The German Sexual Reform Movement and Its Destruction by the Nazis (1897–1935)

Beginnings in the Empire: Paragraphs 175 and 218 and the first organisations

The German sexual reform movement set itself against two articles of the penal code, in force from 1871 in the North German Confederation and from the next year in the Reich: Paragraph 175 punished sex between men and Paragraph 218 abortion. The courts read Paragraph 175 narrowly as acts resembling intercourse, while Paragraph 218 sent both the pregnant woman and those who helped her to penitentiary. 1 2 3

Paragraph 175. Unnatural fornication committed between persons of the male sex, or by humans with animals, is to be punished by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed. 4

§. 175. Die widernatürliche Unzucht, welche zwischen Personen männlichen Geschlechts oder von Menschen mit Thieren begangen wird, ist mit Gefängniß zu bestrafen; auch kann auf Verlust der bürgerlichen Ehrenrechte erkannt werden. 4

The first organisation against Paragraph 175 was the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded on 15 May 1897 by the physician Magnus Hirschfeld with the publisher Max Spohr and others in his Charlottenburg flat. The world’s first gay rights organisation, it collected 6,000 signatures for a repeal petition, which SPD chairman August Bebel brought before the Reichstag in 1898 without success. In 1903 the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen formed around Adolf Brand, publisher of the homosexual magazine Der Eigene. 5 6 7

The movement against Paragraph 218 grew within the women’s movement. On 26 February 1905 the League for the Protection of Mothers, led by Helene Stöcker, was refounded in Berlin to help unmarried mothers and their children and to spread sex education and contraception, and from that year Stöcker was among the first to demand the repeal of Paragraph 218. In 1908 the general assembly of the Federation of German Women’s Associations rejected Camilla Jellinek’s motion to abolish it. A third of the league’s members were men, among them Bebel and the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel. 8 3 9

The Eulenburg affair and the politicisation of homosexuality (1906–1909)

The Eulenburg affair first made homosexuality a national political issue. In November 1906 the journalist Maximilian Harden attacked Philipp zu Eulenburg, a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the Berlin city commandant Kuno von Moltke in his weekly Die Zukunft as a homosexual “camarilla”. In the trials of 1907–1909 Hirschfeld testified as an expert that Moltke had a homosexual disposition, then withdrew it at the retrial, and Brand was sentenced to prison for naming Chancellor Bülow as homosexual. 10 11 12

The affair brought homosexuality into public debate but also fanned hostility. Convictions under Paragraph 175 rose from 1909 until the First World War, and the committee’s Munich branch dissolved in 1908. A government draft penal code of 1909 sought to extend Paragraph 175 to women. The publicity the movement had wanted came, but it came back as harsher punishment. 10 1

The fallout of the Eulenburg affair reached the army and the court. On 29 November 1907 War Minister Karl von Einem demanded in the Reichstag that homosexual officers leave the service, and in November 1908 Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the military cabinet in charge of “purging” the officer corps, died of a heart attack while dancing in a ballet skirt before the Kaiser at a hunting party’s entertainment. Chancellor Bülow resigned in July 1909. Antisemitic attacks on Harden and his lawyer as Jews were fierce too, foreshadowing those later aimed at Hirschfeld. 10

Strands of theory: sexual intermediaries, the Männerbund and Freudo-Marxism

The movement’s main theory was Hirschfeld’s doctrine of sexual intermediaries. Every man and woman, he held, is a unique mixture of male and female traits, and homosexuality is an inborn variation that cannot be punished; he spread the idea through the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries from 1899 to 1923, and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee made this biological “third sex” its line. 13 5

Brand and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen rejected a theory that tied homosexuality to femininity and held up love between manly men as a Greek ideal. Hans Blüher, historian of the Wandervogel, argued in The Role of Eroticism in Male Society (1917) that the state arises from male leagues bound by homoerotic ties; he called “effeminate” homosexuality pathological and cast women and Jews as the league’s outsiders. 7 14 15 16

