Fears concerning sexual intransigence, deviance, and seduc tion have a long history in Germany, as elsewhere, surfacing in sexual scandals, medical texts, psychiatrist notations, the columns of newspapers and boulevard press, and in debates about the criminalization of same-sex relations. 1 By the end of the Weimar Republic, both opponents and supporters of decriminalization agreed that adolescents were particularly vulnerable to seduction by adult male homosexuals. The Nazis relied on this idea when they expanded Paragraph 175 in 1935, adding a new para graph, 175a, to the legal code to address intergenerational sex, male prosti tution, and the threat of seduction.

Just as Nazi Germany expanded the Criminal Code as part of its social revolution, similarly, Stalin's Soviet Union (USSR) treated homosexual ity as suspicious activity linked to sabotage, espionage, and a lack of politi cal reliability. The USSR's most celebrated playwright Maxim Gorky was unequivocal in 1934 in seeing homosexuality as antithetical to the tenets of communism:" exterminate homosexuals and fascism (itself) will disap pear." Homophobia ran rampant across the political spectrum. Like the Nazis, the USSR's People's Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko thought homosexuals were sexual pariahs, who" in filthy little dens and hiding places" made elaborate plans to corrupt the innocence of youth