ABSTRACT
The prosecution of people with homosexual feelings took particular forms under the Nazi regime, but it was not a distinctively Nazi phenomenon. Homosexual men were being put on trial long before 1933 — indeed, their criminalization stretches right back to the early Middle Ages. In Germany a nation-wide ordinance had existed since 1871 in the shape of Section 175 of the Reich Penal Code. Also in the ‘Second Reich’ (to use the Nazi terminology) a police and judicial apparatus had been in place to mount effective operations. The anti-homosexual policy of the National Socialists did not therefore start from scratch. Hitler, Himmler and their ‘national comrades’ did not have to invent any new laws, nor establish any new apparatus. The National Socialists only had to come to power to carry out what they had preached before the ‘seizure of power’: that is, the shaping of society in accordance with national [völkisch] ideals. Whoever opposed this policy or sought to escape it was threatened with ‘eradication’ or ‘re-education’. The campaigns against male homosexuals were one element in this policy. ‘Keeping the people's body pure’, ‘reproduction of the species’, ‘maintaining the sexual balance’ — these were some of the slogans that defined, or were supposed to define, the policy directed against them.
