Paragraph 175 of Germany's Criminal Code is aimed against homosexuals and makes the act a punishable crime. During a recent visit to Hamburg, a subscriber of ONE met with Dr. Kurt Hiller who is the author of the Petition to abolish Par. 175. Both Dr. Hiller and ONE's subscriber had been active in Berlin during the period before and after the World War I, joining with Magnus Hirschfeld in the Wissenschaftlich Humanitaere Komitee which first asked for a change in the law.

Despite his old age Dr. Hiller has preserved his fighting spirit, and has founded in Hamburg together with some younger and enthusiastic members a new Committee. They have prepared the Petition for the German House of Representatives, to be heard in November, asking for the abolition of this ominous Par. 175. Although the editors of ONE feel the Petition is weak and negatively worded, we print it hoping that German-American readers may became aware of the movement of law reform in Germany and wish to support it. We wish for Dr. Hiller and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee every success.

A PETITION

The undersigned Association asks for the understanding, and if possible the support, of the progress minded part of the German nation on behalf of the petition which follows, and which is a resumption of the famous, controversial, and by now historic work of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (1897-1933) founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld.

The humanitarian movement has met with some considerable, though not total, success in several countries, including Germany, in the realization of such goals as: the lessening and, hopefully, the elimination of the cruelties of warfare, the emancipation of women, the liberation of the proletariat from slavery, racial equality, and the protection of religious and national minorities. However, in a few countries, including Germany, despite intense efforts on the part of scientists and jurists, another minority, a biological one which varies in the nature of the love drive, namely the homosexual, has failed to achieve its civil rights.

On October 16, 1929, the goal had nearly been reached-on that day the Commission for Law Reform of the German Reichstag voted 15 to 13 in favor of a resolution to repeal Para-

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graph 175 of the proposed new Criminal Code. One of the majority was the president of the committee, Prof. Wilhelm Kahl, a member of the German People's Party. That petition of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which had been circulating for years and which had asked for this change in the law, had been signed by nearly the whole of the literate German-speaking world of that pe-

riod:

(Editor's Note: We omit, for the sake of brevity, a distinguished list of jurists, medical authorities, political figures, philosophers, scholars, writers, poets, artists, critics, industrialists, publishers, etc. To name only a sample: Ivan Bloch, Albert Eulenberg, Karl Jaspers, Krafft-Ebing, Eugene Steinach, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, George Grosz, Maxmillian Harden, Gerhard Hauptmann, Herman Hesse, Catherine Kollwitz, Theodore Lessing, Thomas Mann, Jacob Wasserman, Felix Weingartner . . .)

The outbreak and the tragic prolongation of the great crisis of 1929 prevented the Plenum of the German Reichstag from discussing the resolution of its Committee, and indeed from discussing the proposed law reform in general. The brown dictatorship, instead of liberalizing the law,