Germany to overturn convictions under Nazi-era anti-gay laws

After more than 70 years, Germany has finally moved to clear the names of more than 60,000 homosexual men prosecuted in post-war Germany under Nazi-era anti-gay laws.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet approved on Wednesday a plan to strike down all convictions under so-called Article 175 of the penal code and offer compensation to the estimated 5,000 convicted men still alive.

The move ends a decades-long campaign against the long shadow of a law drafted in Kaiser-era Germany and tightened up further in the Nazi years. East Germany abolished the law in 1969 but it only vanished entirely from German statue books in 1994.

Lump sum

Wiping the resulting convictions, a proposal by Social Democrat (SPD) justice minister Heiko Maas would offer gay men convicted under the law a lump sum of €3,000 as well as an additional €1,500 for each year they spent in prison.

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“We can never completely erase the travesty of justice, but we want to rehabilitate the victims,” said Mr Maas in a statement.

In addition to victim compensation, the proposal provides a €500,000 annual grant to the Magnus Hirschfeld gay history research centre in Berlin.  The legislation passed at cabinet on Wednesday and still must be approved by the Bundestag, where Dr Merkel’s grand coalition enjoys a large majority.

Germany’s Article 175 outlawed “sexual acts contrary to nature . . . be it between people of the male gender or between people and animals”. Sex between women was not explicitly illegal.

Dating from 1871, it was rarely enforced until the Nazi era, when more than 42,000 men were convicted under the law and sent to prison or concentration camps. The Nazi-era laws were overturned in 2002 but post-war convictions remained valid.

Persecution

Historian Wolfgang Benz said that persecution of gay men continued without interruption after the Nazi era.

“The rage against the unwanted minority was no smaller,” he wrote in a 2016 study on the period.

Gay groups and men convicted under paragraph 175 welcomed the belated move to overturn their convictions. Heinz Schmitz was arrested as a 17-year-old in Freiburg in 1961 by the local police department’s “morality” division. He was interrogated at police headquarters, his picture and fingerprints taken, and he was threatened unless he told police whom he had kissed and more.

“The questions were so intensive, always with the background, ‘if you don’t tell us we have the option of going to the firm where you’re doing your traineeship, so you’ll lose your place,’” he remembered.

He was found guilty in February 1962 and sentenced to six months on probation but was mocked for years afterwards as a “morality hoodlum” who posed a danger to young men in the neighbourhood.