Paragraph 175 - WikiHQ

thumb|upright=1.6|Graph of convictions under Paragraph 175. Spike occurs during [[Nazi era, and dropoff after partial repeal in 1969. Note: "BRD" refers to West Germany ().]]

Paragraph 175, known formally as §175 StGB and also referred to as Section 175 in English, was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994. It made sexual acts between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. Overall, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law. The law had always been controversial and inspired the first homosexual movement, which called for its repeal.

The statute drew legal influence from previous measures, including those undertaken by the Holy Roman Empire and Prussian states. It was amended several times. The Nazis broadened the law in 1935 as part of the most severe persecution of homosexual men in history. It was one of the few Nazi-era laws to be retained in their original form in West Germany, although East Germany reverted to the pre-Nazi version. In 1987, the law was ruled unconstitutional in East Germany, and it was repealed there in 1989. In West Germany, the law was revised in 1969, whereby the criminal liability of homosexual adults (then aged 21 and over) was abolished but remained applicable to sex with a man less than 21 years old, homosexual prostitution, and the exploitation of a relationship of dependency. The law was again revised in 1973 by lowering the age of consent to 18 years, and it was finally repealed in 1994.

Historical overview

Paragraph 175 was adopted in 1871, shortly after Germany was unified. Beginning in the 1890s, sexual reformers fought against the "disgraceful paragraph", and soon won the support of August Bebel, head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD); however, a petition in the Reichstag to abolish Paragraph 175 floundered in 1898. In 1907, a Reichstag Committee decided to broaden the paragraph to make lesbian sexual acts punishable as well, but debates about how to define female sexuality meant the proposal languished and was abandoned. In 1929, another Reichstag Committee decided to repeal Paragraph 175 with the votes of the Social Democrats, the Communist Party (KPD) and the German Democratic Party (DDP); however, the rise of the Nazi Party prevented the implementation of the repeal. Convictions multiplied by a factor of ten to over 8,000 per year by 1937. Furthermore, the Gestapo could transport suspected offenders to concentration camps without any legal justification at all (even if they had been acquitted or already served their sentence in jail). Thus, over 10,000 homosexual men were forced into concentration camps, where they were identified by the pink triangle. The majority of them died there.

While the Nazi persecution of homosexuals is reasonably well known today, far less attention has been given to the continuation of this persecution in post-war Germany. In 1950, East Germany abolished Nazi amendments to Paragraph 175, whereas West Germany kept them and even had them confirmed by its Constitutional Court. About 100,000 men were implicated in legal proceedings from 1945 to 1969, and about 50,000 were convicted. The age of consent was lowered to 18 in 1973, and finally, in 1994, the paragraph was repealed and the age of consent lowered to 16, the same that is in force for heterosexual acts. Germany is notable for having anti-sodomy regulation before Christianity; Roman historian Tacitus records execution of homosexuals in his book Germania. Christian condemnation of homosexuality reinforced these sentiments as Germany became baptised. In 1532, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina produced a foundation for this principle of law, which remained valid in the Holy Roman Empire until the end of the 18th century. In the words of Paragraph 116 of that code:

<blockquote>The punishment for fornication that goes against nature. When a human commits fornication with a beast, a man with a man, a woman with a woman, they have also forfeited life. And they should be, according to the common custom, banished by fire from life into death.</blockquote>

In 1794, Prussia introduced the Allgemeines Landrecht, a major reform of laws that replaced the death penalty for this offense with a term of imprisonment. Paragraph 143 of that code says:

<blockquote>Unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or of humans with beasts, is punished with imprisonment of six months to four years, with the further punishment of a prompt loss of civil rights.</blockquote>

In France, the Revolutionary Penal Code of 1791 punished acts of this nature only when someone's rights were injured (i.e., in the case of a non-consensual act), which had the effect of the complete legalization of homosexuality. In the course of his conquests, Napoleon exported the French Penal Code beyond France into a sequence of other states such as the Netherlands. The Rhineland and later Bavaria adopted the French model and removed from their lawbooks all prohibitions of consensual sexual acts.

The 1851 Prussian criminal code justified the criminalization of homosexuality with reference to Christian morality, even though the prohibited act did not endanger any legal interest. Two years before the 1871 founding of the German Empire, the Prussian kingdom, worried over the future of the paragraph, sought a scientific basis for this piece of legislation. The Ministry of Justice assigned a Deputation für das Medizinalwesen ("Deputation for Medical Knowledge"), including among others the famous physicians Rudolf Virchow and Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben, who stated in their appraisal of 24 March 1869 that they were unable to give a scientific grounding for a law that outlawed zoophilia and male homosexual intercourse, distinguishing them from the many other sexual acts that were not even considered as matters of penal law. Nevertheless, the draft penal law submitted by Otto von Bismarck in 1870 to the North German Confederation retained the relevant Prussian penal provisions, justifying this out of concern for "public opinion".</blockquote>

Even in the 1860s, individuals such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl Maria Kertbeny had unsuccessfully raised their voices against the Prussian paragraph 143.

