The Frankfurter Engel (German for Frankfurt angel) is a memorial in the city of Frankfurt am Main in southwestern Germany; it is dedicated to homosexual people who were persecuted under Nazi rule, and as well as under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code during the 1950s and 1960s.
The memorial is a statue of an angel and is the first of its kind in Germany. Subsequent memorials in Germany are Kölner Rosa Winkel (1995) in Cologne and Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism (2008) in Berlin.
At the base of the memorial, written in German, is:
Homosexuelle Männer und Frauen wurden im Nationalsozialismus verfolgt und ermordet. Die Verbrechen wurden geleugnet, die Getöteten verschwiegen, die Überlebenden verachtet und verurteilt. Daran erinnern wir in dem Bewusstsein, dass Männer, die Männer lieben, und Frauen, die Frauen lieben, immer wieder verfolgt werden können. Frankfurt am Main. Dezember 1994
This can be translated to English as:
Homosexual men and women were persecuted and murdered in Nazi Germany. The crimes were denied, the dead concealed, the survivors scorned and prosecuted. We remember this, in the awareness that men who love men and women who love women still face persecution. Frankfurt am Main. December 1994.
The memorial honors homosexuals who were persecuted and/or died during the Nazi rule and Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code that outlawed homosexuality during the 1950s and 1960s. It was reformed in 1969 and fully repealed in 1973.
On 20 July 1992 a competition for the memorial design began. Ultimately, the winner of the competition was the artist Rosemarie Trockel, and the memorial was built at the crossing of the streets Schäfergasse and Alte Gasse. On 11 December 1994 the memorial was opened.
Before 1933, male homosexual acts were illegal in Germany under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. The law was not consistently enforced, however, and a thriving gay culture existed in major German cities. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, the first homosexual movement's infrastructure of clubs, organizations, and publications was shut down. After the Röhm purge in 1934, persecuting homosexuals became a priority of the Nazi police state. A 1935 revision of Paragraph 175 made it easier to bring criminal charges for homosexual acts, leading to a large increase in arrests and convictions. Persecution peaked in the years prior to World War II and was extended to areas annexed by Germany, including Austria, the Czech lands, and Alsace–Lorraine.
A pink triangle has been a symbol for the LGBT community, initially intended as a badge of shame, but later reappropriated as a positive symbol of self-identity. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, it began as one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, distinguishing those imprisoned because they had been identified by authorities as gay men or trans women. In the 1970s, it was revived as a symbol of protest against homophobia, and has since been adopted by the larger LGBT community as a popular symbol of LGBT pride and the LGBT movements and queer liberation movements.
Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994. It made sexual relations between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. Overall, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law. The law had always been controversial and inspired the first homosexual movement, which called for its repeal.
Ernst Klee was a German journalist and author. As a writer on Germany's history, he was best known for his exposure and documentation of medical crimes in Nazi Germany, much of which was concerned with the Action T4 or involuntary euthanasia program. He is the author of "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders first published in the English translation in 1991.
Karl Gorath was a gay man who was arrested in 1938 and imprisoned for homosexuality at Neuengamme and Auschwitz. He was freed in 1945.
Pierre Seel was a gay Holocaust survivor who was conscripted into the German Army and the only French person to have testified openly about his experience of deportation during World War II due to his homosexuality.
The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in May 1897, to campaign for social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and against their legal persecution. It was the first LGBT rights organization in history. The motto of the organization was "Per scientiam ad justitiam", and the committee included representatives from various professions. The committee's membership peaked at about 700 people. In 1929, Kurt Hiller took over as chairman of the group from Hirschfeld. At its peak, the WhK had branches in approximately 25 cities in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
Martin Dannecker is a German sexologist and author.
The Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism in Berlin was opened on 27 May 2008.
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The memorial to gay and lesbian victims of National Socialism is a monument in Cologne, Germany, dedicated to the gay and lesbian victims of the Nazis.
This is a list of events in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQ+) history in Germany.
There is a widespread and long-lasting myth alleging that homosexuals were numerous and prominent as a group in the Nazi Party or the identification of Nazism with homosexuality more generally. It has been promoted by various individuals and groups from before World War II through the present, especially by left-wing Germans during the Nazi era and the Christian right in the United States more recently. Although some gay men joined the Nazi Party, there is no evidence that they were overrepresented. The Nazis harshly criticized homosexuality and severely persecuted gay men, going as far as murdering them en masse. Therefore, historians regard the myth as having no merit.
The Eldorado was the name of multiple nightclubs and performance venues in Berlin before the Nazi era and World War II. The name of the cabaret Eldorado has become an integral part of the popular iconography of the Weimar Republic. Two of the five locations the club occupied in its history are known to have catered to a gay crowd, although attendees would have included not only gay, lesbian, and bisexual patrons but also those identifying as heterosexual.
The Frankfurt Homosexual Trials were a series of criminal trials in Frankfurt that took place in 1950 and 1951. Criminal proceedings were initiated against over 200 people during the trials, beginning a wave of persecution against homosexuals across Germany. The trials marked the end of the relative restraint exercised by the judiciary in criminalizing homosexuality after the end of World War II in Europe.
In Nazi Germany, lesbians who were sent to concentration camps were often categorized as "asocial", if they had not been otherwise targeted based on their ethnicity or political stances. Female homosexuality was criminalized in Austria, but not other parts of Nazi Germany. Because of the relative lack of interest of the Nazi state in female homosexuality compared to male homosexuality, there are fewer sources to document the situations of lesbians in Nazi Germany.
The first homosexual movement was a socio-political movement which thrived in Germany from the late nineteenth century until 1933. The movement began in Germany because of a confluence of factors, including the criminalization of sex between men and the country's relatively lax censorship. German writers in the mid-nineteenth century coined the word homosexual and criticized its criminalization. In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the world's first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose aim was to use science to improve public tolerance of homosexuality and repeal Paragraph 175. During the German Empire, the movement was restricted to an educated elite, but it greatly expanded in the aftermath of World War I and the German Revolution.
The Memorial to the First Homosexual Emancipation Movement is a memorial in the neighbourhood of Moabit in Berlin, Germany. Unveiled on 7 September 2017, the memorial is located opposite the Federal Chancellery on the Spree and commemorates the first homosexual movement, which was destroyed in 1933 by the Nazis, and especially the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee founded in 1897 to oppose the criminalization of homosexuality in Germany. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee's headquarters were located on the other bank of the Spree near the Federal Chancellery. The riverbank where the memorial is located has been named the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer since 2008. The memorial includes an information panel that has been in place since 2011 and discusses the movement with portraits of Anita Augspurg (1857–1943), Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935).
The Röhm scandal resulted from the public disclosure of Nazi politician Ernst Röhm's homosexuality by anti-Nazis in 1931 and 1932. As a result of the scandal, Röhm became the first known homosexual politician.