GAY MEN UNDER THE NAZI REGIME
The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality between 1933 and 1945. This campaign persecuted men who had sexual relations with other men. It is unclear how many of these men publicly or privately identified as gay or were part of gay communities and networks that had been established in Germany before the Nazi rise to power.
Beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime harassed and dismantled these communities. They also arrested large numbers of gay men under Paragraph 175. Paragraph 175 was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men. During the Nazi period, the police arrested about 100,000 men for allegedly violating this statute. Approximately fifty percent of these men were convicted. In some cases, this led to their imprisonment in concentration camps.
It is important to note that not all of the men arrested and convicted under Paragraph 175 identified as gay. However, any man who had sexual relations with another man faced potential arrest in Nazi Germany, regardless of how he understood his own sexuality.
Identifying as a gay man was never explicitly criminalized in Germany. However, the Nazi campaign against homosexuality and the regime’s zealous enforcement of Paragraph 175 made life in Nazi Germany dangerous for gay men.
Gay men in Germany were not a monolithic group, nor did the Nazi regime view them as such. Being gay could and often did result in persecution. However, other factors also shaped gay men’s lives during the Nazi era. Among them were supposed racial identity, political attitudes, social class, and cultural expectations about how men and women should behave (i.e., gender norms). This diversity meant that gay men had a wide range of experiences in Nazi Germany. For example, gay men active in anti-Nazi political movements risked being arrested as political opponents. And gay Jewish men faced Nazi persecution and mass murder as Jews.
Gay Men in Germany, circa 1900
Already in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, there were indications of nascent and growing gay communities in Germany. At this time, the nature of human sexuality became an area of scientific investigation and debate in Europe and the United States. Germany was at the forefront of this development, not least because of debates regarding Paragraph 175. Paragraph 175 was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men. It was enacted in 1871 following the unification of the German Empire and the codification of German law.
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