In the late 1920s a current joining psychoanalysis and Marxism was added. The Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich held that sexual repression in capitalist society produced mass neurosis and authoritarianism and that sexual liberation was a condition of revolutionary social liberation. Unlike Hirschfeld’s biology, this Freudo-Marxism located sexuality in class and social structure. 17 18

Conflict within the movement: the “third sex” against “male culture”, and antisemitism

The homosexual movement never spoke with one voice. Adolf Brand worked at first with Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee but came to the opposite of the Jewish doctor’s theory of a “third sex” between man and woman. The members of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen followed Benedict Friedlaender and Elisar von Kupffer, who refused to identify homosexuality with femininity; they called their feelings “love between friends” rather than “homosexuality” and accused Hirschfeld of medicalising it. Holding love between men superior to heterosexual love, they drifted into misogyny, and towards the end some members, Brand among them, showed antisemitic tendencies and developed a theory of the homosexual “superman” superior to heterosexuals. 7

Hans Blüher’s relation with Hirschfeld turned from cooperation to hostility. In 1912 he belonged to both the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and Hirschfeld even wrote a foreword to the third volume of his book portraying the Wandervogel as an “erotic phenomenon”. The contact broke down when Blüher would not take Hirschfeld’s side in the conflict between Freud and Wilhelm Stekel and his antisemitism came into the open. Blüher divided homosexuality into three kinds: only the “virile” kind, which he thought creative of culture, was normal, while latent homosexuality and the “effeminate” kind corresponding to Hirschfeld’s “third sex” were pathological. In Bourgeois and Spiritual Anti-Feminism (1916) he linked Jewishness with “femininity”, as Otto Weininger had, claiming that Jews suffered from a “weakness for male leagues” and a “hypertrophy of the family”. After the war he became a Protestant, antisemite, anti-feminist and monarchist, and is counted among the figures of the Conservative Revolution. 16

Friedrich Radszuweit, who led the mass organisation, also clashed with Hirschfeld. Chairman of the Bund für Menschenrecht from 1923, he insisted on leading the movement and could not agree with Hirschfeld and Brand on the age of consent and the punishment of male prostitution. From 1923 the three briefly formed an action committee for the repeal of Paragraph 175, but it did not last. After the Nazi electoral gains of 1930 Radszuweit swung to the right, calling for a ban on the writings of the Jewish physician Felix Abraham, and in 1931 he made antisemitic remarks about Hirschfeld. The same year he wrote to Hitler asking him to stop the Nazi party’s harassment of the Bund and of homosexuals; Hitler is said to have passed the letter to the SS with the note “to be liquidated on taking power”. 19 20

Antisemitism was fiercer outside the movement. As both a Jew and a homosexual Hirschfeld was targeted early by European fascists and later by the Nazi party, and in 1920 völkisch activists beat him so badly in the street that the police at first declared him dead. The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen’s ideal of the “manly man”, for its part, is seen as touching on some aspects of National Socialism. 21 7

1919: the Institute for Sexual Science and the film Different from the Others

In 1919, with censorship abolished after the November Revolution, the movement achieved two things. One was a film: Different from the Others, made by Richard Oswald with Hirschfeld’s advice, tells of a violinist who is blackmailed, convicted under Paragraph 175 and takes his life, and is counted the first film to treat homosexuality openly. Hirschfeld appeared in it himself to plead for tolerance; it opened in Berlin on 28 May 1919. 22

The film caused a fierce controversy. Conservatives demanded the return of censorship, and antisemitic attacks accused Hirschfeld and Oswald, both Jews, of spreading a “Jewish vice”. When film censorship was reintroduced in May 1920 the film was banned on 18 August and its prints destroyed; Hirschfeld put a shortened version into his 1927 documentary Laws of Love, which was also soon censored. 22

