PARAGRAPH 175Worthy documentary about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, narrated by Rupert Everett.Running time: 76 minutes. Not rated. In German and French with English subtitles. At Film Forum, Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street.
THE title of the movie “Paragraph 175” refers to Germany’s anti-sodomy law of 1871, which was expanded by the Nazis to justify the arrest of as many as 100,000 men they suspected to be homosexuals, only eight of whom are still known to be alive.
Six of them – ranging in age from 78 to 94 – tell their stories in this absorbing documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Celluloid Closet”), which begins with a vivid portrait of what one survivor calls the “homosexual Eden” of the Weimar Republic, where gays openly proclaimed their preferences.
But things turned horrific with the rise of Hitler, whose response to accusations that some of his top lieutenants were closeted gays was to add male homosexuals to the list of those being shipped off to concentration camps – along with Jews, Gypsies and political dissidents.
Partly because most of them were gentiles, few gays ended up in the gas chambers. But as many as 15,000 died while being used as forced labor or for hideous medical experiments. (Lesbians were spared arrest because their sexual preference was considered a temporary, reversible condition – but they were forced underground or left the country altogether).
One of the men, a resistance fighter, recalls posing as a Hitler Youth to rescue his Jewish boyfriend (both were 18) – who perished when he refused to leave his family, who were sent to a death camp.
Another bitterly recalls his unsuccessful, decade-long struggle to receive compensation for the unspeakable torture he suffered from the German government, which has never acknowledged the persecution of gays. (Paragraph 175 remained on the books until 1969).
Narrated by Rupert Everett with well-chosen archival footage, “Paragraph 175” is a worthy addition to the growing canon of Holocaust documentaries.