"An unnatural sex act committed between persons of the male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed." — Paragraph 175. German Penal Code, 1871.
Trailer for Paragraph 175, directed by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (2000).
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Paragraph 175 was a provision to the German Criminal Code that occurred on May 15, 1871. It criminalized male sexual penetration, along with bestiality, prostitution, and child sexual abuse. The law was subjected to many changes from 1871 until its abolishment in 1994, including being revised by the Nazis in 1935 and the East and West German governments in 1968 and 1969 respectively. It is estimated that 140,000 men were persecuted under Paragraph 175, with close to 100,000 of those occurring during the Nazi Regime (Epstein and Friedman).
Upon German Reunification in the early 1990s, the question of whether Paragraph 175 should be abolished, as it had in East Germany a year earlier, was raised. In 1994, Paragraph 175 was stricken completely from the German Penal Code and replaced with Paragraph 176, which made the age of consent 14 for all Germans regardless of the gender. |