Although prejudice and legal discrimination against homosexuals existed prior to Hitler’s rise to power, Nazi authorities embraced a particularly virulent form of homophobia which aimed to eradicate homosexuality from German society.

Homosexuals became prime targets of Nazi persecution almost immediately after Hitler took office on January 30, 1933. The Nazis condemned homosexual activity as "socially aberrant" behavior and viewed homosexuality as a crime of degeneracy. Along with other targeted groups—criminals, vagrants, the disabled, and the insane—homosexuals were labeled as "asocial" degenerates who posed a threat to the health and survival of the Aryan race.

Background

When the was adopting a unified criminal code, the expert opinion was delivered by the Royal Prussian Scientific Deputation for Medical Affairs . Under the leadership of Rudolf Virchow, they stated that “…we are not in a position to offer any reasons why…those between two males should be punishable by law.” However, in May 1870, the Reichstag approved the new criminal code, which included Paragraph 175, which continued to penalize homosexuality with imprisonment.

The German Empire thus wrote in legislation against homosexuality. The 1871 Reich Criminal Code’s Paragraph 175 outlawed homosexual acts, but was vague in its definition of what those acts were. The so-called anti-sodomy law declared “unnatural indecency” between men to be “punishable by imprisonment” for up to two years.

The law did not define “indecency” nor made mention of homosexual acts between women. The only clarity came in 1877 when the German Supreme Court of Justice defined “unnatural indecency” as an “intercourse-like act,” but this still left a wide room for interpretation. Up until 1935, only penetrative intercourse (anal or oral) would bring a court conviction, with other acts, including mutual masturbation, being permitted.

But this law wasn’t truly enforced, as Berlin had an open and flourishing gay community that made it one of Europe’s great cultural centers. During the Weimar Republic, the government did not pay much attention to the law. As a result numerous gay bars and over 30 gay magazines and journals were active in Germany. By the early 1930s, some 350,000 homosexual men and women lived among Berlin’s four million inhabitants. In the whole of Germany there are believed to have been around four million homosexuals at the time.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee

In May 1897 in Berlin, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was formed as the first gay rights organization. The Committee not only provided support for others but also committed itself to the political struggle for gay equality. Its two leading founders and organizers were publisher Max Spohr and the physician Magnus Hirschfeld.

The Committee aimed to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175. Homosexuals were offered legal and medical advice, as well as representation in court. But it was essentially a political group that lobbied the German parliament to abolish Paragraph 175. They organized thousands of public lectures held throughout Germany, published and distributed informational pamphlets, wrote newspaper and magazine articles, and by 1907 they managed to gather over 6,000 signatures from prominent Germans for a petition to overturn Paragraph 175, including Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann.

Adolf Brand, though, was more radical. He began to publish the world’s first gay magazine, ( “the peculiar”), in 1898. Its subject was gay art and gay life, but Brand also was willing to use the publication to “out” well-known politicians who publicly proclaimed anti-gay positions while privately practicing homosexuality. In 1904, he claimed in print that Friedrich Dasbach, a member of the Reichstag, consorted with male prostitutes. Brand went so far as to publish a leaflet in 1907 claiming that German Chancellor Franz von Bulow was a homosexual.

To support his publication, and as a symbol of his disagreement with the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, Brand founded the group Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of its Own) in 1903 as a private club of authors and artists.

Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, meanwhile, set up the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919 for studying homosexuality. He became known as the "Einstein of Sex" for his pioneering work in the field of sexual science. He conducted many studies on homosexuality to prove it was not abnormal. Hirschfeld aimed to make people conscious of their sexuality and allow people to live their sexual lives as they wanted, not just according to rules that were dictated by society, and thus argued that homosexuality was “neither an illness nor a crime.” In 1929, Hirschfeld said,

“I do not cultivate and propagate homosexuality. I only open the eyes of those who are homosexually inclined about themselves and endeavor to struggle against their social ostracization.”

