Himmler's secret card index

On 10 October 1936, Heinrich Himmler signed a secret decree in Berlin. It was not published in any official gazette, but sent directly to police stations throughout the Reich. As Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police, Himmler ordered the establishment of a "Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion". He vilified both as "plagues on the nation" that stood in the way of the Nazi regime's population policy goals.

The Olympic Games in Berlin had ended only a few weeks earlier. After its temporary restraint during the Games, the regime stepped up persecution once again. Organisationally, the new Central Office was attached to the Prussian State Criminal Police Office, but until 1939 it actually reported to a Gestapo department. Its first head was SS officer Josef Meisinger. In a later lecture, he claimed that homosexual men weakened the "strength of the nation". Combating abortion soon took a back seat in the office's work.

The focus was on systematic registration. With barely twenty staff, the Central Office kept card indexes, evaluated reports from the police and judiciary and made recommendations on action against individual men. By 1940, around 41,000 convicted or suspected people had been registered. The number of convictions under Paragraph 175 shot up. Even after serving their sentences, those affected were not safe: many were sent to concentration camps without any further court ruling. Around 6,000 men were sent to the camps as homosexuals; more than half did not survive.

Lesbian women were not subject to targeted criminal prosecution, but they too were recorded in police files. Many of the Central Office's card indexes are said to have been lost in the final days of the war. With the end of the Nazi regime in 1945, the office also disappeared. But the legal basis for persecution remained: in the Federal Republic, Paragraph 175 stayed in force in its harsher version until 1969.