1871: Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany proclaims the Second Reich. Paragraph 175 of the Prussian Penal code is adopted for the entire Reich It makes sexual acts between males punishable. In practice, German courts usually prosecute only homosexual behaviour that resembles “coital acts.”
1897: Dr Magnus Hirschfeld established the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.
1899: HIrschfeld issues the first volume of the Yearbook for Intersexual Variants, which he edits until 1923. This scholarly journal publishes essays on the medical, legal, historical, and anthropological aspects of homosexuality, together with pertinent bibliographies. These bibliographies demonstrate that homosexual research advances considerably: in one year alone, more than three hundred publications on homosexuality are published in Germany. The committee also presents a petition to the Reichstag for abolishing the punitive Paragraph 175. These efforts continue until 1929. Major scientists, writers, and artists who sign the petition at one time or another include Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Martin Buber, Alfre Doblin, Albert Einstein, George Grosz, Gerhard Hauptmann, Herman Hesse, Engelbert Humperdinck, Karl Jaspers, Kathe Kollwitz, Max Liebermann, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Scheler, Arthur Schintzler, Felix Weingartner, Heinrich Zille, August Bebel, Karl Kautsky, and Harry Graf Kessler.
1903: Hirchfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee distributes more than 6,000 questionnaires concerning personal sex preferences to Berlin students and Factory workers. It is the first investigation of its kind in Europe. One result is that 2.2 percent of the male population responds that it has homosexual experiences.
1908: Effort by opponents of the women’s emancipation movement to outlaw lesbian acts fails.
1919: First gay film in Germany, Different from the Others (Anders als die Anderen) starring Conrad Veidt, directed by Richard Oswald.
1920: Hirschfeld, a homosexual, a Jew, and a liberal, is attacked while lecturing in Munich; a second assault there in 1921 results in a fractured skull; in 1923 in Vienna, a young man opens fire and wounds some members of the audience.
1921: Adolf Hitler merges various small right wing groups into the National Socialist Workers’ Party. The first SA units are established as private bodyguards. Ernst Roehm, an openly homosexual army captain, becomes the second SA leader, but resigns after he loses a suit against a hustler who had robbed him.
1923-4: Trial of homosexual mass murderer Fritz Haarmann creates a shockwave in Germany, pits the Communists against the Social Democrats, and hurts the German homosexual emancipation movement profoundly.
1928: The National Socialists issue their views on homosexuality when answering a questionnaire sent to all political groups: “it is not necessary that you and I live, but it is necessary that the German people live. And it can only live if it maintains its masculinity. It can only maintain its masculinity if it excercises discipline... Free love and deviance are undisciplined. Therefore, we reject you... Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy.”
1929: The American stock market crashes. German and Austrian banks collapse. Efforts to abolish Paragraph 175 nearly succeed, but the reform is postponed indefinitely because of the economic crisis. On August 2 a Nazi Party rally in Nuremburg draws approximately 150,000 participants. A year later Ernst Roehm is recalled and made head of the SA. The Nazis quickly grow to about two million members.
1933:
January 30: Hitler is appointed chancellor.
February 23: Pornography banned, and homosexual-rights groups are proscribed.
February 27: The Reichstag burns down.
February 28: A presidential decree gives Hitler emergency powers. Civil rights are eliminated. The reign of terror begins. Some SA concentration camps are established near Berlin. A law is passed against “Communist acts of violence.”
February 29: Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutchman who allegedly set the Reichstag afire, is dubbed a homosexual, and can now be executed legally.
March 5: The last elections with more than one party on the ballot are held; the Nazis gain 44 percent of the vote. Actions begin against the Jews.
March 9: Heinrich Himmler is made chief of the Munich police.
March 13: Joseph Goebbels is appointed Minister of Propaganda. The process of “co-option” begins: political, social, and private life must be in line with Nazi ideology.
March 21: Special courts are established for prosecution of political enemies.
March 22: Dachau, the first major concentration camp, is built, originally for 5,000 inmates.
March 24: The Reichstag passes the Enabling Law, eliminating the Weimar constitution.
April 1: Nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses and professional people. All pamphlets issued by the Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned.
April 7: New public-employee laws are the first to exclude non-Aryans.
April 26: The Gestapo is founded.
May 2: Leaders of labour unions are arrested; their headquarters are occupied by the Nazis.
