Did the Weimar Republic have laws on child prostitution before 1933?
Executive summary
The Weimar Republic did have a regulatory and reforming legal framework for prostitution—culminating in a 1927 law on venereal disease that effectively shifted policy away from punitive, registry-based policing toward medico‑social controls and partial decriminalization of adult prostitution [1] [2] [3]. However, the sources provided do not establish a clear, explicit statutory regime before 1933 that specifically and comprehensively criminalized or regulated "child prostitution" as a distinct legal category comparable to modern age‑of‑consent or child‑protection statutes; the record in these materials is ambiguous and sometimes conflates later or modern provisions with Weimar practice [4] [5].
1. The legal context: state regulation and the 1927 anti‑VD law
Weimar-era prostitution policy grew out of an older system of state regulation in which only women who submitted to compulsory medical examinations and heavy restrictions were tolerated by police; reformers and parts of the political mainstream pushed to change that system, and the key legislative milestone was the 1927 law aimed at combating venereal disease, which linked public‑health measures to a decriminalizing tendency for adult prostitution while also expanding intrusive controls such as mandatory medical treatment for infected persons [3] [1] [2]. Historians emphasize that the 1927 law was controversial: it was presented as both a progressive public‑health reform and a continuation of discriminatory state control—especially against women—because sanitary measures could reinforce policing of female sexuality even as the formal criminal status of some behaviors shifted [2].
2. What the sources say — and do not say — about minors
Several popular and polemical accounts claim widespread child prostitution in Weimar Berlin, but the scholarly and archival sources cited here are more cautious: they document a climate of visible street prostitution, sexual commodification, and political debate about brothels and public order, and they confirm reform efforts and propaganda campaigns about sexual danger, including the occupation‑era brothel controversies, rather than a clear legislative package focused specifically on minors [4] [6] [7]. One close legal cue in the record is evidence of parliamentary debate over criminal‑law reform that touched on provisions like Paragraph 296, but according to the sources a number of proposed reforms were discussed and some were not passed before the Republic’s collapse—so the legislative map on offenses involving minors remained unsettled in the late Weimar years [5]. In short, the supplied materials do not supply a direct citation to a Weimar statute that explicitly defines or criminalizes "child prostitution" in the way modern criminal codes do.
3. Modern summaries and retrospective claims: caution required
Secondary summaries and encyclopedic pages sometimes present current German criminal‑law norms (e.g., prohibitions on pimping and brothel access for persons under 18) alongside historical description of Weimar, which risks conflating periods; Wikipedia’s article on prostitution, for instance, outlines present‑day age limits and criminal provisions but does not by itself prove those identical rules applied before 1933 [4]. Popular or ideological pieces that depict Weimar as a free‑for‑all sexual “decadence” including child prostitution tend to overstate or sensationalize anecdotes; scholarly works collected here (monographs and articles) emphasize contested reform, public‑health rationales, and political compromise rather than clear evidence of a comprehensive child‑protection statute enacted across the Republic before 1933 [8] [3] [2].
4. Competing interpretations and what remains unresolved
Scholars agree that Weimar sexual politics were complex and produced compromises—some liberalizing, some coercive—and that debates over prostitution reform were politically salient and tied to broader battles over gender and the state [8] [3]. Where the record supplied here is inconclusive is on whether a distinct legal regime governing sexual exploitation of minors (a discrete "child‑prostitution" law) existed uniformly before 1933; the answer from these sources is that while measures regulated prostitution and attempted criminal‑law reform was debated, explicit, uniformly enforced child‑protection statutes prior to 1933 are not clearly documented in this set of materials [2] [5]. Further primary‑law study (statute texts, Reichstag debates, state police codes) would be necessary to settle the question definitively.