The end of the anti-gay paragraph
After 123 years of criminalisation, Paragraph 175 is repealed. Germany abolishes its ban on male homosexuality.
On 11 June 1994, the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code came into force in Germany. Since 1872, the paragraph had made sexual acts between men a crime, criminalising gay and bisexual men for more than a century. In popular parlance, those affected were simply called "175ers".
The paragraph originated in the criminal code of the newly founded German Empire. Even in the Weimar Republic there were serious efforts to abolish it, among others by Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. These efforts were destroyed by the Nazi seizure of power. In 1935 the Nazi regime drastically tightened the paragraph: criminal liability was extended to all "lewd" acts, and the maximum sentence was raised to five years. Tens of thousands of men were persecuted and sent to prisons and concentration camps.
What followed after 1945 was another chapter of state failure: the Federal Republic took over the tightened Nazi version of the paragraph almost unchanged. The Federal Constitutional Court approved this in 1957. Until 1969, around 45,000 men were convicted in West Germany alone. A first reform only came in 1969, and a second in 1973. Paragraph 175 was only deleted completely after reunification, when the GDR, which had abolished the paragraph in 1968, became the model. On 10 March 1994, the Bundestag voted by a large majority to abolish it without replacement. On 11 June 1994, the repeal took effect. In the place in the Criminal Code that had meant criminalisation for 123 years, it has since simply said: "§175 (repealed)". The rehabilitation of those convicted took even longer: it was 2017 before men convicted after 1945 were also officially compensated.