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- For the German aerospace engineer, see Karl Otto Lange
Karl Lange (born 28 October 1915, date of death unknown) was imprisoned by the Nazis for the then crime of homosexuality under the criminal code's Paragraph 175, which defined homosexuality as an unnatural act. [1]
National Socialism, more commonly known as Nazism, is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party – in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar aims.
Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to people of the same sex. It "also refers to a person's sense of identity based on those attractions, related behaviors, and membership in a community of others who share those attractions."
Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994. It made homosexual acts between males a crime, and in early revisions the provision also criminalized bestiality as well as forms of prostitution and underage sexual abuse. All in all, around 140,000 men were convicted under the law.
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Lange was born in Hamburg, Germany to an American father and a German mother. In 1935, when Lange was twenty years old, an informer told the police that he had been having secret meetings with a fifteen-year-old youth, and he was arrested. He was released after fifteen months but re-arrested in 1937 and imprisoned at Fuhlsbüttel prison, and then was part of a group that was transferred to Waldheim prison in Saxony, where he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was transferred to the prison hospital.
Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany with a population of over 1.8 million.
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, and the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.
After the war Lange was hired at a bank in Hamburg but was fired after eighteen months when his employer learned of his Paragraph 175 convictions.
