12 Facts About Karl Giese

Karl Giese was a German archivist, museum curator, and the life partner of Magnus Hirschfeld.

Around 1918, when Karl Giese was a student, he met Magnus Hirschfeld after a lecture in Munich.

Karl Giese took over the management of the archive of the Institute and gave lectures, curated exhibitions and wrote articles.

Karl Giese was part of a dramatical group Theater der Eigenen.

Karl Giese appeared in Richard Oswald's film Different from the Others as the violinist Paul Korner during his school days.

Hirschfeld did not return to Germany from his world journey in 1932, and Karl Giese went to meet him in Paris.

Karl Giese made contact with the magazine, arranging the publication of some articles by both Hirschfeld and himself.

In 1934 Karl Giese traveled to Paris to join Hirschfeld but was apprehended in a public bathhouse, arrested on charges of "public indecency", and sentenced to three months in prison.

Karl Giese was heir of the library and the few objects that had been saved from the Institute.

However, Karl Giese moved to Brno in 1936 and lived with the Jewish lawyer Karel Fein for several months before moving into his own flat.

At the time of the Nazi annexation of Austria and shortly before the Nazi takeover of the Czech Sudetenland, Karl Giese committed suicide in Brno on 16 March 1938.

Karl Giese's possessions, including his inheritance from Hirschfeld, were lost in the Holocaust.