Berlin police, led by , did not seriously enforce Paragraph 175. In 1885, responsibility for enforcing the law came under the Department of Blackmail and Homosexuals (). The joint department meant that the police became effective at prosecuting blackmail, which was a common threat regarding homosexuality, and gay men led a relatively open life in the city.</blockquote>

Allowing time for the refinement of the draft, it was set to appear before the Reichstag no earlier than 1917. World War I and the defeat of the German Empire consigned it to the dustbin.

Weimar Republic

{| border="0" align="right" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="margin:0px 0px 15px 30px; background:#F3F3FF"

|+Table 2: Prosecutions under § 175 (1919–1933)

The plans of a center-right regime in 1925 to increase the penalties of Paragraph 175, came close to fruition; but they, too, failed. As part of a broader reorganization of the criminal code, the provision on penalties for homosexuality were moved from paragraph 175 to paragraph 296; in addition, their proposed reform draft included paragraph 297: the latter dealtnwith so-called "qualified cases" such as homosexual prostitution, sex with young men under the age of 21, and sexual coercion of a man in a service or work situation, which were reclassified as felonies (Verbrechen) rather than misdemeanors (Vergehen). This act would have pertained not only to homosexual intercourse but also to other homosexual acts such as, for example, mutual masturbation. At the same time, a vast majoritywith only three KPD votes dissentingsupported the introduction of the new Paragraph 297 (dealing with the so-called "qualified cases").came to nought. In March 1930, the Inter-Parliamentary Committee for the Coordination of Criminal Law Between Germany and Austria, by a vote of 23 to 21, placed back Paragraph 296 in the reform package. But the latter was never passed, because during the last years of the Weimar Republic, the years of the Präsidialkabinette, the parliamentary legislative process generally ground to a halt. Mutual physical contact was no longer necessary. This formulation was fundamentally different from traditional sodomy laws, but similar to the law against gross indecency in the United Kingdom since 1885.

Beyond thatmuch as had already been planned in 1925a new Paragraph 175a was created, punishing "qualified cases" as schwere Unzucht ("severe lewdness") with no less than one year and no more than ten years in the penitentiary.

thumb|A [[Gestapo telex about arranging preventive detention of an "incorrigible homosexual"]]

By 1937, this broad expansion of Paragraph 175 to include "intention" had increased the number of convictions tenfold to 8,000 annually.</blockquote>

In contradistinction to normal police, the Gestapo were authorized to take gay men into preventive detention (Schutzhaft) of arbitrary duration without an accusation (or even after an acquittal). This was often the fate of so-called "repeat offenders": at the end of their sentences, they were not freed but sent for additional "re-education" (Umerziehung) in a concentration camp. Only about 40 percent of these pink triangle prisonerswhose numbers amounted to an estimated 10,000survived the camps.

After World War II

Development in the Soviet occupation zone and in East Germany

thumb|Invalidated ("ungültig") OdF identity card: The Magistrate of East Berlin refused any [[pink triangle|pink-triangle prisoner the right to receive a pension as a "victim of fascism" ("Opfer des Faschismus", hence "OdF").]]

In the Soviet occupation zone that later became East Germany, the development of law was not uniform.  The Provincial High Court in Halle (Oberlandesgericht Halle, or OLG Halle) decided for Saxony-Anhalt in 1948 that Paragraphs 175 and 175a were to be seen as injustice perpetrated by the Nazis, because a progressive juridical development had been broken off and even been reversed. Homosexual acts were to be tried only according to the laws of the Weimar Republic.

In 1950, one year after being reconstituted as the German Democratic Republic, the Berlin Appeal Court (Kammergericht Berlin) decided for all of East Germany to reinstate the validity of the old, pre-1935 form of Paragraph 175.

On 1 July 1968, the GDR adopted its own code of criminal law. In it § 151 StGB-DDR provided for a sentence up to three years' imprisonment or probation for an adult (18 and over) who engaged in sexual acts with a youth (under 18) of the same sex. This law applied not only to men who have sex with boys but equally to women who have sex with girls.

