"Paragraph 175"
A Telling Pictures Production
Produced and Directed by Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman
Narrated by Rupert Everett
Director of Research/Associate Producer Klaus Müller
Producers: Michael Ehrenzweig, Janet Cole

Paragraph 175 is a feature documentary on the persecutions to which gays were submitted, in the Nazi Germany.

In the Nazi Germany, gays were forced to wear a pink triangle, the same way in which Jews had to wear the yellow star. However, this was only the top of the iceberg. Between 1933 and 1945, according to Nazi documents, approximately 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality. Roughly half were sentenced to prison and approximately 10,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. The death rate of homosexual prisoners in the camps is estimated to be as high as sixty percent (among the highest of non-Jewish prisoners), so that by 1945 only about 4,000 survived.

However, the end of the war didn’t mean that persecutions were over – Paragraph 175 remained on the Penal Code of Federal Germany until 1969. Gay survivors were not considered victims of the Nazi regime, as the other concentration camps’ survivors. They were excluded from reparations by the German government, and their time spent in concentration camps was deducted from their pensions. Moreover, some of them were re-arrested after the war and re-imprisoned – as a matter of fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of convictions for homosexuality in West Germany was as high as it had been during Nazi rule.

When the international community sought atonement for the victims of Hitler’s Germany at the Nuremberg Trials of 1946, neither the atrocities committed against homosexuals nor the anti-gay legislation and measures were mentioned. Homophobia and anti-gay persecution were accepted as normal in post-war Europe and in the United States. In the 1990’s, researchers began to document the histories of the men who wore pink triangles. The first institution to do so was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which changed public perceptions by including the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in their exhibits. Encouraged by historians and the museum, several gay survivors — some of them in their late 80s and early 90s – came forward to tell their stories for the first time, ending decades of unnatural silence and isolation.
Paragraph 175 includes the filmed testimonies of several gay survivors, illustrated by evocative images from the period and many original ones. It tells some haunting stories, remembered sometimes with bitterness, other times with irony and humour – the true stories of some men who couldn’t forget, yet managed to survive.
 

Dr. Klaus Müller is a German historian and European Project Director for Western Europe for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has been researching gay survivors of Nazi persecution since the early 1990’s, and dedicated his work to bringing their stories to international attention.  In 1997, he met directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and proposed them to make this film. Production took place in Germany, France, Spain, and England.

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Pierre Seel, born 1923 in Alsace-Lorraine, was 17 when the Nazis occupied his homeland. He was arrested and interrogated about his homosexuality before being sent to the internment camp at Schirmeck. While there he was forced to build crematoria, he was violated and humiliated. At the end of 1941, Pierre and thousands of other Alsatians were forced to join the German army. This was the ultimate humiliation for him, as he had been involved in resistance activities: to be forced to fight on the side of the enemy. He was eventually taken prisoner by the Russians, who gave him his freedom.

After the war he was allowed back into his family under the condition that he never reveal the true circumstances of his arrest. He went into a downward spiral, entering a marriage of convenience and eventually becoming suicidal – until deciding to take a stand and make his story public.
 
 

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