The other was the Institute for Sexual Science. On 6 July 1919 Hirschfeld opened the world’s first institute of sexology in Berlin-Tiergarten with the dermatologist Friedrich Wertheim and the neurologist Arthur Kronfeld. It offered sex counselling, treatment, expert opinions and public lectures and issued transvestite certificates; Karl Giese ran its archive and Max Hodann its counselling centre, and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and later the World League for Sexual Reform were housed there. 23 24 13

Weimar parties and Paragraph 175: the penal code committee vote of 1929

In the Weimar Republic the campaign against Paragraph 175 became a mass movement. The Bund für Menschenrecht, founded in Berlin in 1920, took the publisher Friedrich Radszuweit as chairman in 1923 and became the largest homosexual organisation of the republic, with tens of thousands of members and several magazines. In 1923 the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and the Bund formed a joint action committee, but they split over the age of consent and the punishment of male prostitution. 20 19 5

The parties of the left still lacked a majority to repeal Paragraph 175. Convictions rose sharply after the 1924 trial of the serial killer Haarmann, and in 1925 a centre-right government proposed a draft penal code that widened the offence, warning that relations between men “wreck the character and destroy moral feeling” and, if they spread, lead to “the degeneration of the people”. 1 6

When the Reichstag penal code committee debated this draft in 1929, the KPD, SPD and DDP struck out the punishment of simple homosexuality between adult men by 15 votes to 13; the communist Richard Linsert, the committee’s secretary, is credited with winning the KPD over to this goal. But a new article punishing “qualified cases” passed against only the three KPD votes, and the committee called the outcome “one step forward and two steps back”. In March 1930 the German–Austrian interparliamentary committee on penal law restored the offence by 23 to 21. 1 25 26

Rifts within the movement deepened too. In November 1929 opponents led by Linsert forced Hirschfeld out of the committee’s chair; with Otto Juliusburger as chairman and Kurt Hiller as second chairman, it turned from biology to psychology and sociology. When the Nazi Party surged in 1930, Radszuweit’s Bund für Menschenrecht turned to the right. 5 27 19

The struggle over Paragraph 218: Cyankali and the mass movement of 1931

The fight over Paragraph 218, which punished abortion, spread through parliament and the streets in the Weimar years. In 1920 the USPD and SPD proposed repeal and exemption from punishment, and the KPD brought repeal and amnesty bills in 1922 and 1924. A law of 18 May 1926 reduced ordinary abortion from a felony to a misdemeanour, and in 1927 the Reich Court allowed a doctor to terminate a pregnancy when the woman’s life was in danger. In 1924 the KPD published Käthe Kollwitz’s poster “Down with the abortion paragraphs!”. 3 28 29

The parties’ case for reforming Paragraph 218 did not point in one direction. Gustav Radbruch, the jurist behind the SPD motion of 1920, told the Reichstag that “our aim is not to permit abortion but merely to abolish its punishment”, distancing himself from the individualist argument of “bourgeois feminists” that everyone is master of their own body. The communist deputy Wilhelm Koenen demanded in 1922 the removal of the “shameless abortion paragraphs” and attacked the Social Democratic justice minister Radbruch for granting suffering women no relief. Gertrud Bäumer, head of the bourgeois Federation of German Women’s Associations, opposed repeal, and the federation’s journal argued in 1920 that legal abortion would bring a collapse of the birth rate and sexual licence. 3

The German Medical Assembly of 1926 estimated 500,000 to 800,000 illegal abortions a year with some 10,000 deaths. Cyankali, by the communist physician Friedrich Wolf, premiered in Berlin on 6 September 1929: a jobless worker’s pregnant girlfriend is turned away by a doctor and dies trying to abort with cyanide. The most successful German-language play of the 1929/30 season, it opened the debate on Paragraph 218, and the communist gynaecologist Martha Ruben-Wolf published Abortion or Contraception?, which held up the Soviet example. 30 31