May 6: Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research is vandalised, and its valuable book and photo collection is set afire.
May 10: Books “inimical to the state” are burned throughout Germany.
June 4: So-called “matrimonial credits” are arranged: parents are to receive 125 marks for each child.
June 27: SA squads storm Jehovah’s Witnesses buildings in Magdeburg: Bibles and books worth millions are burned.
June 30: Additional laws are passed to remove Jews and non-Nazis from the legal professions and the civil service.
July 14: The Nazi Party is declared the only legal party. The denaturalisation of “non-Germanics” means loss of German citizenship for many East European Jews. Laws for the “protection of hereditary health” are enacted (also called “laws for the prevention of racially inferior offspring”). A euthanasia program is developed, and is carried out six years later.
July 20: In Rome an agreement is signed between the new regime and the Vatican.
September 22: The Reich Chamber of Culture is established, under Goebbels. Jews and other “enemies of the state” are excluded.
November 12: The first general election under the one party state is held: 93 percent of the electorate votes for Hitler.
December 1: A law for “security of state and party” is passed.
Throughout 1933, approximately 40,000 Germans are arrested.
1934
March: Soviet Russia passes legislation making homosexual acts punishable by law.
April 20: Himmler is made acting chief of the Gestapo.
June 28: “The Night of Long Knives.” SA chief Ernst Roehm’s associates are murdered, together with three hundred men not connected with his organisation. Roehm is executed two days later. Hitler issues a stern directive that homosexuals are to be expelled from the ranks.
July 3: The Ministry of Justice declares the Roehm purge “to be entirely within the law.” Hirschfeld’s successor, Kurt Hiller, is shipped to Oranienburg, a concentration camp near Berlin. He survives the war.
July 20: The SS is established as an independent organisation under Himmler.
August 2: President Paul von Hindenburg dies.
August 17: A law is passed against “fomenting subversion among the armed forces.”
August 19: Hitler asks the German people to approve his new powers; more than 90 percent do so in a vote.
October-November: The first large wave of arrests of homosexuals occurs throughout Germany.
October 24: A secret letter is sent by the Gestapo to police departments throughout the country, ordering them to submit lists of all men known to be, or to have been, homosexually active.
October 26: A special department on abortion and homosexuality is set up by the Berlin Gestapo under SS Captain Joseph Meisinger.
November 20: Himmler is appointed head of the entire Gestapo organisation.
December 20: A law against “insidious slander” is passed, under which any criticism of the regime, even as a joke, is considered criminal blasphemy.
Throughout 1934, approximately 70,000 Germans are arrested.
1935
March 16: All able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty are drafted for military service.
April: Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned from all civil service jobs and are arrested throughout Germany.
May 21: Only men with proven “Aryan ancestry” can serve in the armed forces.
May 22: The SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps demands the death penalty for homosexual men.
June 28: New Laws are passed concerning Paragraph 175. The SS courts use the law and the new amendments to widen the scope of persecution. They come to regard as felonious almost any conceivable contact, however tenuous, between males.
July: The courts issue several landmark decisions. Any action is punishable as a crime if the “inborn healthy instincts of the German people” demand it. Furthermore, any action can now be punished without a judge’s referring to a specific criminal statute. The basic precepts of Western judicial procedure are thus abolished.
September 14: The Nuremburg laws are enacted as “laws for protection of German blood and honour.” Jews are deprived of civil rights and citizenship. Intermarriage is prohibited. Sexual contacts between Jews and non Jews are considered crimes of “racial desecration.” So-called People’s Courts are established to try cases of racial treason.
October 28: A directive is issued to promote “biological marriage,” under which women are encouraged to produce illegitimate children.
December 12: The “Spring of Life” organisation is established to supply homes and care for unmarried mothers and their children. SS men are to act as studs for childless women.
Throughout 1935, approximately 85,000 Germans are arrested.
1936
February 10: Gestapo actions are declared not legally reviewable.
March 7: The German army reoccupies the Rhineland.
March 29: The SS is increased to 3,500 men.
June: Women are forbidden to act as attorneys and judges. The Institute for Racial Hygiene and Population Biology is founded. The institute deals with asocial groups such as Gypsies.
June 17: Himmler is appointed chief of German police. He now rules all SS and police forces.
July: The first group of Gypsies is sent to Dachau.
