GROSS: i do believe most of the individuals who the Department of Blackmail and Homosexuality went after were prostitutes as the division, though we interpreted, did not actually want to pursue, like, the class that is middle. Therefore the assumption, too, i believe, had been that prostitutes who generate income when you look at the intercourse trade had been also ready to generate income through blackmailing the individuals these were – have been spending them to possess intercourse.
But that contributes to, like, a complete other chapter into the tale, that has been that there clearly was plenty of prostitution, male prostitutes, in homosexual Berlin at that time. Therefore let’s simply target, first, how prostitutes had been mostly the folks have been prosecuted, if i am aware precisely, within the part that is blackmail of Department of Blackmail and Homosexuality?
BEACHY: Yeah, that is absolutely cam4 accurate. Particularly because of the start of century that is 20th here appeared to be something such as a scourge of blackmail. It had been just like a plague, and there have been a lot of situations that there clearly was, actually increasingly, some sort of a formal campaign against it. Then when these situations would arrived at test, the blackmailers, a man prostitutes, tended to get much weightier sentences than their victims, even though their victims had been additionally convicted beneath the anti-sodomy statute. And so the blackmail had been considered, definitely, the worst criminal activity.