Käte Rogalli is not the first trans woman to be commemorated with a Stolperstein. However, she is the first to have her real name – not her deadname (name given to her at birth) – engraved.

The stumble stone was laid on August 31, 2023 in front of where she lived on Hagelberger Straße in Kreuzberg.

Who Is Käte Rogalli?

Käte was born in 1903 in Berlin and was assigned male at birth. When she was young, she worked as a technical draughtsman and precision mechanic. She was often mistaken for a girl in men’s clothing and ended up losing her job due to discrimination.

However, in the middle of the 1920’s she got in touch with Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), where founder Magnus Hirschfeld researched gender and sexuality.

Hirshfeld and Paragraf 175

In his research, Hirschfeld had found that transgenderism was an innate characteristic and that trans women were not gay men dressed ‘immodestly in women’s clothing’. Hirschfeld coined the word ‘transvestite’ to describe what we nowadays call trans women.

This was of great importance in Germany at the time, as the infamous Paragraph 175 of the penal code prohibited male prostitution and men from having sexual intercourse with each other.

Hirschfeld made a deal with the police to let trans women walk the streets in peace as they were not gay men.

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was even licensed to issue the so-called transvestite certificate to the trans women, and with that in hand, the trans women were in a category outside Paragraph 175.

Käte was issued such a transvestite certificate in 1926. She also used her certificate to change her birth name with the authorities. However, not to the name Käte, which she wanted, because the authorities only offered a limited list of names to choose from.

Forced to Wear Men’s Clothes

Society changed radically when Hitler and the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933. Among other things, the Nazi regime changed Paragraph 175 so that minor offenses were enough to be arrested and convicted. And the punishment was increased to five years in prison – that was, internment in a concentration camp.

This had a huge impact on trans women like Käte. In 1936, she was arrested by the Gestapo and had her transvestite certificate revoked. She was also forced to wear men’s clothes and thus considered a gay man by the Nazis. Shortly after, she was arrested again for wearing women’s clothes.

The following year, the punishment came. Internment in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, where many others from Berlin’s LGBT+ community had been imprisoned wearing prison garb with the inverted pink triangle. The pink triangle was dedicated to gays (men) in the concentration camps and was the cause of violence and discrimination from the other prisoners.

Committed to an Infamous Aktion T4 Institution

Here Käte was interned for a little over a year until 1938, when she was again taken to court and sentenced to two years of forced labor building the so-called Ostmarkstraße in eastern Bavaria.

Upon her release, Käte returned to Berlin and moved into the address on Hagelberger Straße. Only a year later, she was arrested again, found ‘insane’ in court and committed to the psychiatric institution Wittenauer Heilstätten – today Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik – in northern Berlin.

The institution is just one of many that were involved in Hitler’s Aktion T4, which aimed to exterminate people deemed unworthy of life. These were typically people with severe disabilities and the mentally ill.

In other words: It was systematic mass murder carried out secretly in psychiatric institutions by doctors. Typically the death certificates listed a completely different cause of death, such as heart attack or suicide.

Suddenly, Käte was a patient in one of these infamous institutions. Two years later, she allegedly died by suicide by hanging herself in a toilet at the institution because there was no prospect of release. That’s the official cause of death.

Nonetheless, Käte died in the custody of the National Socialists on April 11, 1943.

80 years later, she became the first transgender to receive a Stolperstein with her real name engraved on it.

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