August 1: The Olympic Games open in Berlin. Anti-Semitic signs are removed and gay bars are reopened.
August 28: Mass arrests of Jehovah’s Witnesses take place in key cities. Most of them are taken to concentration camps.
September 13: An SS ordinance requires every SS man to produce four children- if not with his wife, then with another woman.
October: Systematic campaign begins against Catholic priests, dignitaries, monks, and schools. They are charged with transferring money illegally, hiding non-Aryans, and engaging in homosexual activities.
October 10: Himmler says that homosexuals must be eliminated as a danger to the German race.
October 25: Italy and Germany sign an alliance pact.
October 26: The Federal Security Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality is established.
November 25: A pact is signed by Japan and Germany; the Japanese are declared “honorary Aryans.”
December 10: Courts rule that “illicit sexual acts” do not have to be acts; intent is what counts. Originally meant for relationships between Jews and non-Jews, the ruling also applies to cases of “homosexual debauchery.”
Throughout 1936, approximately 90,000 Germans are arrested.
1937
February 17: Himmler gives a secret speech before SS leaders in which he says all homosexuals must be eliminated. SS men caught in homosexual acts should be put in concentration camps and then “shot while trying to escape.”
March: Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical denouncing the Nazi regime’s persecution of Catholic clergymen and institutions, a violation of the 1933 agreement.
May: A decree allows unmarried mothers to change their names and those of their illegitimate children.
May 28: In a nationwide radio broadcast, Goebbels says that all Catholic institutions are breeding grounds of homosexual activities.
July 1: Martin Niemoller, pastor of the Protestant Confessional Free Church, is arrested.
Summer: The Ministry of Justice issues an ordinance stating that beating of prisoners is permissible for “purposes of intense interrogation,” but it must be limited to twenty five blows. Hitler orders a stop to anti Catholic trials.
October 29: Himmler issues a special memorandum to the effect that actors and other artists can be arrested for homosexual offences only with his own special permission.
November 5: At the Hossbach Conference, Hitler reveals his plans for the conquest of Europe to the General Staff.
December 14: A confidential ordinance for preventive anticrime legislation is initiated, under which people suspected of being “enemies of the state” can be arrested without any specifically cited reason. They need only be defined as “anti-community-minded.” The same legal concept, previously applied to Jews and homosexuals, is now applicable to all Germans.
1938
January 5-6: Gestapo powers are enlarged. Anybody endangering state security can be taken into protective custody.
January: Chief of Staff General Werner von Fritsch goes on trial for trumped-up homosexual activities.
January 25: General Werner von Blomberg is blackmailed into retiring after allegations concerning his wife’s sexual history are leaked. Hitler assumes the newly created rank of Chief of the Supreme Command of the Army.
January 30: The court finds von Fritsch innocent of all charges.
February 3: Von Fritsch resigns.
March 13: Hitler annexes Austria.
April 4: Himmler issues a directive that men convicted of homosexual crimes can be transferred directly to concentration camps. He will revise the directive in 1940, declaring that they must be transferred.
April 20: Jews must register their possessions.
June 14-15: Jewish businesses must be registered and marked as such. All Jews with police records are arrested.
July 6: An international conference is held in Evian, France, on the problem of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. No country, including the United States, wants them.
July 25: Jewish physicians lose permission to practice.
August 17: Jews must change their first names to Sarah and Israel by January 1939.
September 15: Chamberlain visits Munich and yields Czechoslovakia. In return Hitler promises peace.
November 7: Hershel Grynszpan, a displaced Jewish youth, kills the third secretary of the German embassy, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris.
November 12: “Crystal Night.” Mobs throughout Germany smash and burn Jewish stores and synagogues. Thousands of Jews are arrested. German Jews are fined one billion marks.
November 15: Jewish children are expelled from German schools.
December: All Gypsies must register with the police.
December 13: Compulsory “Aryanisation,” i.e. theft, of all Jewish enterprises begins.
By official count, 170,000 Germans are in various concentration camps.
1939
January 1: The Yearbook of the Reich Central Security Bureau publishes criminal statistics: the names of approximately 33,000 German homosexuals are on record.
January 30: Hitler announces a policy of extermination of European Jews in case of war.
March: All Germans between the ages of ten and eighteen are to be conscripted into the Hitler Youth.
