German vets and the fight for gay rights

When we think of the birth of the gay rights movement, New York’s Stonewall riots of 1969 perhaps come to mind, but what about the German army of World War I?

 

Gay activism was very much alive in 1920s and 1930s Germany before the Nazi regime snuffed it out, says historian Laurie Mahoefer.

 

 

 

German WWI veterans who were gay wrote openly about homosexual emancipation in their letters at the time.

 

“These are guys that are self-identified as homosexual, and are aware of the movement for what they called ‘homosexual emancipation’ before the war, but during the war they have this transformative experience where their political consciousness really changes and they become radicalised.”

 

Once the war was over, those gay veterans turned their attention to a political struggle for what we now understand as gay rights and formed groups to change the law, Mahoefer says.

 

“These new organisations attracted tens of thousands of people. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee before the war had a membership of about 100, and after the war some of these veterans founded a group that became the League for Human Rights that had 100,000 members and published a number of magazines lobbied parliament and openly advocated for gay rights.”

 

Post-war Germany was quite an open society until the Nazis came to power in 1933.

 

“These activists were able to champion their cause quite openly. They used their own names in their publications and they freely admitted that they were homosexual and that was new. Before the First World War there were hardly any activists who did that.”

 

Mahoefer says this foreshadowed struggles for gay rights later in the century.

 

“Being out, using your own name, waging mass political struggles trying to build a big membership organisation...”

Immediately after WWI ended, social democrats and left liberals came to power in Germany and relaxed censorship. That allowed homosexual emancipation publications to reach a wider audience.

 

“There seems to have been a pretty strong sense in wider German society that although homosexuality might not be something we applaud, people can be homosexual and be pretty good citizens and we ought to tolerate them so long as they are upstanding and respectable.”

 

Before the war, German society had been pretty supportive of homosexual emancipation – and in 1929 Germany came very close to repealing its sodomy law, she says.

 

“The League for Human Rights advocated for gay rights for both men and women, as well as rights for people we would probably call transgender today – the word ‘transgender’ didn’t exist at the time and the word they used instead was ‘transvestite’.”

 

This slow flowering of gay rights in Germany came to an abrupt end in 1933 and never really recovered until Germany reunited in 1991, says Mahoefer.  

 

“Gay men in Nazi ideology are held out as this very dangerous thing. And they had become publically visible in 1920s Germany in ways that they were not common in other countries.”

 

This visibility made them especially vulnerable when Hitler embarked on his purges.

 

After WWII, the gay rights movement in Germany started to rebuild, she says.

 

“The Nazis took the sodomy law and made it harsher and West Germany kept that law on its books for a while and imprisoned probably thousands of men under that law.

 

In the 1960s they reformed that law and it wasn’t until reunification in 1991 the West Germany got rid of the final vestige of that law.”