Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
과학적 인도주의 위원회
The world’s first gay rights organisation, founded in Berlin in 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld and others. It sought to abolish Paragraph 175 by showing scientifically that homosexuality is inborn; although it never had more than 500 members, it was a milestone of the first homosexual emancipation movement. It was dissolved when the Nazis came to power in 1933.
In depth
Hirschfeld founded it on 15 May 1897, four days before Oscar Wilde’s release from prison, in his Charlottenburg flat with the publisher Max Spohr, the lawyer Eduard Oberg and the colonial writer Franz Joseph von Bülow. Its motto was “Per scientiam ad justitiam”—through science to justice. Its basic strategy was to show scientifically that homosexuality is inborn and so knock away the grounds for punishment, and it rallied opinion against Paragraph 175 with a journal and popular pamphlets. A repeal petition signed by 6,000 people that year was brought before the Reichstag by August Bebel in 1898, without success. It published the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries from 1899 to 1923 and its Mitteilungen from 1926 to 1933, kept a lending library for members from about 1904, and its lectures and concerts doubled as a meeting place for members. Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedlaender and Kurt Hiller were among those who joined, and it had branches in some 25 cities including Munich, Frankfurt, Vienna and in the Netherlands. The Eulenburg affair (1907–1909) made it widely known but also brought a backlash: the Munich branch dissolved itself in 1908, citing “the unfavourable times and the complete hopelessness of any agitation”.
From 1919 the committee had its office in the Institute for Sexual Science and adopted its theory of homosexuals as a biological “third sex” between man and woman. The mass organisation of the movement in these years was the Bund für Menschenrecht, claiming tens of thousands of members, while the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen took partly opposing positions. In 1926, at Hirschfeld’s suggestion, Hiller revised the counter-draft of the Cartel for the Reform of the Sexual Penal Code. In March 1929 the committee invited the DDP deputies on the Reichstag penal code committee, then debating Paragraph 175, to the institute to meet homosexual men in person, and in October that committee voted 15 to 13 to drop the punishment of simple homosexuality between adult men. But a new article punishing “qualified cases” passed at the same time—“one step forward and two steps back”, the committee called it—and the reform never reached the floor before parliamentary government collapsed in 1930.
Through the 1920s Hirschfeld remained the undisputed leader, but a generational change was under way beneath him. Hiller took over more and more of the running of the committee, and new figures rose: the communist Richard Linsert and the lawyer Fritz Flato. Flato had spotted Linsert at a congress of the friendship leagues in Munich in 1922 and brought him to Berlin, where he became the committee’s secretary; a KPD member on its left wing, he won his party over to the repeal of Paragraph 175. Hirschfeld’s biologism—the line of preventing punishment by proving homosexuality an inborn “intermediate stage”—had met opposition inside the committee from the start, and in 1929 there was fierce debate over the committee’s future tactics. It ended in a “king’s overthrow”: on 24 November the opponents, led by Linsert, forced Hirschfeld to resign the chair. Hirschfeld called Linsert a troublemaker. That month the committee moved out of the institute to an office in Zimmerstraße, Kreuzberg, which also went by the name “Archive for Sexual Science”. The psychiatrist Otto Juliusburger became chairman, Hiller second chairman and the writer Bruno Vogel a board member, while Flato, first treasurer, became the board member for legal affairs in 1930 and held legal consultations for members. The new leadership shifted the weight from biological to psychological and sociological research, seeking to free the committee from its scientific isolation. In summer 1930 it gave up the Zimmerstraße office and moved into Linsert’s flat.
Linsert died in February 1933 and Hiller was put in a concentration camp. The committee held its last meeting in the flat of its secretary Peter Limann on 8 June 1933 and dissolved itself; because it hastily destroyed its membership records after the Nazis took power, little is known of its inner structure today. Attempts to refound it in 1949 and 1962 failed.