Paragraph 175 sounds innocuous enough. A minor piece of legislation, perhaps, or part of those terms and conditions that any one of us would be forgiven for skimming over. But as the award-winning new film Great Freedom makes clear, it was in fact a vindictive article of the German penal code that criminalised male homosexuality and blighted the lives of 140,000 men, more than a third of whom received prison sentences. As well as remaining in force for more than a century, Paragraph 175 exposed a tacit accord between the Nazis – who lowered the threshold for punishment while raising the sentence – and the postwar liberating forces.
“Other laws were reset after the war to how they had been before the Nazis,” explains Sebastian Meise, the film’s 46-year-old Austrian director, when we meet in a London office. “But 175 just continued.” A “pink list” of known gay men, which the Nazis had compiled, was still in circulation by the late 1970s, Meise says. “It’s absurd the lengths the state went to in persecuting these men. What struck me most was the allies. For me, they’ve always been the liberators – they freed us from fascism. But in this case, they were on the same level as the Third Reich.”
