Paragraph 175

I agree that this is an excellent film. One has to admire the willingness of these men to tell their story after so many years. Paragraph 175 remained as a law in the German Penal Code until the 1970s, which is why the gay survivors were not given the same reparations that other survivors received. I saw this film on cable and am planning to get a copy on DVD. However, a previous comment incorrectly stated that this was the first film on this subject in 67 years. There was an earlier film which interviewed gay male Holocaust survivors. The title is "We Were Marked With a Big Red A." I do not see it listed in IMDb, but I have it on VHS. I purchased it in the bookshop at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. I think that Klaus Müller, who is a consultant to the Holocaust Museum, was also on the crew of this film.

This film is fantastic. What a powerful 80 minutes of film. It was so informative and emotional without shoving anything down your throat. The way the delicate and sensitive subject matters were handled was graceful and respectful. Kudos.

It made me feel angry, sad, and compassion for the people that are struggling to voice their stories without making a fiasco out of what happened to them.

Like so many other documentaries, this one did not try and play with my emotion with overly sappy music or editing. It was simple and precise. The music was haunting and had the perfect mood for the piece. The interviews were not overly edited for dramatic effect, but were simple and honest.

I watched it twice. Cried both times. And I feel more educated and compassionate for renting this great film.

This film is an excellent example of letting people tell their story without embellishing the contextual situation. The extra material added to the interviews is perfectly balanced to put the interviews in their historical and personal context, without unduly expanding the context to overshadow what the (very few) survivors had to tell. Enough information is given about paragraph 175 and it's application during Hitler's reign and after for us to get an insight of its consequences, and the situation of denial of our 'civilised' western countries even today regarding the gay victims of this horror. But the focus is on the survivors' tale, not the context. This technique (too rarely applied) produced an extremely powerful documentary. I have seldom seen such a well balanced work.

Paragraph 175 is a powerful documentary that deals with a provocative subject. I just wish filmmakers Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein had fleshed out the subject a bit more. While this film about gay men who were persecuted and imprisoned under the Nazi regime, is in many respects absorbing, the film ultimately suffers from an overly narrow and constricted focus.

Perhaps the problem was that there were just not enough men alive today who were willing to talk about their experiences. From the outset, the pool of interviewees was certainly going to be limited, but also limited is the actual archival footage of life in the concentration camps.

Instead the directors have chosen to pepper the film with well-preserved family photographs, and lively footage of gay and lesbian culture blossoming during the days of the Weimar Republic after WW1. Sensitively narrated by British actor Rupert Everett, Paragraph 175 is all about the German penal code, which was originally enacted in 1871, and later used by the Nazis, to outlaw homosexuality.

The penal code stated: "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed," But Paragraph 175 was never really enforced until the Nazi's came to power. This documentary centers on six emotional accounts of the most elderly and frail survivors of the concentration camps who, up until now, have repressed their stories.

There's a Jewish gay resistance fighter who posed as a Hitler Youth member to rescue his lover from a Gestapo transfer camp in an ultimately futile effort; a photographer who was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality, who upon his release joined the army because of the lack of men in his hometown and he "wanted to be with men." There's a young man who was freed from a sentence at Dachau only to be interned again at Buchenwald, and a Frenchman imprisoned from Alsace, who breaks down after telling of being raped and subject to inhuman torture. Their stories are indeed heart wrenching, because unlike the Jews, they have forced to live quietly, unable to share their horrific experiences for so long.

It is interesting to note that the penal code didn't cover lesbians. The Nazis considered lesbians to be "curable." Women were regarded, as vessels of motherhood - increasing the German population was top priority - therefore, they were exempt from mass arrest. Most lesbians went into exile or quietly married gay men. One woman, who tells her story in the film, was given exit papers and was lucky enough to escape to England.

The statistics are staggering: Between 1933 and 1945, some 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality, roughly half of them were sentenced to prison, and from 10,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. The camps were used for re-education, slave labor, castration and sadistic medical experiments. It's believed only about 4,000 survived their ordeal.

The situation didn't improve after the war. Paragraph 175 remained in force until the late sixties, so many gay men were re-imprisoned and subject to repeated persecution. In this respect, Epstein and Friedman should be largely commended for bringing this subject to the attention of the world, and telling these powerful personal stories before the last survivors die. Mike Leonard September 05

The golden days of decadent Berlin came to a bloody halt when Hitler's regime took over Germany in the early 1930s and gay men were brought down by simple innuendo and gossip (lesbianism was considered curable, but male homosexuality was "catching"). Early talk of homosexuality in Hitler's ranks precipitated the reinsertion of Paragraph 175, an old anti-sodomy law from the late 1800s, and gays were branded with the lowly Pink Triangle. Forceful documentary on a little talked-about chapter of history has just a handful of elderly witnesses but a superlative presentation of personally-shot footage mixed with telling photographs. Some of the recollections are haunting; the doomed come back to life in these harrowing stories. *** from ****