The Second German Reich penal law criminalized relations between the same sex, in Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code. The Nazis firmed it up, and it remain on the book until 1966 in East Germany and 1967 in West Germany.
A half-century after the defeat of Nazi Germany, historian Klaus Mueller searched out survivors of Nazi prisons. Few were alive or willing to tell their story, and those that did, to varying degrees told of the horrors and joys of being gay in Nazi and Weimar Germany and thereafter.
One survived the death camp at Mathausen for more thab 8 years; another released early from prison joined the Wehrmacht, so he could be among men, although he refrained from sexual relations. Still another spoke chillingly of a singing forest: there the Nazi torturers hung homosexuals handcuffed to trees, where they were beaten or died slowly of a painful crucifixion. A Frenchman from occupied Alsace rounded up went to a cavalry where his torturers shove wooden sticks up his anis, and even in his 70s he suffered and bled from his wounds that wouldn't heal. The seemingly more cheerful, a German Jew, survived the war hardly unscathed. His Protestant relatives hid him, but he was bold as brass and full of courage, even donning a Hitler Youth uniform to rescue a young lover, who at the last moment couldn't leave his family to a horrible death that he shared at Auschwitz. The film opens with his 'cheery' retelling that under the bombing of Berlin, he had sex with a German soldier as they held each other for dear life fearful that death awaited them.
He ended up in Palestine post war, fought for Israel and in 1979 returned to Germany to work with the small Jewish community there. And yet, like all survivors, or many perhaps, a happy face drowned out the unthinkable memories of Nazis, starvation, inhuman treatment and sheer sadism.
Homosexuals, especially Christians, became human guinea pigs: operations, castration and worse. A lone lesbian, safely in Britain tells of her 'miraclous' escape. Lesbians were, according to Nazi philosophy, were recuperable vessels, for their eggs, when impregnated, could furnish Aryan children for the Third Reich.
The defeat of Whilhelmian Germany in 1917, open up forces of liberation and repression. Weimar Berlin became the Mecca of homosexuality and free sex; it also bred the extreme right that rebelled against defeat and licenctiousness.
The 1997 film 'Bent' provides a vivid tableau of Gay Berlin. On the other hand, Hilter's Brown Shirt headed by the homosexual Ernst Roehm, led a group of thugs killing homosexuals, Communists Socialists and anyone opposed to Hitler's Nazi Party.
Visconti's 'The Damned', in a deeply intense segment, shows the 'Night of the Long Knives', the massacre of Roehm and his homosexual horde.
The five or six witness in Paragraph 175 are now dead, but their words resound with a heaviness of a history that seems forgotten. But has the persecution of homosexuals stopped. Recently the Sultan of Brunei has revived Shaaria law, calling for beheading or sutting off of limbs for those that engage in same sex relations. ISIS were no different where they held power. And the rise of the Alt Right and revival of Fascism have enough example of murders, bombings and the like. So, the page of history in many ways has flipped backwards, it seems, in spite of Gay Liberation, soon to celebrate the 50 anniversary of The Stonewall Rebellion.
Mueller's film lies in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It should be seen often and in schools and public venues, the more especially since humans sense of history is drenched in amnesia.
Review of Paragraph 175
