Hiller met Schultz in a concentration camp in 1934, where Schultz had been interned because of his involvement with the German Communist Party in their fight against the rise of the Nazis. They both fled to Prague that year and to London in 1938. Schultz returned to Germany in 1945. There he found a position with the North German Radio in Hannover and was its director from 1961 until his death in 1964; he was buried in Hamburg, his city of birth.

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Although Hiller was deeply in love with him, Schultz has been described as "sexually ambiguous." He was married twice, but, according to Hiller, he did not find the fulfillment he desired in either marriage.

In his last years Hiller wrote a two-volume biography, Leben gegen die Zeit (Life against the times). The first volume, Logos (1969), concentrates on intellectual and political issues, and includes descriptions of his experience in concentration camps. The second, Eros (1973), is and, as he directed, was published only after his death. He died in Hamburg on October 1, 1972. After his body was cremated, the urn with his ashes was placed in the grave of his friend Walter Detlef Schultz.

Hiller left a large literary estate, including some 20,000 letters. For thirty years his executor, Horst H. W. Müller, allowed no one to inspect it. But after Müller's death it was acquired by the Hiller-Gesellschaft, which was founded by a group of researchers in 1998 on the occasion of a Hiller Exhibition in the library of the University of Hamburg. Its purpose is to keep alive the memory of Kurt Hiller, to research his life and work, and to make them known to the public. Much information about Hiller may be found at their web site: www.hiller-gesellschaft.de.

Notable in the twentieth century both for its pioneering efforts in homosexual emancipation and for the subsequent Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Berlin is now a major participant in the struggle to gain legal recognition of gay relationships.

While Germany, until recently, never officially accepted or welcomed members of the glbtq community, German culture and homosexuality have a long and significant history.

The homophile movement of the United States refers to organizations and political strategies employed by homosexuals from the end of World War II to 1970.

As part of its agenda to preserve an "Aryan master race," Nazism persecuted homosexuals as "asocial parasites"; more than 100,000 men were arrested on homosexual charges during the Nazi years, with 5,000-15,000 gay men incarcerated in concentration camps.

The capital and largest city of the Czech Republic, Prague is the hub of the country's gay and lesbian life and the center of its glbtq political movement.

Editor, photographer, and activist, Adolf Brand was the leader of a faction of the early German homosexual emancipation movement whose cultural views were expressed in Der Eigene (The Self-Owner), the first homosexual literary and artistic journal.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

Swiss actor, cabaret performer, and stage director Karl Meier was, under the pseudonym "Rolf," editor of Der Kreis, the leading European homophile publication, from 1943 until its demise in 1967.

Paragraph 175 was the German law prohibiting sex between men; strengthened by the Nazis, it was the statue under which homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.