Hirschfeld also wrote and directed a film entitled Different from the Others (1919), which explicitly pleaded for tolerance. Different from the Others set the standard for liberal tolerance for homosexuals. Showings of Hirschfeld's film were regularly disrupted by the fascists. In one such incident in Vienna in 1923 they shot and wounded several members of the audience.

Hirschfled decided to take his public awareness informational tour abroad. From 1930 - 1932 he traveled around the world, introducing the new science of sexology in public lectures from New York and San Francisco to Tokyo, Shanghai, Manila, Calcutta, Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Athens.

But the largest homosexual organization was the League of Human Rights, which was started in 1923 by Friedrich Radszuweit. By 1929, the League had over 48,000 members. Like the Committee, it became involved in the campaign against Paragraph 175.

Rise of the Nazis

But as Hitler’s Nazi party was gaining strength in the late 1920s, opposition to homosexuals increased. In May 1928, a Nazi Party response said:

“[The] German nation... can only fight if it maintains its masculinity. It can only maintain its masculinity if it exercises discipline, especially in matters of love. Free love and deviance are undisciplined. Therefore, we reject you, as we reject anything which hurts our people. Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes them a plaything for our enemies.... We therefore reject any form of unnatural sexuality, above all homosexuality.”

Wilhelm Frick, Nazi Party deputy to the Reichstag, added in 1929, “Our view…is that these §175 people…should be prosecuted with all severity because such vices will lead to the downfall of the German nation.”

When Hitler took over in January 1933, persecution of homosexuals became policy. They set upon dismantling the gay subculture of Berlin in a broad attack on “public indecency.” Nearly 100 clubs and cafes, political organizations, publishing houses, and bookshops were closed down by the police or forced to dissolve themselves.

In February 1933, during the “Campaign for a Clean Reich,” the first decrees were issued against gay and lesbian bars, gay organizations, and publications and scholarly works about homosexuality.

On May 6, 1933, Nazi student groups and sympathizers ransacked Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology, Berlin's most visible symbol of sexual reform. Four days later, on May 10 th , much of the institute's unique library was destroyed as part of a public book burning in Berlin to destroy the "un–German spirit." Hirschfeld himself saw the destruction of his life's work in a newsreel in a Paris movie theater. The institute was closed and reopened as a Nazi office building.

Hirschfeld, then in Paris at the end of a three–year world tour, became an exile as his German citizenship was revoked. Unable to return to Germany, he died in French exile in Nice. His Scientific–Humanitarian Committee and other sexual rights organizations stopped their work in Germany.

German men who, the state asserted, carried a "degeneracy" that threatened the "disciplined masculinity" of Germany.

Hitler believed that homosexuality was "degenerate behavior" that threatened the "masculine discipline” of the German nation. Gay men were denounced as "antisocial parasites" and as "enemies of the state," and charged with corrupting public morality. As an “infection,” it was also feared that it could become an “epidemic,” especially within the all-male Nazi Party and armed forces and among Germany’s male youth, which pedophiles were said target. Homosexuality was also accused of being a factor in the declining birthrate that threatened to leave Germany unable to sustain itself.

Homosexuality, the Nazis charged, weakened Germany in several ways. It was accused of being a factor in the declining birthrate that threatened to leave the nation unable to sustain itself. National strength depended on the growth of the German population, but since , German birthrates had been declining, due in part to the deaths of two million men in the war. , SS chief, said, “Roughly 7-8% of men in Germany are homosexual. If that’s how things remain, our nation will fall to pieces because of that plague. Those who practice homosexuality deprive Germany of the children they owe her.”

It was also feared as an "infection" that could become an "epidemic," particularly among the nation's vulnerable youth. It was thought that it could give rise to a dangerous state– within–the–state since homosexuals were believed to form self–serving groups. It endangered public morality and contributed to the decline of the community. Therefore, for the good of the state, the Nazis asserted, homosexuality had to be eradicated.