When Wolf and the Stuttgart physician Else Kienle were arrested in February 1931 on charges of performing abortions for profit, mass protests led by the KPD set up “fighting committees against Paragraph 218” in almost every large city, and a “committee for self-accusation”, with Einstein among its members, called on women and doctors to denounce themselves en masse. Kienle was released after a hunger strike and spoke at rallies across the country, but after the two were freed the movement faded, and the Nazis mounted counter-propaganda. 3 32 33

The World League for Sexual Reform and exchanges with the Soviet Union

Hirschfeld widened the German movement into an international one. The international congress for sexual reform that he held in Berlin on 15–20 September 1921 was later counted as the first congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, which was formally founded at its second congress in Copenhagen in July 1928. Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis and Auguste Forel were its presidents, followed from 1930 by Norman Haire and others. Congresses met in London (1929), Vienna (1930) and Brno (1932), but the one planned for Moscow in 1931 never took place. 34 35

The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a model for German sex reformers. In January 1923 a delegation led by Health Commissar Nikolai Semashko visited the Institute for Sexual Science, and Grigory Batkis and others explained that the Soviet decision not to punish homosexuality was deliberate. In 1926 Hirschfeld visited Moscow and Leningrad at the invitation of the Soviet government, and the shortened version of Different from the Others was shown in the Soviet Union in 1928. In the 1930s, however, the Soviet Union erased this model itself, restoring the sodomy law in 1934 and banning abortion in 1936. 36 37 13 22

The league was a coalition of many currents. In 1930 it had 182 individual members and some 130,000 through affiliated bodies such as the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the League for the Protection of Mothers, and its congresses heard Helene Stöcker, Max Hodann, the Soviet Alexandra Kollontai and the British Bertrand and Dora Russell, among others. Its demands included freedom of contraception and abortion and the end of punishment for homosexuality, but also “eugenic influence on offspring”. 34 35

Wilhelm Reich and Sex-Pol: sexual politics inside the KPD

It was Wilhelm Reich who brought sexual politics into the workers’ movement. In 1927 he opened six free sex-counselling clinics for workers in Vienna, offering psychoanalytic counselling, Marxist advice and contraceptives, and in November 1930 he moved to Berlin and joined the KPD. In autumn 1931 he brought regional sex-reform associations together in the German Reich Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics, Sex-Pol, within the KPD. 38 39 18

Sex-Pol demanded new marriage and abortion laws and sex education and tried to show apolitical people, or those calling for authoritarian rule, that their sexual distress had its roots in capitalism. But it met fierce hostility in the party (“Reich wants to turn our gymnasiums into brothels”), and the KPD stopped distributing his books and liquidated the association. After publishing The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933 Reich was expelled from the party that autumn, and in 1934 from the International Psychoanalytical Association. 39 17

Reich opposed punishing homosexuals but did not regard homosexuality as natural sexuality. In his sex-economy normal sexual development was genital, that is heterosexual, and most homosexuality resulted from a very early disturbance of the capacity to love the other sex or from blocked access to it; unlike Hirschfeld he held it acquired rather than inborn. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) he wrote that German fascism cultivated submission to authority in its youth organisations through an ascetic, sex-negative education, in which the natural desires for the other sex, pressing for satisfaction from childhood, were partly replaced by homosexual and sadistic ones. In “What Is Class Consciousness?” (1934) he argued that the more developed a young man’s heterosexual inclinations, the more open he was to revolutionary ideas, and the stronger his homosexual tendency and sexual repression, the more easily he was drawn to the right. 40

Yet in The Sexual Revolution (Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, 1936) Reich condemned the Soviet abortion ban and recriminalisation of homosexuality as a brake on the sexual revolution, siding with what he saw as the tolerant view of most workers that homosexuality harmed no one. He called Gorky’s equation of homosexuality with fascism muddled, since it confused preferential homosexuality such as Röhm’s with the homosexuality of necessity of people deprived of relations with the other sex, and held that the persecution of homosexuals was no different whether Nazis or communists carried it out. The historian Cat Moir judges that Reich’s view of homosexuality as a pathology rather than a crime was close to Hirschfeld’s, and that he too remained adamant that homosexuals must not be persecuted. 40

