Paragraph 175

Paragraph 175 of the German penal code was written in 1871 and made relations between men a crime. In 1935 the Nazis widened it and hardened its enforcement. Between 1933 and 1945 some hundred thousand men were arrested under it; some went to prison, some to the camps, and very few of those sent to the camps survived. The paragraph stayed on the books after the war; men who came out of the camps received no compensation, and most of them never spoke. The documentary finds a handful of survivors and gets them to tell it for the first time. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman direct together; seventy-four minutes, narrated by Rupert Everett. Among those speaking are Heinz Dörmer, Gad Beck, Pierre Seel, and Annette Eick, who managed to get out of Germany. Epstein and Friedman had previously made The Celluloid Closet.