I had written a thing, but then I went looking for an article and this quote basically sums up what i was saying better:

West Germany reinstated former Nazis in government and kept the same strict Nazi-era sodomy laws, which criminalized any act perceived to be homosexual, including kissing and touching. As a result, the West German government prosecuted more than 100,000 gay men between 1949 and 1969, of whom over 50,000 were convicted. About the same number of gay people were prosecuted and convicted during the Nazi dictatorship, according to Huneke.

Bonus cope in the very next sentence, emphasis mine:

East Germany, on the other hand, repealed Nazi-era laws in an effort to be perceived as anti-fascist,

unfalsifiable orthodoxy, when the reds do good things it’s only to hide their inherently bad nature, ect ect. The whole article is studded with little gems like this, including:

Huneke found that during the Cold War era, communist East Germany had more lenient sodomy laws and accepted gay activists’ demands more quickly than its democratic twin.

If it’s more lenient and more responsive to the people, then how is it not the more democratic? This article is a really good example of idealism, where a clearly better material outcome must be implied to be duplicitious or tainted somehow because the “bad” guys did it. Still, it does get the facts right.

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/12/29/east-germanys-lenient-laws-helped-unified-germany-become-gay-friendly/