Many Obstacles in a Complex Story of Persecution

“Paragraph 175,” the new documentary from Oscar-winning producers-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Life and Times of Harvey Milk,” “Common Threads”) about the persecution of homosexuals by the Third Reich, probably should have been made 10 or 20 years ago. The problem, say the filmmakers, is that they weren’t ready to make a film about one of the last untold Holocaust stories, and it wasn’t ready to be made.

At the time, says Friedman, they were not as assured and seasoned as filmmakers to do full justice to the more ambiguous aspects of the story. The political climate was not hospitable either. “Back then, gay people were very hungry for positive images to counter all the negative images about them,” he says. To properly tell this story, he continues, it couldn’t be easily broken down into heroes and villains. For instance, one of the men interviewed for the film was a member of the Hitler Youth. Another, after spending three years in prison for his homosexuality, joined the German army.

An even knottier problem was that the gay men who survived the Nazi atrocities were largely in hiding and unwilling to tell their stories. Even in the completed film, their initial reticence is almost palpable. One man, Heinz F., would not allow his family name to be used and initially would only agree to be photographed in silhouette. Epstein and Friedman eventually persuaded him to appear on camera.

Unlike with the Jewish genocide, after World War II there was no outrage or condemnation of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In the film, Dr. Klaus Muller, a historian who helped the San Francisco-based filmmakers gain access to survivors, tells of growing up in ignorance of the treatment of homosexuals by the Nazis. Through his research efforts, Muller convinced the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to include the plight of gays among its exhibitions.

Muller approached Epstein and Friedman with the idea for “Paragraph 175” at the Berlin Film Festival in 1997, when they were promoting “The Celluloid Closet,” their documentary about the portrayal of gays and lesbians in motion pictures. “He told us it was basically now or never,” says Epstein, “since only a few survivors were still alive. We had to act quickly. Even so, some of the people we wanted to interview died before we were ready.”

The title of the film refers to a section of the German penal code that dealt with sexual relations between men (but not women) and bestiality. Though it had been enacted in 1871, Paragraph 175 was not stringently enforced until the mid-’30s. After closing down gay establishments, the Third Reich arrested about 100,000 men for homosexuality, sometimes based merely on hearsay. About 10,000 to 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps, where about 60% died. By 1945, only about 4,000 were still alive, and they continued to be persecuted. Heinz Dormer, one of the men interviewed in the film was re-arrested in 1949, 1951 and 1959, and spent another eight years in prison. The law was not revoked until 1969.

“We were dealing with a generation of men for whom homosexuality equaled shame,” says Epstein. It was a difficult hurdle to overcome. “The day we spent with Pierre Seel was touch and go the whole time. He clearly wanted to talk, but it was unbelievably painful.” Seel had been arrested at age 17 and was one of the prisoners conscripted to build the crematorium at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. Afterward, he was forced to join the German army. After the war, his family only took him back provided that he never reveal why he’d been arrested.

Like many German Jews, some homosexuals saw themselves as German citizens first and thought their allegiance to the fatherland would protect them. “It was inconceivable to them that closing down of gay bars would lead to being sent to concentration camps,” says Friedman, who adds, “Once there, there was no solidarity among gays as there was with Jews. There was no one to communicate or commiserate with.”

Unlike Jews who survived the concentration camps and went to live elsewhere, many of the Nazis’ gay victims remained in Germany under a self-imposed silence. “They went back to their towns and were expected to act as if nothing had happened,” says Epstein. “It was never spoken of, as if their arrest for homosexual activity was deserved.”

‘We Didn’t Want to Perpetuate a Mythology’

The individual stories in “Paragraph 175” are fraught with irony and contradictions. Although gays were actively persecuted and imprisoned by the Nazis, the Allies continued to vilify the Third Reich as pederasts and perverts, based on the homosexuality of one of Hitler’s early lieutenants, Ernst Roehm, who was murdered in the infamous Night of the Long Knives massacre in 1934, and their glorification of the ubermensch Aryan race with its emphasis on the beauty of the male body.

Ultimately, says Epstein, they had to embrace the complexities of the story to do it justice. “We didn’t want to perpetuate a mythology,” he says. And, adds Friedman, “we didn’t want to add to the feeling that just because you’re a victim it necessarily makes you a good person.”

They also didn’t want to be caught in justifying their story in the hierarchy of suffering. Unlike the Jews, gays were spared the crematoria and ovens. Their destruction was not as wholesale and systematic. “Our mandate was to tell this story specifically,” says Epstein. “We didn’t want to compare gays to the victims of the Holocaust. It’s the same argument that occurred when the fight for gay rights was compared to the civil rights struggle. It was, perhaps, not an appropriate analogy, but that doesn’t mean the struggle for gay rights wasn’t important and significant.”

“The Nazis did a lot of horrible things,” adds Friedman. “And this was one of them. It’s appropriate to look at everything they did.”

Having won two Oscars for their previous efforts and the director’s award for “Paragraph 175” at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Friedman and Epstein were disappointed that the film was overlooked in this year’s Academy Award nominations for best documentary. “We didn’t even place in the 12 preliminary finalists,” says Friedman. They can only guess why the film wasn’t included. “Maybe the moral arguments of the story were too complicated,” says Epstein. “Maybe there was too much sex. The men we interviewed were refreshingly happy to talk about their sexual exploits and they even had photos. I think talking about gay male sexuality still makes some people uncomfortable.”

They are developing three projects, which they are comfortable describing only in broad strokes. The first is about the ethics of genetic engineering. “That’s as specific as we want to get right now,” says Friedman. Another project focuses on gender identity, and the third on men in prison. With two Oscars under their belt, are they having an easier time raising money for their documentaries? (HBO and Britain’s Channel Four were among the contributors to “Paragraph 175.”)

“Not really,” says Epstein. “Well, yes and no,” interjects Friedman. “It takes us one or two years [to finance their films] instead of five.”