March 15: Bohemia and Moravia become German protectorates.
April: Jehovah’s Witnesses are arrested throughout Germany. Only those who renounce their faith are freed.
April 10: A secret Gestapo report reveals that 302,535 German political prisoners are held in concentration camps.
May 21: Women with four or more children are to be awarded a “Mother Crest.”
June: Two thousand Gypsies from Austria are sent to various camps.
June 5: Illegitimate children of German mothers can be furnished with documents testifying to their “Aryan” ancestry. This enables them to attend school.
July 21: Adolf Eichmann is made director of the Jewish “emigration office” in Prague.
August 23: The German-Russian nonaggression pact is signed.
September 1: Hitler decrees that “those who are, as far as it is humanly possible to judge, incurably sick... may be granted a merciful death.” Mass killings of “unneeded consumers” begins: approximately 70,000 in asylums, 3,000 children in reform schools, up to 20,000 in camps, and all Jewish inmates institutions. Germany invades Poland.
September 3: Britain and France declare war on Germany.
September 5: A new decree against “enemies of the people” as “dangerous deviants” is issued.
September 9: The first group of Austrian homosexuals is shipped to a newly established camp, Mauthausen, near Linz. A decree of the Ministry of the Interior establishes medically supervised brothels for German troops in occupied territories.
September 17: Russian troops enter Eastern Poland.
September 23: German Jews are forbidden to own radios.
October 12: The first deportation of Jews begins from Austria, Moravia, and Bohemia to Poland.
October 21: Reinhard Heydrich organises the elimination of the Gypsies.
October 28: Himmler issues an ordinance encouraging married SS men to have illegitimate children if their wives do not produce the desired number of offspring.
November 23: Jews in occupied Poland must wear a yellow Star of David.
November 25: Foreign workers are to be severely punished for sabotage in industry or the armed forces, or if they have sexual relations with German women. The later is called “racial desecration.”
1940
February 10: First deportation of German Jews to Poland.
April 9: Invasion of Denmark and Norway.
April 30: The first enclosed ghetto is organised in Lodz.
May 10: Germany occupies Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
May 15-18; Gypsies are moved from Germany to the east.
May 30: Hitler issues an unwritten secret order to Hans Frank, chief civilian officer of occupied Poland, that the Polish leadership is to be annihilated completely.
June 22: France capitulates.
July 15: Himmler issues a directive that men arrested for homosexual activities who have seduced more than one partner must be transferred into a camp after serving a prison sentence.
August 13; The Battle of Britain begins.
August 15: Eichmann presents a plan for resettling Jews in Madagascar. The plan is never implemented.
October 22: Further deportation of Jews begins, from southern Germany and Alsace-Lorraine to Auschwitz.
November 15: The Warsaw Ghetto is sealed off.
December: The first mass murder of Jews occurs at Treblinka.
1941
February-April: Seventy two thousand Jews are transported into the Warsaw ghetto.
March 7: A new decree states that German Jews can be used for forced labour in Germany.
May 14: Three thousand six hundred Parisian Jews are arrested by French police forces. Premier Henri Petain pledges collaboration with the Nazis.
June 22: Germany attacks the Soviet Union. A new wave of arrests of all groups occurs throughout Germany.
September 4: New decrees are issued against “deviant criminals”: they must be put to death if “they threaten the health of the German people.” This applies to homosexuals, among others.
September 8: A confidential Gestapo directive orders that henceforth Russian prisoners of war are to be shot.
September 23: The first tests for gassing of prisoners are conducted in Auschwitz.
October-November: Austrian and Czech Gypsies are shipped to the Lodz ghetto.
November-December: Firing squads start shooting German Jews in the East.
November 15: Himmler issues a decree relating to “purity” in the SS and police: any SS officer or policeman caught “engaging in indecent behaviour with another man or allowing himself to be abused by him for indecent purposes will be condemned to death and executed.”
December 7: The Japanese attack Pearl Harbour.
December 8: Japan declares war on the United States and Great Britain.
December 11: Germany declares war on the United States.
1942
January: “The Subhuman” is published by the German government and translated into several languages. Over three million copies are distributed. The brochure contrasts the heroic-handsome features of “Nordic Aryans” with those of “subhumans” such as blacks, SLAVS, Jews, and so forth.
