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Where have I heard this before?

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute for Sexual Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology, or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was the first sexology research center in the world.

The Institute was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who since 1897 had run the world's first homosexual organization Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance at the start of the first homosexual movement that would flourish in interwar Weimar culture. The Committee published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Hirschfeld built a unique library at the institute on gender, same-sex love and eroticism.

The institute pioneered research and treatment for various matters regarding gender and sexuality, including gay, transgender, and intersex topics. In addition, it offered various other services to the general public: this included treatment for alcoholism, gynecological examinations, marital and sex counseling, treatment for venereal diseases, and access to contraceptive treatment. It offered education on many of these matters to both health professionals and laypersons.

After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.

One estimate says that between 12,000 to 20,000 books and journals, and even larger number of images and sex subjects, were destroyed. Another estimate says that about 25,000 books were destroyed.

This included artistic works, rare medical and anthropological documents, and charts concerning cases of intersexuality which were prepared for the International Medical Congress, among other things. A collection of works about sexuality, in any one place, similar to the one stored at the institute was not compiled until the founding of the Kinsey Institute in 1947.