Paul Hugo Biederich

Paul Hugo Biederich (* 1907 ; † 1968 ) was a German lawyer, police officer and political activist. Biederich became known as a senior Gestapo official in the 1930s and as an activist in favor of the decriminalization of homosexuality in the young Federal Republic in the 1950s.

Life

After attending school, Biederich studied law . 1933 doctorate he with a dissertation on an issue of fraud law at the University of Kiel to Dr. jur .

After the National Socialists came to power , Biederich was accepted into the Secret State Police , where he made it up to the head of the Gestapo in Potsdam. He also became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS).

In 1938, Biederich was arrested for homosexual relationships he had with a nineteen-year-old and charged with violating Section 175 of the Criminal Code before the 1st Large Criminal Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court. The proceedings ended with a conviction, whereby Biederich's SS and Gestapo membership was assessed as aggravating the penalty in the sense of the National Socialist regime. In 1955 a federal German court found that the 1938 verdict was politically oriented and that when it came to the verdict, "essentially aspects were decisive which, from a constitutional point of view, could never have been considered to increase the penalty." The judges of 1938 linked Biederich's “act” with the Röhm affair and with the attitude of the Nazi regime to the question of the treatment of homosexuality.

After 1945, according to Pretzel, Biedrich was one of the most dedicated homosexual lawyers in West Germany, alongside Werner Hesse. He also advocated the abolition of Section 175 . For example, in 1957 he represented a client before the Karlsruhe Federal Constitutional Court who was suing against the continued validity of the National Socialist Homosexual Act. Together with the psychiatrist Hans Giese , Biederich wrote a petition to the Bundestag in 1951, in which he urged a reform of homosexual criminal law. For Giese's Institute for Sex Research, he also worked for years as legal advisor. Together with the psychiatrist Leo Dembicki , Biederich again published in 1951 a representation of the American Kinsey report aimed at a popular readership . There were also numerous articles that Biederich published in magazines of the homosexual movement of the post-war period, although, unusual for the 1950s, he did not use a pseudonym .

Fonts

• Failure to report property properties in criminal fraud , 1933.
• Paragraph 175. The homosexuality , Hamburg 1950.
• Man's sexuality. Presentation and criticism of the Kinsey Report , Regensburg 1951. (together with Leo Dembicki)
• Reply to the text "The Third Sex" by the District Court Councilor R. Gatzweiler, Bonn , Hamburg 1951.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Andreas Pretzel : Applications for criminal rehabilitation, in: Ders .: Nazi victims under reservation. Homosexual men in Berlin after 1945 , 2002, p. 111f ..
2. ↑ Andreas Pretzel: Applications for criminal rehabilitation, in: Ders .: Nazi victims under reservation. Homosexual men in Berlin after 1945 , 2002, p. 112.