January 20: The Wannsee Conference begins, its purpose being to decide the fate of European Jews: the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” is developed. Himmler and Heydrich are to supervise the roundup and transport of Jews to eastern camps, where they will be exterminated.
February 1-10: An amendment to the 1941 law extends the death penalty to any German male engaging in sexual activity with another male.
March 21: Heydrich decrees that only German homosexuals are to be arrested; those of other nationalities are to be deported from Germany.
March 28: The first transport of French Jews to Auschwitz begins.
June 4: Heydrich, as SS governor in Prague, is assassinated by the Czech underground. In retaliation, the Germans destroy the town of Lidice six days later.
June 23: The first systematic gassings begin Auschwitz.
July 12: Warsaw Ghetto inmates are transported to concentration camps.
July 15: The first prisoners are brought from the Netherlands to Auschwitz.
August 1: A Gestapo ordinance states that German camp inmates can be whipped only by Germans.
August 23: The siege of Stalingrad begins.
August 26-8: Seven thousand Jews are arrested in unoccupied France.
October 4: All Jews still in regional camps are ordered to Auschwitz.
November 7: The Allies land in North Africa.
November 11: Germany invades unoccupied France.
November 22: The Soviet Union starts a counteroffensive.
November 25: The first deportation of Norwegian Jews to Auschwitz begins.
1943
January 14: At the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin announce terms for the “unconditional surrender” of Germany.
February: A roundup of remaining Gypsies occurs throughout Germany.
February 18: German students in Munich rebel against Nazi policies; Sophie and Hans Schell are executed.
March: Himmler orders Dutch Gypsies transported to Auschwitz.
April 19: Warsaw ghetto uprising begins.
May 9-13: German forces in Africa surrender.
May 19: The Gestapo tries to establish jurisdiction over army and navy personnel convicted of homosexual activities. Military leaders have often ignored the orders concerning homosexual behaviour.
June 11: Himmler orders liquidation of all Polish ghettoes.
July 9-11: The Allies land in Sicily.
August 2: Inmates rebel in Treblinka.
September 8: Italy surrenders to the Allies.
October 18: Jews are deported from German occupied Rome.
1944
January 3: Russian troops reach the Polish border.
January 16: Eisenhower assumes command of Allied forces.
February 10: Ernst Kaltenbrunner decrees that foreign workers who have had sexual relations with German women are to be executed.
March 20: Hitler, outraged by his wavering Hungarian ally, occupies that country.
April-June: The Nazis transport 476,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.
June 6: The Allies invade Normandy.
July 20: Klaus von Stauffenberg attempts to assassinate Hitler. The Fuhrer survives. Himmler’s squads execute all real and suspected conspirators.
July 24: Soviet troops liberate Maidanek concentration camp in Poland.
August 1: Poles in Warsaw rise up against the Germans. Soviet troops across the river make no moves.
August 23: Drancy, a concentration camp in France, is liberated by Allied troops.
August 25: De Gaulle enters Paris.
September: Last transports from the Netherlands and France to Auschwitz begin.
October 7: Various attempts are undertaken by prisoners to break out of Auschwitz.
November 3: Russian troops reach Budapest.
November 8-16: Eichmann transports 38,000 Jews from Budapest to Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, and other camps.
November 26: Himmler orders the Auschwitz crematoria destroyed because of approaching Soviet troops.
1945
January 17: Soviet troops enter Warsaw after the Nazis have crushed Polish resistance. Hungarian Jews are liberated by Soviet troops.
January 26: Auschwitz is liberated by the Russians. Approximately 15,000 inmates, mostly Jews, are rescued.
April 13: Vienna is occupied by Soviet troops.
April 15: Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany, is liberated by the British. Approximately 40,000 prisoners are freed.
April 20: American troops enter Nuremburg.
April 23: Mauthausen, near Linz, is taken over by the International Red Cross.
April 28: Dachau is liberated by American troops.
April 28: Mussolini is executed by Italian partisans.
April 30: Hitler commits suicide in his Berlin bunker. American troops liberate about 30,000 inmates from several German camps.
May 2: Berlin capitulates to Soviet troops. Theresienstadt is taken over by the International Red Cross.
May 7: General Alfred Jodl signs Germany’s unconditional surrender at Reims, France.
May 23: Himmler commits suicide.
November 20: The Nuremberg trials begin.
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