Sex-Pol’s theory also fed a debate on workers’ sexuality. In Vienna Reich clashed with the Social Democrats around Karl Kautsky junior, who set the “healthy” sexuality of skilled workers against the “brutalised” sexuality of the lumpenproletariat, while Reich saw repressive sexual morality as making the working class petty-bourgeois. After his expulsion Sex-Pol survived until 1939 as a loose circle of exiled left-wingers, anarchists and Trotskyists around the Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy, which Reich published in Scandinavian exile from 1934. 41 39

In The Will to Knowledge (1976), the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault questioned the “repressive hypothesis” on which sexual liberationists like Reich relied: the belief that bourgeois society had silenced and repressed sex since the seventeenth century. What modern times had seen, he argued, was not silence but a “veritable discursive explosion” about sex. From Catholic confession to psychiatry and sexology, an “incitement to discourse” multiplied the ways sex was confessed, classified and studied, and in the process someone who had committed the act of sodomy became a member of a “species”, the homosexual. Power did not merely forbid but was productive, making sex an object of knowledge and norms, and from the eighteenth century the state took hold of sex as biopower governing the “population”: birth and death rates, marriage and contraception. A discourse calling for the “liberation” of sex against repression might therefore belong to the same historical context as what it denounced. 42 43

Foucault also turned around Sex-Pol’s idea that working-class sexuality was less repressed. The modern “deployment of sexuality”, he held, was aimed not at repressing the sex of the exploited classes but first at the body, vigour, longevity, procreative power and descent of the “ruling” classes: what blood had been for the nobility, sex was for the bourgeoisie. Foucault did not deny state sexual repression as such, but reframed it within a biopower concerned with producing and maintaining the population needed for war and labour. 41 17

1933–1935: destruction under the National Socialist regime

The Nazi Party treated the sexual reform movement as an enemy from the start. Asked about Paragraph 175 in 1928, it answered: “Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy.” Hirschfeld was beaten by völkisch activists in 1920, and his lectures were later disrupted by thugs; in 1931 he left on a lecture tour of the United States, travelled around the world and never returned to Germany. In 1931–1932 the Social Democrats and communists attacked the Nazis by exposing the homosexuality of the SA chief Ernst Röhm. 2 13 21

Destruction began as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933. On 23 February the Prussian Ministry of the Interior ordered the closure of establishments for “persons who indulge in unnatural sexual practices”, and from March printed matter on homosexuality was confiscated; Brand’s house was raided five times and his photographs and 6,000 magazine issues seized. Soon after taking power the regime also made advertising or offering abortion punishable again. After the Reichstag fire in February, Max Hodann was arrested by the Gestapo and then fled abroad. 2 3 44

On the morning of 6 May 1933 students of the German Student Union, led by a brass band, stormed the Institute for Sexual Science, smashed much of its interior and looted tens of thousands of items and its library of over ten thousand volumes; in the afternoon the SA continued the looting. Hirschfeld, then in Switzerland, later saw it in a newsreel in a Paris cinema. On the night of 10 May the institute’s books burned in the book burning on Berlin’s Opernplatz, and the head of a smashed bust of Hirschfeld was carried in the procession on a pole. Psychoanalytic works by Freud and others, and Reich’s books, went into the flames too. 24 45 18

In the Night of the Long Knives, beginning on 30 June 1934, Hitler had Röhm and the SA leadership killed, and propaganda cited Röhm’s homosexuality among the justifications. Himmler, who backed the purge, went on to command the SS, the Gestapo and the camps, and in December 1934 the Gestapo began raids on homosexuals in Berlin. A law of 28 June 1935, in force from 1 September, deleted the word “unnatural” from Paragraph 175, extending it to any “lewdness”, and added Paragraph 175a for “aggravated cases”. 46 2 1

Paragraph 175 (1) A man who commits lewdness with another man or allows himself to be abused by him for lewdness shall be punished by imprisonment. (2) In the case of a participant under twenty-one at the time of the act, the court may in especially minor cases refrain from punishment.

