Paragraph 175
독일 형법 제175조
The article of the German penal code that punished sexual acts between men. In force from 1871, when the penal code of the North German Confederation took effect, until its repeal in reunified Germany in 1994, it was used to convict some 140,000 men. From the founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897 through the Weimar years it was the main target of the homosexual emancipation movement, and in 1935 the Nazis greatly widened it.
In depth
The original text punished “unnatural fornication” between men, or between humans and animals, with imprisonment; the courts read it narrowly as acts resembling intercourse. In 1897 Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee gathered 6,000 signatures for a repeal petition, which SPD chairman August Bebel brought before the Reichstag the next year without success. Convictions rose after the Eulenburg affair of 1907–1909, and a government draft of 1909 sought to extend the offence to women. In the Weimar Republic the left parties again lacked a majority for repeal, and in 1925 a centre-right government drafted a wider offence instead. In the Reichstag penal code committee in 1929 the KPD, SPD and DDP struck out the punishment of simple homosexuality between adult men by 15 votes to 13, but a new article punishing “qualified cases” passed against only the three KPD votes; the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee called the result “one step forward and two steps back”, and in March 1930 the German–Austrian interparliamentary committee on penal law restored the offence by 23 to 21. By a law of 28 June 1935 (in force from 1 September) the Nazis deleted the word “unnatural”, extending the offence to any “lewd” act, and added Paragraph 175a, which punished “aggravated cases” with up to ten years’ penitentiary. Convictions rose tenfold, from 801 in 1932 to over 8,000 in 1937 and 1938; nearly 50,000 men were sentenced between 1933 and 1945, and thousands were sent to concentration camps marked with the pink triangle. East Germany returned in 1950 to the pre-1935 text, stopped punishing acts between adults from the late 1950s, confirmed this in its 1968 penal code and abolished the remaining article in 1988. West Germany kept the Nazi-era version for two decades, reformed it in 1969 and 1973, and the article was finally repealed after reunification, on 10 June 1994.