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Now, his regime collapsing literally around his ears Hitler is a shadow of his former self. Yet with Soviet troops only 50 miles away the Führer has made time to award one of the Nazis’ most prestigious honours; second only to the Iron Cross.
The recipient of this Knights Cross Silver with Crossed Swords is …Dr Erwin Gohrbandt.
You may know him better as the inventor of the vaginoplasty, an operation to create a fake vagina for men who think they are women. It’s this operation that kick starts what will become known as… “sex change surgery”.
It goes without saying Gohrbandt is not being honoured by Hitler for that dubious “achievement”. Nor indeed for his long collaboration with the Jewish eugenicist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, a Nazi hate figure, who will go on to be revered by progressives as the progenitor of “gender affirming healthcare”.
Let me tell you then the remarkable story of the unlikely relationship between Adolf Hitler and the pioneer of ‘sex change surgery’ and how Erwin Gohrbandt ….helped save the Führer’s life.
[T]hree years after Magnus Hirschfeld founded his Institute for Sexual Research, . . . Gohrbandt agreed to operate on Dora (aka Rudolph) Richter a trans identified male patient of the world famous sexologist. For a relatively young surgeon like Gohrbandt it was risky to castrate a man. Castration was technically illegal for a start. Eugenicists like Hirschfeld were however keen to push ethical and legal boundaries. So it seems was Erwin Gohrbandt.
Some transvestites were not content with rubber breast pads and tubes. Some wanted to go further. In 1923 the “female” hormone estrogen was synthesised. Newly castrated Dora Richter was one of the first men to be given the drug.
Between 1929 and 1931 Gohrbandt removed first Dora’s penis and then created a fake surgical “vagina” for him. He’d then do the same for Toni Ebel and his boyfriend Charlotte Charlaque.
There is some disagreement about whether Gohrbandt or Kurt Warnekros conducted the vaginoplasty in 1931 of Danish artist Einar Wegener who adopted the name Lili Elbe and was the subject of the move ‘The Danish Girl’. If he didn’t conduct it himself Gohrbandt almost certainly oversaw it because he had invented the operation and having “perfected” it knew more than anyone else how to keep his patient from dying.
Today, trans activists routinely try to minimise Gohrbandt’s importance. A common refrain is he only conducted four or perhaps five of the early ‘sex change’ surgeries. Yet….these are the four or five pioneering operations these same activists portray as milestones in trans liberation.
What this dismissal of Gohrbandt also ignores is the difficulty these operations represented. In an age before antibiotics surgery was far more dangerous than it is today. The less time a wound was open to the air the better. It was an urgent requirement to seal a wound as quickly as possible. A surgeon’s success depended on his ability to work fast.
It should hardly need saying that cutting a hole through the penis stump until you reach the abdominal lining is an operation that in 1929 would have been extraordinarily dangerous. To be able to graft skin from the upper leg to form an internal layer was at the very limits of the possible. Never mind the hygiene complications ….of suppurating grafted flesh so close to the rectum and the bladder.
It was only in 1943 that scientists worked out the immunological reasons why most skin grafts were rejected. Hirschfeld had, in other words, found in Erwin Gohrbandt the perfect clinician to push the boundaries of surgery.
Given Gohrbandt’s later embrace of Nazism it’s tempting to assume he collaborated with the Institute for Sex Research merely to make use of an opportunity to test his skills. But we should never forget Hirschfeld shared many of the instincts of the Nazi movement. He was above all an eugenicist who argued only certain people -the healthy ones, whatever that means – should be allowed to reproduce. He insisted homosexuals should not.
By 1935 Gohrbandt was driving the forced sterilisation of the mentally ill, the alcoholic and the disabled at Berlin hospitals such as the Moabit. He wasn’t embarrassed by this work.
In 1936 he published a paper in English proclaiming the virtues of the rapid, efficient sterilisation (castration) of the “infirm” which he and his team had developed.
So what about that medal I mentioned at the start of this story? Could it have been for his Dachau experiments that Hitler decided to honour Gohrbandt? It’s true the same medal was awarded to Josef Mengele the year before for his work at Auschwitz.
Hitler had all his paperwork burned so we can’t be sure why he felt it necessary to honour Gohrbandt in the dying days of the regime. Or we couldn’t until now.
A month ago as I was poking around the dustier, less visited fringes of the internet I discovered a reference to Gohrbandt. And my jaw dropped. I sat agog and disbelieving for some time. Fasten your seat-belt for this is a world first.
The reference to Gohrbandt was in Georgia’s Athens Banner-Herald on the 19th of March 1945.
I looked at other regional American papers on the same day and found they too carried the same story which had originated with the Associated Press’s correspondent Louis P Lochner.
I knew the story could be trusted because few journalists in the world had the sort of deep contacts within the Nazi regime as he did.
Lochner’s report on the death throes of the Nazi regime is utterly credible. In it he describes the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler in July 1944.
The bomb plot failed because Hitler and his top brass decided at the last minute -due to the July heat- to meet in a wooden outhouse instead of their bunker. The explosive force of the bomb was dissipated by the outhouse’s open windows and flimsy structure.
Nonetheless, Hitler’s stenographer was just one of four people killed. Many others were injured including the Führer. His hearing would never recover. By a strange coincidence Mussolini was scheduled to arrive for talks later that day. When he did arrive Hitler showed him the bomb-site.
When they met Hitler was forced to use his left arm to make the Nazi salute. His right arm was so badly damaged and almost paralysed. Which is where Erwin Gohrbandt comes in. Lochner reports of Hitler, “his right arm was injured but nursed back to health by Professor Gohrband, noted Berlin physician”.
Why does this matter? It’s hard to exaggerate how paranoid Hitler became after the bomb plot. There had been around 40 attempts to assassinate him already. None came nearly as close as this.
That tells us Erwin Gohrbandt was beyond suspicion.
The man who invented ‘sex change’ surgery was now literally at the right hand of one of the most wicked men in history. And his job? To enable Adolf Hitler to make the Heil Hitler salute once again.
He died in his bed in 1965, widely admired. He was even awarded a medal by the Federal Republic.