Scientific-Humanitarian Committee

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, WhK) was founded in Berlin on 14 or 15 May 1897, to campaign for social recognition of gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, and against their legal persecution. It was the first LGBT rights organization in history.

The WhK was founded on 15 May 1897 (four days before Oscar Wilde's release from prison) by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish-German physician, sexologist and outspoken advocate for gender and sexual minorities. Original members of the WhK included physician Magnus Hirschfeld, publisher Max Spohr, lawyer Eduard Oberg and writer Franz Joseph von Bülow. Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedländer, and Kurt Hiller also joined the organisation. A split happened in 1903. In 1929, Hiller took over as chairman of the group from Hirschfeld. At its peak, the WhK had about 500 members, and branches in approximately 25 cities in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

This book, and other that may have survived the destruction of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, are sought after by the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft in Berlin.

The Committee was based in the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, until 1933 when it was destroyed by the Nazis, from which it took a great deal of scientific theories on human sexuality – such as the idea of a third sex between a man and a woman. 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, and the goal of this categorization of human sexuality was to demonstrate the innateness of homosexuality and thus make the criminal law against male-male gay sex in Germany at the time inapplicable.

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