English abstract
Christian-Alexander Wäldner uses a file, which was long considered as lost, to trace the life story of a central figure of the homosexual subculture and the persecution of homosexuals in Hanover from the end of the 1920s to the mid-1930s. Hermann L. died in a concentration camp 1936. His criminal prosecution file contains extensive material on the life of a homosexual man in the transition phase from the Weimar Republic to the first years of the Nazi dictatorship. Material like this is rarely documented in such detail and preserved so well.
L. was a victim of the national socialist persecution of homosexuals. At the same time he was responsible for the denunciation and arrest of many homosexual men in the Hanover region, after his own imprisonment and repeated criminal conviction under § 175 RStGB. The author nevertheless supports the installation of a "Stolperstein" to the memory of Hermann L.