Academy-award winning documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman direct this harrowing, lyrical look at the persecution of homosexuals during the Third Reich. German historian and member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Klaus Muller interviews the dozen or so surviving victims, now frail and wizened, who recount their experiences. Jewish resistance fighter Gad Beck recalls how he posed as a Hitler Youth in an ultimately vain attempt at saving his lover. One man was freed from a sentence at Dachau only to be interned again a Buchenwald. Another recalls hearing, in the distance, a "singing forest" -- the sound of gays bound and tortured by Nazis in a local grove. Epstein and Friedman fashion a layered narrative consisting not only of interviews but also archival footage depicting background life in Weimar Germany. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
Just when you thought you had heard every last shred of evidence of the barbarity of the Nazi regime comes this documentary about the Third Reich's persecution of homosexuals. And not a moment too soon, for onscreen historian Klaus Müller (a young man who admits he hadn't heard about this aspect of the Third Reich, which may say a lot about the German educational system) managed to track down survivors of this persecution while they still had breath left in them to tell their stories. Narrator Rupert Everett fills in the historical information: that close to 100,000 men were arrested for violating Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code (written in 1871), which stripped anyone convicted of unnatural sexual behavior of his or her rights; that 10,000 to 15,000 of them were sent to camps of some kind for "re-education," which consisted of slave labor, surgical experiments, and castration; that lesbians were considered "curable" in part because the Fatherland considered them vessels for the future generations (conversely, gay men were denying the growth of the nation), but that the social world of gay women was effectively exterminated by the Nazis. In spite of how long Paragraph 175 had been on the books, Berlin in the 1920s is shown here to be a "paradise" for homosexuals with its vibrant and tolerant social scene. As in any good Holocaust documentary, it is the direct testimony of the victims that brings home the horror. "I am ashamed for humanity," says one French man who suffered brutal punishment under Nazi occupation. Another victim talks of spending a night with another young a man, a Jew who was then taken off to Auschwitz the next morning with his mother: "It had a different value then, a night of love," the survivor notes. This is not a story with an especially comforting conclusion, either; after the war, Paragraph 175 remained on the book for decades. "Nobody wanted to hear about it," says a survivor when asked if he ever talked to anyone about his awful experiences, including eight years in various camps. These men are still fighting for status as official victims of Nazi persecution. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Between 1933 and 1945, 100,000 men were arrested under Paragraph 175. Some were imprisoned, others were sent to concentration camps. Only about 4,000 survived; see Paragraph 175 for full details.
In 2000, fewer than ten of these men were known to be living. Five come forward in the documentary to tell their stories for the first time, considered to be among the last untold stories of the Third Reich.
Paragraph 175 tells of a gap in the historical record and reveals the lasting consequences, as told through personal stories of men and women who lived through it: the half-Jewishgayresistance fighter who spent the war helping refugees in Berlin; Annette Eick, the Jewish lesbian who escaped to England with the help of a woman she loved; the German Christian photographer who was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality, then joined the army on his release because he "wanted to be with men"; Pierre Seel, the French Alsatian teenager, who watched as his lover was eaten alive by dogs in the camps.
