Another factor that led to the increased arrests of queer people during this period was the expansion of Paragraph 175. Established in 1871, Paragraph 175 existed for the first part of its history as a farily standard sodomy law. That is, by the letter, it didn’t necessarily criminalize homosexuality, but rather what was considered homosexual contact — male-on-male penetration. In 1935, however, the Nazi party revised the statute such that a man could violate the law simply by looking at another man with what was deemed sexual intent. Worse still, the Nazi’s revisions to the policy also extended its maximum penalty from six months’ to five years’ imprisonment. Except in Austria, annexed by Germany at the time, Paragraph 175 did not apply to lesbian sexuality. And as Dr. Whisnant explains, part of the reasoning behind this fact is almost comical. Despite a lot of discussion among German lawmakers regarding the equal application of the law, they ultimately decided against it, worried that such a policy might itself “give women ideas,” Whisnant tells them. The lawmakers therefore decided they were “better off just not talking about it.”
Without built-in communities like other groups, 175ers experienced exceptionally difficult circumstances once interned in concentration camps. During the Nazi regime, the 5,000 to 15,000 queer people sent to concentration camps endured unspeakable atrocities. Some were castrated. Others were used as target practice. Virtually all were subjected to soul-crushing labor, labor that at times served no purpose besides mental and physical torture. These facts were not necessarily unique to 175ers, as anyone condemned to concentration camp life experienced their own personal form of hell. Yet what did make the 175ers’ time in the camps especially dangerous was their noted difficulty forming alliances with other captives. Unlike groups such as the interned communists, who had a similar political ideology to bind them, 175ers tended to avoid associating with one another, understandably fearful of the social alienation that might ensue. As Dr. Whisnant tells them., to survive in the camps, “you had to have a survival strategy, and a big part of the survival strategy was learning to depend on others — having a group that could protect you and give you information and warn you about stuff.” By and large, 175ers lacked such a community to depend on for support.
The notion that 175ers endured the most severe hardships is patently false. Unless they were also Jewish or Roma, queer people were not targeted for extermination, Dr. Whisnant explains. “There have been some really famous books that have made statements about the 175ers being sort of the bottom of the totem pole, worse off than even the Jews,” He adds. “They weren’t.”
Queer survivors of the Holocaust were excluded from restitution proceedings — the process by which the German government agreed to make direct payments to those who had endured the Holocaust — for over three decades. The vast majority of restitutions were paid to Jewish survivors — quite justifiably so. Yet perhaps more devastating to 175ers than being financially left out of the restitutions process was the fact that Paragraph 175, the law largely responsible for their imprisonment, remained on the books even after the Nazi regime toppled, in 1945. In fact, between 1949 and 1969, 50,000 more people were arrested for violating the law. (Though enforcement was eased during the early 1970s, it wasn’t until 1994 that the law was repealed.) As for restitutions, queer survivors of the Holocaust, along with representatives from other so-called “forgotten victim groups” would be given an opportunity to plead their position on June 24, 1987. The hearing would lead to the German government creating a “Hardship Fund” for those who had as yet been excluded from the compensation processes. In 2017, the German government finally voted to annul all convictions made under Paragraph 175 and to pay restitutions directly and specifically to those who had been convicted and/or jailed because of the law. In March, 2019, the German government again revised its approach to Paragraph 175 restitutions. The current policy is such that anyone who can prove having been investigated (500 euro for each investigation opened), taken into custody (1,500 euro for each year of pretrial detainment), or experienced other “disadvantages” (1,500 euro) related to the law can seek compensation.
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