Made by the Academy Award winning team responsible for Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt, Paragraph 175 is an excellent documentary that explores the haunting memories of a group of gay and lesbian Holocaust survivors with subtlety.

Paragraph 175 was added to the Reich Penal Code in 1871. Its exact wording:

An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights might also be imposed.

In Weimar Germany, when Berlin was known throughout the world as a "gay Eden" the law was rarely deployed, and there was expectations it would be reformed or just forgotten. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, Paragraph 175 began to be more strictly enforced. After the Night of the Long Knives in 1935, when Ernst Roem, Hitler's confidant and head of the SA who was said to be gay, the persecution of homosexuals began in earnest, including the deportation of around one hundred thousnad homosexual men to concentration camps where they reportedly sat on the lowest social rung, beneath Russian POWS and even Jews.

Pierre Seel was deported to the Shirmeck camp in 1941. Still alive and angrily seeking reparations or at least recognition for homosexual victims of Nazi persecution, Seel published his memoirs in 1995. His appearances in this film show him endearingly cantakerous, heartbroken, and vital. He relates how he and others were anally raped with planks of wood, their bowels punctured in some cases - Seel says that his "ass still bleeds today". At Shirmeck, he was forced to watch his friend, Jo, be dragged into the central square, and eaten alive by Alsatian dogs.

Annette Eick escaped to London with the help of a Marlene Dietrich lookalike she had a crush on. Heinz Dörmer lost almost twenty years of his life in various concentration camps and prisons, but it is the teary, cathartic reflections of Heinz F. who was sent to Dachau and who - still apparently hesitant to reveal his full name - tells some of his story for the first time in this film that is the Paragraph 175's most chilling and heartbreaking interview.

Paragraph 175 was amended in 1973 and eventually repealed in 1994. The deplorable "what persecution?" approach throughout the world to homosexual victims of the Nazis, men who were targetted as deliberately and relentlessly as Jews, gypsies and communists, is a particularly sour note in the clumsy tune of our Holocaust understanding. The German government finally issued a formal apology to gay victims of the Nazis in 2001, a year after the release of this film.

Oh, and Rupert Everett's narration, like the rest of the film, is solemn, spare and respectful.

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