The statute of Paragraph 175 was amended several times. The Nazis broadened the law in 1935 and increased its prosecutions by an order of magnitude; thousands died in concentration camps, regardless of guilt or innocence. East Germany reverted to the old version of the law in 1950, limited its scope to sex with youths under 18 in 1968, and abolished it entirely in 1988. West Germany retained the Nazi-era statute until 1969, when it was limited to "qualified cases"; it was further attenuated in 1973 and finally revoked entirely in 1994 after German reunification.
"An unnatural sex act committed between persons of the male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed." (Paragraph 175, German Penal Code, 1871)
Of the pink-triangle prisoners send to the Nazi concentration camps due to Paragraph 175, an estimated 10,000 men managed to survive to the end of World War II. Several of them were later transferred from the concentration camps to regular prisons, where they continued to serve their sentences.
From 1935 to 1945, the Gestapo were authorized to arrest and imprison suspected offenders of Paragraph 175. Several of the imprisoned suspects had either never received a formal trial, or had previously been acquitted in court.
In 2002, the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) of Germany formally annulled all convictions of Paragraph 175-related sex crimes performed during the Nazi era (1933-1945) and in effect pardoned the convicts (most of them posthumously). However it declared the convictions from 1945 to 1969 to still be part of the formal record, despite being based on a Nazi-era law. In 2016 and 2017, the Federal Ministry of Justice declared those convictions to have been illegal as well, and offered formal pardons to either the surviving former convicts or to their surviving family members.
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