The first of September, twice
Tightening and decriminalisation fell on the same day. Thirty-four years lay between them.
On 1 September 1935, the version of Paragraph 175 revised by the Nazis came into force in Germany. It had been passed a good two months earlier. On paper the change looked tiny. A single adjective was dropped, the word "unnatural". Until then, courts could only convict if they succeeded in proving acts resembling intercourse. Now far less was enough. A look, a touch, an approach.
The figures show how strong the effect was. In the year before the reform, just under a thousand convictions were handed down under this paragraph; three years later there were around eight thousand five hundred. According to estimates, the police arrested around one hundred thousand people on this charge under Nazi rule. Several thousand men ended up in concentration camps, where they had to wear the pink triangle and stood at the very bottom of the prisoner hierarchy. The regime deliberately left lesbian women out of the paragraph, because it still intended them to play the role of child-bearers.
What followed after 1945 is one of the bitter chapters in the history of the Federal Republic. The Nazi version simply remained in force. Between the founding of the state and the end of the sixties, tens of thousands more men were convicted in the West, many of whom lost their jobs, homes and families.
And then, thirty-four years after the tightening, the correction fell on exactly the same calendar date. On 1 September 1969, a criminal law amendment came into force that decriminalised consensual sexual acts between men over twenty-one. This did not abolish the paragraph. In changing versions, it remained in the criminal code until 1994.