In general, they seemed to let gay people be, unless someone who was connected to the regime was accused of being a homosexual.” Bumpy road to progress “On the one hand, it wanted to live up to this anti-fascist legacy, but it was also a brutal dictatorship that didn’t want to appear to be gay-friendly. “East Germany was sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Huneke said. And by 1957, East German officials stopped prosecuting consensual adult same-sex relations altogether, Huneke said. About the same number of gay people were prosecuted and convicted during the Nazi dictatorship, according to Huneke.Įast Germany, on the other hand, repealed Nazi-era laws in an effort to be perceived as anti-fascist, and it reverted to the more lenient pre-World War II sodomy law, which only criminalized penetrative sex. As a result, the West German government prosecuted more than 100,000 gay men between 19, of whom over 50,000 were convicted. West Germany reinstated former Nazis in government and kept the same strict Nazi-era sodomy laws, which criminalized any act perceived to be homosexual, including kissing and touching. The twin Germanies split on how they approached homosexuality as soon as the country separated after World War II, Huneke said. He also interviewed Germans who lived through the Cold War and reunification periods.
This gets us thinking about the development of human rights in general and how it functions differently in different places at different times.”Īs part of his research, Huneke examined materials from 10 archives in the United States and Germany, including the records of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. “West Germany is often thought of as this beacon of liberalism, but it was anything but liberating toward gay people, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. “Many of the things that Sam found are surprising to the way most people typically think of West versus East during the Cold War,” said Daughton, who is one of Huneke’s advisers. Samuel Clowes Huneke made some surprising finds when he investigated German history during the Cold War. Daughton, associate professor of modern European history in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. But little work has been done on the post-war period, said J.P. Previous historical research has investigated how gay people fared in Germany during the Weimar period, the interwar years that ran roughly from 1918 to 1933, and during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. Gay rights activism there was surprisingly successful.” Different approaches “But it actually had a lot to do with what was happening in East Germany, which was ruled by a communist dictatorship. “There is an assumption that the state of gay rights in Germany today is something that’s mostly due to events in democratic West Germany, which had a more vibrant gay culture and a more visible gay rights movement during the 1970s,” Huneke said. As a result, East Germany contributed significantly to Germany’s pro-gay turn once the country unified in 1990, in some regards more than West Germany did. Huneke found that during the Cold War era, communist East Germany had more lenient sodomy laws and accepted gay activists’ demands more quickly than its democratic twin. “And that explanation is not an obvious one.” “I started this work with one big question: How does a country go from the Nazi dictatorship to becoming the standard bearer of gay rights that it is today?” said Huneke, who pursued the research as part of his doctoral dissertation. That stark cultural and political change intrigued Stanford researcher Samuel Clowes Huneke, a doctoral candidate in history, who began investigating how East and West Germany dealt with homosexuality from 1945 to 1990. (Image credit: Courtesy of Private Archives of Peter Rausch) Several of East Germany’s gay activists, including well-known transgender woman Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, center, pose for a photo in the 1970s.