Unknown author · Public domain

A physician who founded the world's first institute devoted to the scientific study of sex, Hirschfeld built the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee into the earliest organized advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights anywhere in the world, decades before such advocacy had a name. Targeted as both Jewish and gay, he was beaten by nationalist activists in 1920, and in 1933 Nazis looted his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and burned its library in one of the regime's first and most infamous book burnings; stripped of his German citizenship, he died in exile in France two years later.