having a close conversation with him at a dining table. The man in ‘womanface’ also seems to enjoy the interaction. If this picture had been taken in a modern-day drag bar, we might infer sexual interest.

However, the evident pleasure both men receive from this interaction could just as easily be the genuine human interest of two people who normally would never interact this way in everyday military society. The younger man in drag may be enlisted, and normally invisible to the other man, who perhaps outranks him.

Here is an actual “role switching,” per Welzer’s introduction, in which sex mimicry transcends normal social boundaries. Wholly ignorant of military culture or history, the Judith Butlers of the chattering classes would label the photo as a “queering” of boundaries and reify that interpretation as a “subversive,” even “revolutionary” act. Since “drag is life and life is drag,” Nazis in drag are life itself, heroically undermining Nazism from within. See how that works?

It is just a photo of two men having a conversation, however. Young men crave the attention and approval and mentoring of older men, regardless of their sexuality. Older men enjoy shaping younger men, regardless of their sexuality. These are photos of men being men, sometimes in women’s clothing. Military life is hard, harder still in wartime, and these men have found a temporary escape.

Indeed, the word “escape” points to what “transgender” is really about. Grown men want to escape their “toxic masculinity” and/or “whiteness.” Drag queens discover they are more confident singers or performers in the persona of a woman.

Children raised to adolescence without forming a healthy view of adulthood will believe the lie that there is a way to escape the travails of growing up in their sexed bodies.

Ellen Page discovered her “gendersoul” through sanctified self-harm in order to escape the male-dominated Hollywood machine that wanted to make her wear a dress on the red carpet. Dylan Mulvaney wants to escape being a skinny, fey man. And so on.

Martin Dammann’s photo collection consists of men who were escaping their circumstances and relieving the stress of wartime. Some of them surely fit the criteria of the transvestite, others were likely autogynephilic, still others were just performing in plain old drag. They were far away from their wives, sweethearts, sisters, mothers, and aunts, might never see them again, missed their presence, and invoked it through performative rituals.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil using Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Dammann has shown us the banality of evil using Eichmanns in drag. Not all humans are Nazis, but all Nazis are human.