Bund für Menschenrecht

An organisation of bisexual, homosexual and trans women and men, it was founded in Berlin in August 1920 as the Deutscher Freundschaftsverband. On its renaming on 11 May 1923 the publisher Radszuweit became chairman, and his publishing house issued the monthly members’ paper Blätter für Menschenrecht, the weekly Das Freundschaftsblatt and the first lesbian magazine Die Freundin until 1933. From 1924 lesbian activists such as Lotte Hahm and Selli Engler joined. In 1925 dissatisfied and expelled members founded a breakaway group under the old name. Where Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was a small circle of professionals, this was the mass organisation; in 1923 it formed a short-lived joint action committee against Paragraph 175 with the committee and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, which broke up over the age of consent and the punishment of male prostitution. It professed political neutrality: when SA chief Ernst Röhm’s homosexuality was exposed in 1931 it called for a boycott of the SPD for exploiting it, but never boycotted the Nazi party, and Nazi supporters grew among its members. After Radszuweit’s death in 1932 Paul Weber succeeded him; reporting that only three members remained, he applied in 1934 to dissolve it, and it was struck from the register on 6 January 1936. It is not to be confused with the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, which used the same abbreviation.