WATCH: This new doc explores the secret queer nightlife of Nazi Germany
Netflix’s new documentary Eldorado: Everything The Nazis Hate. With a mix of archival footage, re-enactments, and interviews with both historians and first-hand witnesses, the film shows a new side of the Weimar Republic just before the Nazi Party seized control.“The history of the Eldorado and especially that of queer people whose persecution did not end with 1945, was uncomfortable for the post-war public for a long time and therefore hushed up,” director and co-writer Benjamin Cantu said in a statement. “Making this film with a great partner as Netflix is an important sign at a time when the rights of LGBTIQ* people are under pressure again in many parts of the world.”Eldorado features the stories of several historical figures, some recognizable and some more obscure.
One prominent character is Ernst Röhm, the co-founder and leader of the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing and a close friend of Adolph Hitler.
As the documentary expertly explores, Röhm was paradoxically both a leader of the Nazi Party and a quasi-openly gay man who frequented the Eldorado — a contradiction that he couldn’t maintain forever.Other historical characters in the film include Gottfried von Cramm, the world’s highest ranked tennis player of 1937 (who happened to be in a relationship with a Jewish man), and Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel, two transgender women who were among the first to undergo gender-affirmation surgery.The film is also chock-full of interviews with experts, including Morgan M.
Page, a trans historian who sees the Eldorado’s story as painfully relatable to the modern day.“The Weimar era has always fascinated me as one brilliant moment of LGBTQ people grasping towards freedom, only to have it snatched away from them.
