The non-criminalization of female homosexuality meant that lesbians were not intensively prosecuted in the same way or to the same degree as homosexual men. But they did suffer, for example, the same destruction of clubs ans other organizations of the homosexual subculture, the banning of its papers and magazines, the closure or surveillance of the bars at which they met.

This led to a dispersal of lesbian women and their withdrawal into private circles of friends. Many broke off all contacts for fear of discovery and even changed their place of residence. A collective lesbian life-style and identity, which had begun to take shape since the turn of the century and especially in the years of the Weimar Republic, was destroyed when the Nazis came to power, and the effects would last well beyond the end of the Third Reich.

The exemption of female homosexuality from penal sanctions was one major reason why the registration and prosecution bodies set up within the Gestapo and the Criminal Police in the wake of Röhm's murder in June 1934 mainly concentrated on the male homosexual "enemy of the State". The paucity of sources makes it impossible to gauge the extent to which lesbian women were also being compulsory registered -- for example, as a result of denunciation to authorities. Scattered evidence indicates that reports were collected about lesbians by the police and also by other organizations such as the Race Policy Bureau of the NSDAP. But the scale of this is unknown -- nor, above all, the consequences which followed from it.

In only a few cases can it be demonstrated that women were tried on the pretext of other offenses but in reality because of their homosexuality. In one documented instance female homosexuality was cited by the administration of the Ravensbrück concentration camp as the grounds of detention. Thus, on 30 November 1940, the transportation list for this women's camp names the day's eleventh 'admission' as the non-Jewish Elli S., exactly 26 years of age. The term 'lesbian' actually appears in the entry as the reason for detention. Elli S. was apparently put among the political prisoners but nothing further is known of her fate.

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