Scientific-Humanitarian Committee

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (German: Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, WhK) was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in May 1897, to campaign for social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and against their legal persecution.

The WhK was founded in Berlin-Charlottenburg, a locality of Berlin, on 14 or 15 May 1897 (about four days before Oscar Wilde's release from prison) by Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician, sexologist and outspoken advocate for gender and sexual minorities.

Original members of the WhK included Hirschfeld, publisher Max Spohr, lawyer Eduard Oberg and writer Franz Joseph von Bülow.

The initial focus of the committee was to repeal Paragraph 175, an anti-gay piece of legislation of the Imperial Penal Code, which criminalized "coitus-like" acts between males.

[13] Beginning in 1919 and 1920, the WhK allied with other homosexual rights groups including the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Special) and Deutscher Freundschaftsverband (German Friendship Association) to oppose the law.

[16][17] The committee's opposition was not indiscriminate, as its petition did support preservation of criminal status for some homosexual acts, including cases between an adult and a minor under age 16.

[18] Work on promoting their petition began in 1897, and the committee particularly wanted signatures from those with prominent status in such fields as politics, medicine, art, and science.

After seeing these attacks against Röhm in a newspaper aligned with the SPD, the committee responded, "The statements in the Münchner Post, hearkening back to the Apostle Paul and employing the entire vocabulary of our conservative-clerical persecutors, could have been printed without changing a word by the most strictly Catholic press."

But it was not until November 24, 1929 that his internal competitors, above all the Communist Party (KPD) functionary Richard Linsert, succeeded in forcing Hirschfeld to resign.

He was succeeded by the Medical Councilor Otto Juliusburger, Kurt Hiller was elected Deputy Chairman and the writer Bruno Vogel became the third member of the new board.

[15] The WhK produced the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), a publication which reported the committee's activities and contained content ranging from articles about homosexuality among "primitive" people to literary analyses and case studies.

[26][27] In 1962 in Hamburg, Kurt Hiller, who had survived Nazi concentration camps and continued to fight against anti-gay repression, tried unsuccessfully to re-establish the WhK.

[30] Growing out of a group against politician Volker Beck in that year's election,[31] it is similar in name and general subject matter only, and takes more radical positions than the conservative LSVD.