Rudolf Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, in 1934 lectured his colleagues on how homosexuals had caused the downfall of ancient Greece. He recorded some of Hitler's personal thoughts on the subject:

"He lectured me on the role of homosexuality in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the reproductive process precisely those men on whose offspring a nation depended. The immediate result of the vice was, however, that unnatural passion swiftly became dominant in public affairs if it were allowed to spread unchecked."

Lesbians, though, were spared mass arrest. Nazi propaganda portrayed the Nazi ideal of the feminine and maternal German woman, criticizing “masculinized” women. Lesbianism was thought to be a temporary and curable condition. In the racist practice of Nazi eugenics, women were valued primarily for their ability to bear children. The state presumed that women homosexuals were still capable of reproducing. Also, it was harder to identify lesbians because women were naturally more affectionate in public than men. To survive, many lesbians chose exile, while others chose to marry gay men in “protective marriages” to give the appearance of conformity.

Male homosexuality, on the contrary, was seen as a disease that corrupted and weakened the blood of the German people.

By mid-1934, the Nazis had linked homosexuality to subversion, even treason. Ernst Röhm, the Nazi who founded the S.A. (aka. Storm Troopers or Brown Shirts), was a known homosexual. Röhm and his Brown Shirts had helped Hitler obtain power. They had prevented the disruption of Nazi gatherings and broken up the meetings of other political parties.

Röhm was discreetly gay until 1925 when he was outed by a Social Democratic newspaper that published a number of love letters written by Röhm. Other top leaders of the SA, including Edmund Heines and Röhm’s assistant, Hans Joachim Graf von Spreti-Weilbach, were also known homosexuals and were outed by the same newspaper. After 1925, Röhm was quite open about his sexuality and was actually a member of the League for Human Rights, Germany's largest gay rights group.

For a long time, Hitler overlooked the homosexual activities of Ernst Röhm, his second in command. Röhm’s Brown Shirts had been successful in spreading the Nazi philosophy throughout Germany and had grown from 300,000 men when Hitler came to power to three million members in only eleven months. As he grew more powerful, Hitler suspected Röhm of plotting to take over the army.

To maintain the support of the army and insure his own rule, Hitler gave orders to eliminate Röhm. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the S. S., carried out the orders. In , "The ," Himmler rounded up and murdered Ernst Röhm and over a hundred of his followers.

The attack on the homosexual community began shortly after the "Night of the Long Knives." Publicly, Hitler charged Röhm and his associates with treason and sexual deviance. Hitler used Röhm’s sexuality as a pretense to step up Nazi attacks on homosexuals as “evidence” that homosexuality led to treason and subversion, and that homosexual men formed dangerous cliques, which served to publicly scare the German people into fearing homosexuals. As a result, Nazi persecution of homosexuals began in earnest after the "Night of the Long Knives."

After the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis increased their attacks on gay men. Many Germans applauded the move and Hitler began by enforcing Paragraph 175.

This happened numerous times, too. When Hitler wanted to eliminate General Werner von Fritsch, who opposed his war plans, Hitler accused the general of being a homosexual. Even though the chief witness confessed he had lied, the general’s name was tarnished. He was demoted to the lowest rank of officer.

Under the Nazis’ harsher interpretation of the law, Paragraph 175 was re-worded. The Nazis revised Paragraph 175 on June 28, 1935. From September 1935 on, when the new law went into effect, the total criminalization of all sexual activities, or even perceived activities, between men was in full effect. Court interpretations of Paragraph 175 radically expanded the range of punishable "indecencies between men."

Under this revised law and the creation of the Reich Special Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion under Heinrich Himmler, the number of prosecutions increased sharply, peaking in the years 1937-1939. Half of all convictions for homosexual activity under the Nazi regime occurred during these years.

175. A male who commits lewd and lascivious acts with another male or permits himself to be so abused for lewd and lascivious acts, shall be punished by imprisonment. In a case of a participant under 21 years of age at the time of the commission of the act, the court may, in especially slight cases, refrain from punishment.

