Magnus Hirschfeld

The first organised legislative campaign for gay rights began in Berlin in 1897, when Hirschfeld, a physician, co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and launched a petition to the Reichstag to repeal Paragraph 175, the law criminalising sex between men. It gathered thousands of signatures, from Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann among others, and a Reichstag committee voted for reform in 1929 before the measure stalled. The Nazis destroyed his Institute for Sexual Science in 1933 and toughened the law. West Germany kept the Nazi version until 1969 and repealed the paragraph entirely only in 1994.