Black, Queer and in Nazi Germany?!

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Valaida Snow came from a family of musicians and was famous for playing the trumpet. Named “Little Louis” after Louis Armstrong (who called her the world’s second best jazz trumpet player, aside from himself, of course) Snow played concerts throughout the U.S., Europe and China. On a return trip to Denmark after headlining at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Snow, the conductor of an all-women’s band, was arrested for allegedly possessing drugs and sent to an Axis internment camp for alien nationals in Wester-Faengle.

Although laws against lesbianism had not been codified, and lesbians were not criminalized for their sexual orientations as gay men were, gay German women were nonetheless viewed as a threat to the Nazi state and were fair game during SS raids on lesbian bars, sentenced by the Gestapo, sent to concentration camps, and branded with a black triangle. As a matter of fact, any German woman, lesbian, prostitute or heterosexual, not upholding her primary gender role – “to be a mother of as many Aryan babies as possible” – was deemed anti-social and hostile to the German state.