175a. Confinement in a penitentiary not to exceed ten years and, under extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than three months shall be imposed:

1. Upon a male who, with force or with threat of imminent danger to life and limb, compels another male to commit lewd and lascivious acts with him or compels the other party to submit to abuse for lewd and lascivious acts;

2. Upon a male who, by abuse of a relationship of dependence upon him, in consequence of service, employment, or subordination, induces another male to commit lewd and lascivious acts with him or to submit to being abused for such acts;

3. Upon a male who being over 21 years of age induces another male under 21 years of age to commit lewd and lascivious acts with him or to submit to abuse for lewd and lascivious acts; 4. Upon a male who professionally engages in lewd and lascivious acts with other men, or submits to such abuse by other men, or offers himself for lewd and lascivious acts with other men.

175b. Lewd and lascivious acts contrary to nature between human beings and animals shall be punished by imprisonment; loss of civil rights may also be imposed.

Everything from gossip and innuendo to "simple looking" or "simple touching" became evidence of homosexuality. Men could be arrested for a touch, a gesture, or even a look deemed to have sexual intent. The motive behind the fight for homosexuality was that of race hygienics.

The Nazis began their roundups of homosexuals with Himmler and the Gestapo ordering all police departments to submit lists of men in their districts suspected of being homosexually active. Just visiting a gay bar could bring a sentence of six months in jail. Decoys were set up in parks and on the street to attract homosexuals. Arrests followed. Homes were invaded and address books and diaries combed for the names of male friends.

Police depended largely on denunciations from ordinary citizens. Those denounced were often forced to give up names of friends and acquaintances, thereby becoming informants themselves. Josef Meisinger, of the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, proudly remarked in April 1937: "We must naturally take into account the greater public readiness to report [homosexuality] as a result of National Socialist education."

In a speech that Himmler gave before a conference of SS officers on February 17,1937, he said,

If you further take into account the facts I have not yet mentioned, namely that with a static number of women, we have two million men too few on account of those who fell in the war [of 1914–18], then you can well imagine how this imbalance of two million homosexuals and two million war dead, or in other words a lack of about four million men capable of having sex, has upset the sexual balance sheet of Germany, and will result in a catastrophe.

I would like to develop a couple of ideas for you on the question of homosexuality. There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation. The people which has many children has the candidature for world power and world domination. A people of good race which has too few children has a oneway ticket to the grave, for insignificance in fifty or a hundred years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years….

Therefore we must be absolutely clear that if we continue to have this burden in Germany, without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world….

Dr. Geoffrey Giles, in his essay entitled “Why Bother About Homosexuals? Homophobia and Sexual Politics in ,” said, “Homosexuals were a somewhat elusive minority. Jews were a much easier target. They stated their religion on census forms, birth certificates, and other government records. Communists, the main target in 1933, could also be tracked down through their own party membership lists. Most homosexuals were relatively invisible.”

In 1934, almost 1,000 gay men throughout the German Reich were sentenced according to the old §175. But from 1937-1939, German police arrested 78,000 men under the new §175.

The Nazis arrested more than 100,000 men on charges of homosexuality in their 12 years of rule from 1933-1945. Most of these men served prison terms as convicted homosexuals. Prison sentences, the most common punishment in the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, varied with the sexual act involved and the individual's prior history.

The following is a translation from an April 1937 Berlin district court document:

Order of arrest

The merchant Wilhelm Machold, born on 7.5.96 in Frankfurt/Main, presently in the State Hospital, Berlin is to be held in custody awaiting trial

He is accused of having willfully committed a series of unlawful acts in Berlin which to date have not lapsed a) having committed unnatural acts with persons of the male sex b) having committed an unnatural act with another man or complying to be used by him for an unnatural act

Offence acc. to penal code § 175 (old and new versions)

In the Nazi mind, the “cure” for homosexuals was “re-education” by imprisonment and forced labor. Conditions in German prisons, penitentiaries, and penal camps were notoriously wretched, and those incarcerated under Paragraph 175 faced both the brutality of the guards and the hatred of their fellow inmates.

