I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany

Samuel Clowes Huneke will be in conversation with Rachel Chin, Daniel Larsen, Sam Rutherford, and Stephan Ehrig (all University of Glasgow).

The book I Will Not Abandon You brings to life the unrelenting defiance of queer women in fascist Germany, showing how love, queer resistance, and collective action survived in the harrowing circumstances of Nazi rule. Drawing on a decade of archival research, the book takes readers into a hidden world, from the wartime balls that lesbian activists continued to organize to the concentration camps where women accused of loving women were imprisoned. Following a diverse cast of characters, it reveals both the oppression that queer women faced and how they resisted fascism in solidarity with one another. Arguing that this solidarity – which transcended race, class, and gender – offers a compelling alternative to today’s fractured identity politics, I Will Not Abandon You is a new history of queer life under fascism and a call to rethink the foundations of progressive politics today.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is associate professor of history at George Mason University. A historian of modern Germany, he is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), A Queer Theory of the State (2023), and I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026) as well as the co-editor of Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe (2025). He is presently at work on a new book, tentatively titled Queer: A History of the World. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Gender History and The Scottish Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology, University of Glasgow.