Paragraph 175a. Punishable by penitentiary of up to ten years, or with mitigating circumstances by imprisonment of not less than three months, are: 1. a man who forces another man by violence or threat of present danger to life or limb to commit lewdness with him; 2. a man who induces another man to lewdness by abusing a dependence arising from service, employment or subordination; 3. a man over twenty-one who seduces a male person under twenty-one to lewdness; 4. a man who commits lewdness with men for gain or offers to do so. 1

§ 175 (1) Ein Mann, der mit einem anderen Mann Unzucht treibt oder sich von ihm zur Unzucht mißbrauchen läßt, wird mit Gefängnis bestraft. (2) Bei einem Beteiligten, der zu Zeit der Tat noch nicht einundzwanzig Jahre alt war, kann das Gericht in besonders leichten Fällen von Strafe absehen.

§ 175a Mit Zuchthaus bis zu zehn Jahren, bei mildernden Umständen mit Gefängnis nicht unter drei Monaten wird bestraft: 1. ein Mann, der einen anderen Mann mit Gewalt oder durch Drohung mit gegenwärtiger Gefahr für Leib oder Leben nötigt, mit ihm Unzucht zu treiben, oder sich von ihm zur Unzucht mißbrauchen zu lassen; 2. ein Mann, der einen anderen Mann unter Mißbrauch einer durch ein Dienst-, Arbeits- oder Unterordnungsverhältnis begründeten Abhängigkeit bestimmt, mit ihm Unzucht zu treiben oder sich von ihm zur Unzucht mißbrauchen zu lassen; 3. ein Mann über einundzwanzig Jahre, der eine männliche Person unter einundzwanzig Jahren verführt, mit ihm Unzucht zu treiben oder sich von ihm zur Unzucht mißbrauchen zu lassen; 4. ein Mann, der gewerbsmäßig mit Männern Unzucht treibt oder von Männern sich zur Unzucht mißbrauchen läßt oder sich dazu anbietet. 1

The people of the movement were scattered. Hirschfeld tried and failed to found a new institute in Paris and died in Nice on his 67th birthday, 14 May 1935, after which the World League for Sexual Reform was dissolved. Hiller went into exile after abuse in a camp; Giese took his life in Brno in 1938 and Kronfeld in Moscow in 1941. Stöcker, Wolf, Kienle and Reich also went into exile. Convictions under Paragraph 175 rose from 801 in 1932 to over 8,000 in 1937 and 1938, and in 1936 a Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion was set up. 13 34 27 47 48 9 33 32 18 1 2

Assessment: achievements and limits of the movement, and after the war

The German sexual reform movement founded the world’s first gay rights organisation and the first institute of sexology and brought Paragraphs 175 and 218 to the centre of public debate; the milder penalties for abortion in 1926 and the committee vote of 1929 were its achievements. But it was always divided by theory, strategy and party, and neither article was repealed in the Weimar Republic. 49 1 3

One of the movement’s limits was eugenics. Hirschfeld popularised the link between sexology and eugenics, in a vocabulary of the time that now recalls Nazi jargon; he sought its aims through education, contraception and legal abortion rather than coercion and firmly rejected Nazi racial hygiene and “euthanasia”, but the sexologist Volkmar Sigusch judged that he and other sexological eugenicists were theoretically unequipped to criticise the discourse the Nazis took up and used. Stöcker’s case for repealing Paragraph 218 was likewise mixed with racist ideas of “breeding up”. 13 3

After the war the two Germanies went different ways. East Germany returned in 1950 to the pre-1935 Paragraph 175, stopped punishing relations between adults from the late 1950s and legalised abortion within twelve weeks in 1972. West Germany kept the Nazi-era Paragraph 175 until 1969 and abolished the article completely only after reunification, in 1994. Homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis long went unrecognised as victims, until the gay liberation movement of the 1970s reclaimed the pink triangle as its symbol. 1 3 2