An unknown number were also institutionalized in mental hospitals. Others—perhaps hundreds—were castrated under court order or coercion. Since 1935, changes in the "Law for the prevention of Children with inherited Diseases" made possible the castration of "political-criminal homosexual males". Under the interpretations of §175 , men could “voluntarily” undergo castration to “free themselves” from their “degenerative sex drive” or to avoid prison or a concentration camp. The Nazis saw this as a success as “social degenerates” were now prevented from having children.

Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim was born Luebeck, Germany in 1906. “In January 1937 the SS arrested 230 men in Luebeck under the Nazi-revised criminal code's Paragraph 175, which outlawed homosexuality, and I was imprisoned for 10 months. In 1938 I was re- arrested, humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally released me, but only on the condition that I agree to be castrated. I submitted to the operation.”

However, up to an estimated 15,000 of these men were sent to concentration camps on charges of homosexuality. Nearly all perished within months. Execution had been advocated for some time by high-ranking Nazis. In May 1935, SS Lt. Karl August Eckhardt, in an article entitled “Unnatural indecency is worthy of death,” said that from the 1 st through the 18 th century, German states punished homosexuality with execution. The point Eckhardt was trying to make was clear. Himmler added, “…In our judgment of homosexuality—a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race—we must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates.”

In July 1940, SS and police chief Himmler directed officers of the Criminal Police that "in future, after their release from prison, all homosexuals who have seduced more than one partner are to be placed in preventive detention" at a concentration camp. This radical step, intended to stop the homosexual "contagion."

Homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps, referred to as "175ers", were forced to wear inverted pink triangle badges as identifiers, much in the same manner that Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David. Men wearing the pink triangle became particular targets of abuse, often subjected to degradation and sadistic beatings.

Homosexuals in these camps were almost always assigned to the worst and often most dangerous work. Usually attached to "punishment companies," they generally worked longer hours with fewer breaks, and often on reduced rations. The Nazis believed it was possible to 'cure' homosexual behavior through labor and re-education.

The quarries and brickyards claimed many lives, not only from exertion but also at the hands of SS guards who deliberately caused "accidents."

Although the homosexual inmates were not targeted for systematic murder, many died in the camps from exposure, starvation, disease, and surgical experiments. Nazis interested in finding a "cure" for homosexuality conducted medical experiments on some gay concentration camp inmates, ranging from massive hormonal injections to castration. In 1943, Himmler approved a medical experiment to “correct” homosexuality. With Himmler’s approval, SS Major Dr. Carl Vaernet, a Danish hormone researcher, implanted capsules of hormones into the groins of men at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In summer 1940, SS chief Himmler ordered convicted homosexual men "who have seduced more than one partner" sent to concentration camps after completing their prison sentence. Such "preventive detention" could be shortened if the individual underwent castration, either voluntarily or, after 1942, at the order of a camp commandant to suppress their “degenerative sex drive.” So after November 1942, concentration camp commandants had the right to order castrations of prisoners in unspecified "special cases," thus authorizing the compulsory castration of incarcerated homosexuals.

Nazi party members themselves were not left out of the persecution. In the 1941 “Decree of the Fuhrer for the Cleansing of the SS and the police force", Hitler ordered the death penalty for homosexual activity by members of the SS and Police.

Himmler made all SS men sign a declaration that they would not engage in such acts:

“I have not been instructed that the Fuhrer has decreed in his order of 15 November 1941, in order to keep the SS and police clean of all vermin of a homosexual nature, that a member of the SS or police who commits an indecent act with another man, or allows himself to be indecently abused by him, will be put to death without consideration of his age.” The German military code did not bar homosexuals from serving in the armed forces, though, and thousands of homosexual men were drafted to serve a regime that persecuted them as civilians. Homosexual conduct, however, was subject to §175, and during the war, over 7,000 soldiers were convicted under the law.

