Anti-Gay Law Used by Nazis Stayed in Effect Long After their Downfall

Savas Abadsidis March 14, 2022

The law had the most innocuous of names: paragraph 175.

Paragraph 175 was a German statute that criminalized sexual relations between men. It did not criminalize sexual relations between women. Paragraph 175 predated the Nazi regime. However, the Nazis revised Paragraph 175 in 1935 to make it broader and harsher. It was one of the main tools that the Nazis used to persecute gay men and men accused of sexual relations with other men.

Paragraph 175 was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual acts between men. It did not apply to sexual acts between women.

This statute was part of Section Thirteen of the German criminal code. Section Thirteen regulated “Crimes and Offenses against Morality” (Verbrechen und Vergehen wider die Sittlichkeit). Other crimes in this section included bestiality, bigamy, incest, and sexual assault.

Paragraph 175 was a statute under the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi regime (1933–1945), and into the postwar era. However, it was enforced differently by different governments and regimes.

While Paragraph 175 criminalized sexual acts between men, it was never a crime to identify as a gay man in Germany.

A new film Great Freedom addresses the pernicious and vindictive way this law was used to prosecute gay men in Germany long after the Third Reich fell.

The Guardian:

As the award-winning new film Great Freedom makes clear, it was in fact a vindictive article of the German penal code that criminalised male homosexuality and blighted the lives of 140,000 men, more than a third of whom received prison sentences. As well as remaining in force for more than a century, Paragraph 175 exposed a tacit accord between the Nazis – who lowered the threshold for punishment while raising the sentence – and the postwar liberating forces.

“Other laws were reset after the war to how they had been before the Nazis,” explains Sebastian Meise, the film’s 46-year-old Austrian director, when we meet in a London office. “But 175 just continued.” A “pink list” of known gay men, which the Nazis had compiled, was still in circulation by the late 1970s, Meise says. “It’s absurd the lengths the state went to in persecuting these men. What struck me most was the allies. For me, they’ve always been the liberators – they freed us from fascism. But in this case, they were on the same level as the Third Reich.”
Some men who had been imprisoned in concentration camps were simply transferred straight to prison following the end of the war. In Great Freedom, this is the fate of Hans, played by Franz Rogowski, who spends most of his adult life behind bars. When we first meet him, he is being sent down in 1968 for lewd conduct in a public toilet. Shot by police from behind a two-way mirror, the Super-8 footage of his cottaging exploits carries the frisson of a peep show. Meise used Tearoom, William E Jones’s film containing footage of a real-life 1960s sting operation in the American midwest, as a reference point.
If Hans doesn’t look perturbed by his sentence, that’s because he knows he will be reunited with his old cellmate Viktor, played by Georg Friedrich. It is their enduring bond, their acts of selflessness and sacrifice, that suffuse the film with hope where it might have been simply harrowing.
“We were trying to find a form that expresses the world he is living in,” Meise says of the script he wrote with his regular collaborator, Thomas Reider. “Hans’s life is like a prison. He can’t be someone else, he can’t do time and turn into a ‘better’ person. The punishment doesn’t do anything to him because he is immediately persecuted again. Even being on the outside is a prison. That’s how we arrived at our structure. We wanted to create this feeling that he is trapped in a time loop. Every time he goes back into solitary confinement, in the darkness, he is then spat out somewhere else.”
During their research, Meise and Reider spoke to many men who had been prosecuted or imprisoned under Paragraph 175. “We approached some of them in a gay cafe in Vienna. It turned out most of them had experiences with the law. One man started telling us that he spent time in prison in the 1960s. His partner of 40 years, who was sitting next to him, said, ‘You never told me that!’ It was such a taboo for the older generation.” He stares out of the window. “I hope they’ve seen the film,” he says softly.
In 2017, the convictions of 50,000 men were quashed at last. This is a welcome development, though Meise sounds a cautionary note. “You can see it all coming back now in Hungary and Poland,” he says. “There are laws in parts of the US which are similar to section 28 in the UK, where you can’t talk about homosexuality in schools. So many things have been achieved – equal marriage, adoption and so on – but conservative forces are coming back very strongly. Democratic rights are endangered again.”

Deadline said of Great Freedom in December:

In Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom, which is Austria’s International Feature Oscar entry, Hans Hoffmann (Franz Rogowski) looks into the mirror as he washes his hands, smirking: he knows. Cut to the inevitable court room, where he is found guilty as charged under a notorious statute known as Paragraph 175. “Back again,” grunts his old cell-mate Viktor (Georg Friedrich) when he sees him in the prison exercise yard. Viktor is a junkie, a murderer, a self-declared hater of “perverts.” They have known each other for over 20 years.

Under the Nazis, the much-contested Paragraph 175 law of 1871 was invoked to justify the persecution and incarceration of homosexuals. Hans first comes to this prison from a concentration camp. After the war, the regime changed, but the notorious law remained in force until 1969. Great Freedom’s timeframe keeps moving back and forth between Hans’ spells inside. It’s easy to lose track of where — or more precisely, when — we are but, of course, that is part of the point.
The years may accumulate, but there is not much to distinguish the Hans and Viktor of 1968 from their 1957 or 1945 selves. Prison garb changes, though everything is so drab you may not even notice. There is a mustache era somewhere in the middle; by 1968, Viktor has acquired a ratty ponytail to go with the Asian religious trinkets on his bedside table. A flush toilet has replaced the 1945 bucket. Maybe the toilet was already there in 1957? It doesn’t matter. Prison encapsulates a unique sort of tedium. The same meals, the same tasks, the same fights, the same grey light. It can even come to feel safe.