He was 11 when his father was killed in World War I. After his mother died, he and his sister Ina were raised by two elderly aunts. After graduating from school, Friedrich-Paul trained to be a merchant. Friedrich-Paul was imprisoned for 10 months. In he was re-arrested, humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally released him, but only on the condition that he agree to be castrated.
Friedrich-Paul submitted to the operation. In he was arrested again, this time for being a monarchist, a supporter of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality between and This campaign persecuted men who had sexual relations with other men. It is unclear how many of these men publicly or privately identified as gay or were part of gay communities and networks that had been established in Germany before the Nazi rise to power. Beginning in , the Nazi regime harassed and dismantled these communities.
They also arrested large numbers of gay men under Paragraph Paragraph was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men. During the Nazi period, the police arrested about , men for allegedly violating this statute.
Approximately fifty percent of these men were convicted. In some cases, this led to their imprisonment in concentration camps. It is important to note that not all of the men arrested and convicted under Paragraph identified as gay. However, any man who had sexual relations with another man faced potential arrest in Nazi Germany, regardless of how he understood his own sexuality.
Identifying as a gay man was never explicitly criminalized in Germany. Gay men in Germany were not a monolithic group, nor did the Nazi regime view them as such. Being gay could and often did result in persecution. Among them were supposed racial identity, political attitudes, social class, and cultural expectations about how men and women should behave i.