There were three categories of homosexuals in the German army: 1) those who had a genetic disposition (repeat offenders) who were imprisoned or executed, 2) those who had only one incident of homosexuality who were typically sent to the front to prove themselves, and 3) those who were suspected but not proven and they were to be watched and monitored closely. As an alternative to prison, convicted soldiers could petition to serve in “cannon-fodder” penalty battalions to be immediately sent to the front.

As German forces moved across Europe, Paragraph 175 or equivalent laws were selectively enforced to further Nazi political goals. In territories annexed to the Reich—chiefly Austria, western Czechoslovakia, western , Alsace–Lorraine, and Luxembourg—the German law was imposed, extending the criminalization of homosexuality across the Greater Reich.

Austria had been prosecuting sexual relations "between persons of the same sex"—including women—under its criminal code Paragraph 129 since 1852. Following the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria, convictions for homosexuality rose by approximately 50%.

Vichy France remained unoccupied, but its collaborationist government under Marshal Philippe Pétain introduced in 1942 the first French law in nearly 150 years to outlaw male homosexuality. The new Paragraph 334 of the Code Pénal imposed prison terms ranging from six months to three years.

After occupying Holland in spring 1940, Nazi authorities instituted the terms of Paragraph 175 but left enforcement to Dutch police. The police sent to trial 138 male homosexuals between 1940 and 1943, producing 90 convictions.

By the end of the war in 1945, up to 50,000 gay men were lost during the Nazi era. Although this number is far less than the Jews, the percentage of homosexuals killed was still incredibly high. Research has indicated a death rate of 60% among the pink triangle inmates of Nazi camps.

As the Allies swept through Europe to victory over the Nazi regime in early 1945, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were liberated. The Allied Military Government of Germany repealed countless laws and decrees. Left unchanged, however, was the Nazi revision of Paragraph 175.

Under the Allied occupation, some homosexuals were forced to serve out the remainder of their terms of imprisonment regardless of time served in the concentration camps or prisons. The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) until the law was revised in 1969, and arrests under the law continued. Between 1950 and 1965, there were 45,000 convictions for homosexual offences, compared to only 9,375 convictions during the 15 years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Convicted homosexuals could not even receive compensation that other survivors of the concentration camps were receiving.

In June 1969, Paragraph 175 was finally amended in West Germany to allow sexual acts between consenting adults over 21 years of age. In contrast to West Germany, East Germany had not adopted the Nazi-ratified version of Paragraph 175. But homosexual magazines and organizations were prohibited in East Germany until 1988 as homosexuality was defined as “a typical sign of decadence among the ruling class.”

Paragraph 175 was not entirely removed from the German penal code until 1994.

A formal pardon for all homosexuals convicted under §175 during the Nazi era was passed by the German parliament only in May 2002.

And it was only in May 2008 that a monument was unveiled by Germany in Berlin, a memorial to the Nazis' long-ignored gay victims.

The effort to get a memorial built started in 1992, and a 1999 parliament decision to build the memorial to the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims also called for "commemorating in a worthy fashion the other victims of the Nazis." In 2001, Jewish and Gypsy leaders backed an appeal for a monument to the gay victims.

"This is a story that many people don't know about, and I think it's fantastic ... that the German state finally decided to make a memorial to honor these victims as well," said Ingar Dragset, a Berlin-based Norwegian who designed the memorial along with Danish-born Michael Elmgreen.

Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said the monument was a reminder of the ongoing struggles that still confront gays. Wowereit said he regretted the time it took to honor the Nazis' gay victims.

"This memorial is important from two points of view — to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily," Wowereit said.

Germany has allowed gay couples to seal their partnerships at registry offices since 2001, although the law stops short of offering formal marriage. Berlin today has a large gay community, as do other major German cities, such as Cologne and .