On 11 August 1987, the Supreme Court of the GDR struck down a conviction under Paragraph 151 on the basis that "homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens." One year later, the Volkskammer (the parliament of the GDR), in its fifth revision of the criminal code, brought the written law in line with what the court had ruled, striking Paragraph 151 without replacement. The act passed into law May 30, 1989. This removed all specific reference to homosexuality from East German criminal law.

Development in West Germany

{| border="0" align="right" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="margin:0px 0px 15px 30px; background:#F3F3FF"

|+Table 4: Convictions under §§ 175, 175a (1946–1994)

|Year 

|Number

|rowspan="27" |     

|Year 

|Number

|1946: || align="center" | (~1152) || 1969: || align="center" | 894

|1947: || align="center" | (~1344) || 1970: || align="center" | 340

|1948: || align="center" | (~1536) || 1971: || align="center" | 372

|1949: || align="center" | (~1728) || 1972: || align="center" | 362

|1950: || align="center" | 2158 || 1973: || align="center" | 373

|1951: || align="center" | 2359 || 1974: || align="center" | 235

|1952: || align="center" | 2656 || 1975: || align="center" | 160

|1953: || align="center" | 2592 || 1976: || align="center" | 200

|1954: || align="center" | 2801 || 1977: || align="center" | 191

|1955: || align="center" | 2904 || 1978: || align="center" | 177

|1956: || align="center" | 2993 || 1979: || align="center" | 148

|1957: || align="center" | 3403 || 1980: || align="center" | 164

|1958: || align="center" | ~3486 || 1981: || align="center" | 147

|1959: || align="center" | ~3530 || 1982: || align="center" | 163

|1960: || align="center" | ~3406 || 1983: || align="center" | 178

|1961: || align="center" | 3196 || 1984: || align="center" | 153

|1962: || align="center" | 3098 || 1985: || align="center" | 123

|1963: || align="center" | 2803 || 1986: || align="center" | 118

|1964: || align="center" | 2907 || 1987: || align="center" | 117

|1965: || align="center" | 2538 || 1988: || align="center" | 95

|1966: || align="center" | 2261 || 1989: || align="center" | 95

|1967: || align="center" | 1783 || 1990: || align="center" | 96

|1968: || align="center" | 1727 || 1991: || align="center" | 86

| || align="center" | || 1992: || align="center" | 77

| || align="center" | || 1993: || align="center" | 76

| || align="center" | || 1994: || align="center" | 44

| colspan="5" | Source: Rainer Hoffschildt 2002 * 1946–1949 complete estimate, based on the course around World War I * West Berlin and Saarland included before 1962 and 1961 respectively (in prior sources never considered!). * 1958–1960 Saarland estimated (~59)

After World War II, the victorious Allies demanded the abolition of all laws with specifically National Socialist content; however, they left it to West Germany to decide whether or not the expansion of laws regulating male homosexual relationships falling under Paragraph 175 should be left in place. On May 10, 1957, the Federal Constitutional Court upheld the decision to retain the 1935 version, claiming that the paragraph was "not influenced by National Socialist [i.e., Nazi] politics to such a degree that it would have to be abolished in a free democratic state".

Between 1945 and 1969, about 100,000 men were indicted and about 50,000 men sentenced to prison. The rate of convictions for violation of Paragraph 175 rose by 44 percent, and in the 1960s, the number remained as much as four times higher than it had been in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Many arrests, lawsuits, and proceedings in Frankfurt in 1950–1951 had serious consequences. These Frankfurt Homosexual Trials of 1950/51 marked an early climax in the persecution of homosexual men in the Federal Republic of Germany, which showed clear continuities from the Nazi era, but took place under the auspices of the new Adenauer era. They were largely initiated by the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office, using the sex worker Otto Blankenstein as a key witness.

The strong continuities between the Nazi era and postwar West Germany are partly due to the continuity in staffing of the police and judiciary, which was disrupted in East Germany. The retention of the Nazis' legal basis for the charges, however, was due to a conservative Christian political realignment; criminalization was strongly defended by some CDU/CSU politicians such as Franz-Josef Wuermeling and Adolf Süsterhenn. These "Catholic maximalists" faced increasing opposition from Protestants and the more liberal elements within their own party. Similar to the thinking during the Nazi Regime, the government argued that there was a difference between a homosexual man and a homosexual woman, and that because all men were assumed to be more aggressive and predatory than women, lesbianism would not be criminalized. Therefore, it was argued, while lesbianism violated nature, it did not present the same threat to society as did male homosexuality.</blockquote>

With new national Bundestag (West Germany's parliament) elections coming up, the Social Democratic Party was coming into power, first in 1966 as part of a broad coalition, and by 1969, with a parliamentary majority. With the Social Democrats holding the power, they were finally in a position to make key appointments in the Ministry of Justice and start implementing reform. In addition, demographic anxieties such as fear of declining birth rate no longer controlled the 1960s and homosexual men were no longer seen as a threat for not being able to reproduce. The role of the state was seen as protecting society from harm, and should only intervene in cases that involved force or the abuse of minors. Paragraph 175b (concerning bestiality) also was removed. Three days later, on June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots broke out in New York.

With the 1969 reform in place, the acceptance of homosexual acts or homosexual identities for West Germans was far from in place. Most reformers agreed that decriminalizing sexual relations between adult men was not the same as advocating an acceptance of homosexual men. While the old view of "militarized" masculinity may have phased out, "family-centered" masculinity was now grounded in the traditional male, and being a proper man meant being a proper father, which was believed at the time to be a role a homosexual male could not fulfill.

In 1986 the Green Party and the first openly gay member of the German parliament tried to remove Paragraph 175 together with Paragraph 182. This would have meant a general age of consent of 14 years. This was opposed by the CDU, SPD, and FDP, and Paragraph 175 remained a part of German law for eight more years.

Developments after 1990

Deletion of Paragraph 175

thumb|upright|"Down with §175" Since 1973 the gay movement had openly been demanding the deletion of Paragraph 175. This 1973 poster uses the [[new left icon of a raised fist and calls on the reader to fight against discrimination in the family, in the workplace, and in [individuals'] search for housing.]] In the course of reconciling the legal codes of the two German states after 1990, the Bundestag had to decide whether Paragraph 175 should be abolished entirely (as in the former East Germany) or whether the remaining West German form of the law should be extended to what had now become the eastern portion of the Federal Republic. In 1994, at the end of the period of reconciliation of laws, it was decidedespecially in view of the social changes that had occurred in the meantimeto strike Paragraph 175 entirely from the legal code. Paragraph 175 was repealed on 10 March 1994.

According to § 176 StGB the absolute minimum age of consent is now 14 years for all sexual acts irrespective of the sex of the participants; in special cases, covered in § 182 StGB, an age of 16 years applies. § 182 (2) StGB allows for prosecution as an Antragsdelikt, a concept in German law according to which certain acts are treated as crimes only if the victim chooses to become a complainant. Further, § 182 (3) StGB allows the public prosecutor's office to pursue a case on the basis of the belief that there is a special public interest. Finally, § 182 (4) StGB allows the court to refrain from punishment if the wrongness of the accused's behavior appears small.

§ 182 StGB contains numerous terms without precise legal definitions; critics have raised concerns that families can misuse this law to criminalize socially disapproved sexual relationships (e.g. a family disapproving of a young person's homosexual relationship might be able to prosecute their partner).

In Austria, an analogous situation exists: Like the German § 175 StGB, the Austrian § 209 StGB was stricken from the legal code; like the German § 182 StGB, the Austrian § 207b StGB is perceived by critics as having potential to be abused as a surrogate for the stricken law.

Pardon of the victims

On 17 May 2002a date chosen symbolically as "17.5."the Bundestag passed a supplement to the NS-Aufhebungsgesetz (). By this supplement to the act, Nazi-era convictions of homosexuals and deserters from the Wehrmacht were annulled. Louder criticism came from the lesbian and gay movement, because the Bundestag left post-1945 judgments untouched, although the legal basis from the end of the war to 1969 was the same as in the Nazi era.

The issue of pardoning men convicted in the postwar era remained controversial. On 12 May 2016, Federal Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, announced that Germany was investigating the possibility of pardoning and compensating all gay men convicted under Paragraph 175. In cases where victims had died still bearing a conviction, the government will instead make payments to gay rights groups. The law comprises both individual pardons and a collective pardon and the documenting of suffering caused by the law, with the full process expected to take up to five years. Those affected by the pardon can apply for a "vindication certificate", and relatives can apply for a posthumous pardon.

Notes

References

Burkhard Jellonnek: Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz : Die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich. (Homosexuals under the Swastika: the pursuit of homosexuals in the Third Reich) Paderborn 1990.
Christian Schulz: § 175. (abgewickelt). : ... und die versäumte Wiedergutmachung. (§ 175. (abolished). : ... and the lack of compensation) Hamburg 1998.
Andreas Sternweiler: Und alles wegen der Jungs : Pfadfinderführer und KZ-Häftling: Heinz Dörmer. Berlin 1994.

External links

Gay Museum in Berlin, in German