Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Memorial "to the gay and lesbian victims of National Socialism" in Cologne: The inscription on the left side of the monument (to the viewer's right from the angle depicted) reads "Totgeschlagen – Totgeschwiegen" ("Struck Dead – Hushed Up").
The pink triangle, rendered in hot pink as a gay pride and gay rights symbol, was originally rendered in pink and used pointed downward on a Nazi concentration camp badge to denote homosexual men.

Upon the rise of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party) in Germany, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of the numerous groups targeted by the Nazis and were ultimately among Holocaust victims. Beginning in 1933, gay organizations were banned, scholarly books about homosexuality, and sexuality in general (such as those from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, run by Jewish gay rights campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld), were burned, and homosexuals within the Nazi Party itself were murdered. The Gestapo compiled lists of homosexuals, who were compelled to sexually conform to the "German norm."

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of whom some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of those sentenced were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps.[1] It is unclear how many of the 5,000 to 15,000 would die in the camps, but leading scholar Rüdiger Lautmann believes that the death rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in the camps suffered an unusual degree of cruelty by their captors. These estimates include only individuals singled out for their sexual orientation. Many others had already been sent to the camps simply based on their religion without need of other justification. Little study has been done to estimate the number of Jewish homosexuals who died in the camps. Gad Beck was the last known gay Jewish person to survive the camps.[2]

After the war, the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries, and some men were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980s that governments began to acknowledge this episode, and not until 2002 that the German government apologized to the gay community.[3] In 2005, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Holocaust which included the persecution of homosexuals.[4]

Purge

On May 10, 1933, Nazis in Berlin burned works of Jewish authors, the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and other works considered "un-German".

Prussia, the largest and most populous of the Länder, did not enforce Paragraph 175 under the leadership of the Social Democratic Otto Braun from 1918 to 1932, which had the effect of making Prussia into a haven for homosexuals all across Germany. In the 1920s, gay culture had flourished in Prussia, especially Berlin, which was known as the "homosexual capital of Europe", and many homosexuals had come out of the closet.[5] Germany under the Weimar Republic was characterized by a sort of cultural war between the traditional conservative culture and the avant-garde Weimar culture, and the tolerance shown to homosexuals in Prussia was often used by conservatives as an example of the "depravity" and "un-German" nature of Weimar culture.[5] The tolerance towards homosexuals in Prussia had ended after Chancellor Franz von Papen had deposed Braun in 1932, and starting in 1933, gay culture in Germany "went completely underground".[5] On 30 January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor with Papen as the Reich Commissioner of Prussia.

The aim of the National Socialist regime was the creation of the idealised Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community") that would unite the German people into one, and which required the removal of all who either would not join the Volksgemeinschaft or those who considered to be racially "unfit" to join the Volksgemeinschaft. The German historian Detlev Peukert wrote the basis of Nazi thinking about the Volksgemeinschaft was "Its basis was the racialist elimination of all elements that deviated from the norm: refractory youth, idlers, the asocial, prostitutes, homosexuals, people who were incompetent or failures at work, the disabled. National Socialist eugenics...laid down criteria of assessment that were applicable to the population at whole".[6]

In late February 1933, as the moderating influence of Ernst Röhm weakened, the Nazi Party launched its purge of homosexual (gay, lesbian, and bisexual; then known as homophile) clubs in Berlin, outlawed sex publications, and banned organized gay groups. As a consequence, many fled Germany (e.g., Erika Mann, Richard Plant). Röhm himself was gay, but he had ascribed to an ultra-macho "hard" image and despised the "soft" homosexuals. A climate of fear took hold over the homosexual community, with – for example – many lesbians getting married to avoid being sent to the concentration camps that had first appeared in March 1933. The Prussian police launched a series of raids to shut down gay bars and Paragraph 175 was enforced with a new degree of strictness and vigor.[5]

In March 1933, Kurt Hiller, the main organizer of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research, was sent to a concentration camp. On May 6, 1933, Nazi Youth of the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organized attack on the Institute of Sex Research. A few days later on May 10, the Institute's library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Around 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed. Also seized were the Institute's extensive lists of names and addresses of homosexuals.[7] In the midst of the burning, Joseph Goebbels gave a political speech to a crowd of around 40,000 people.

Hitler initially protected Röhm from other elements of the Nazi Party which held his homosexuality to be a violation of the party's strong anti-gay policy. However, Hitler later changed course when he perceived Röhm to be a potential threat to his power. During the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, a purge of those whom Hitler deemed threats to his power, he had Röhm murdered and used Röhm's homosexuality as a justification to suppress outrage within the ranks of the SA. After solidifying his power, Hitler would include gay men among those sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Heinrich Himmler had initially been a supporter of Röhm, arguing that the charges of homosexuality against him were manufactured by Jews. But after the purge, Hitler elevated Himmler's status and he became very active in the suppression of homosexuality. He exclaimed, "We must exterminate these people root and branch... the homosexual must be eliminated."[8]

Shortly after the purge in 1934, a special division of the Gestapo was instituted to compile lists of gay individuals. In 1936, Himmler created the Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung (Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion).

Nazi Germany thought of German gay men as against the plan of creating a "master race" and sought to force them into sexual and social conformity. Gay men who would not change or feign a change in their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the "Extermination Through Work" campaign.[9]

More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were serving prison terms as "convicted homosexuals".[1] Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order.[10]

Some persecuted under these laws would not have identified themselves as gay. Such "anti-homosexual" laws were widespread throughout the western world until the 1960s and 1970s, so many gay men did not feel safe to come forward with their stories until the 1970s when many so-called "sodomy laws" were repealed.

For a variety of reasons lesbians were not widely persecuted in the Nazi period.[11] However, there are a number of recorded cases of lesbians imprisoned in concentration camps.[12]

Definition of homosexuality

The first legal step historically towards the eventual persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime in Germany was paragraph 175 of the new penal code that was passed after unification of the German states into the German Empire in 1871. Paragraph 175 read: "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights might also be imposed." The law was interpreted differently across the nation until the ruling of a court case on April 23, 1880. The Reichsgericht (Imperial Court of Justice) ruled that a criminal homosexual act had to involve either anal, oral, or intercrural sex between two men. Anything less than that was deemed harmless play.[13] The German police forces (until 1936 all policing was the responsibility of the Länder governments) found this new interpretation of paragraph 175 extremely difficult to prove in court since it was hard to find witnesses to these acts. The enforcement of Paragraph 175 varied at times, with for instance a major and unprecedented crackdown on homosexuals being launched after the Eulenburg-Harden affair of 1906-09 led to a homophobic moral panic in Germany.[14] Enforcement also varied from länd to land with Prussia under the leadership of the Social Democrat Otto Braun refusing to enforce Paragraph 175 from 1918 to 1932.

After the Night of the Long Knives, the Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner (who was not a Nazi at the time) amended paragraph 175 due to what his government saw as loopholes in the law. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 also declared any "expression" of homosexuality was now a criminal act. The most significant change to the law was the change from "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex" to "A male who commits a sex offense with another male." This expanded the reach of the law to persecute gay men. Kissing, mutual masturbation and love-letters between men served as a legitimate reason for the police to make an arrest. The law never states what a sex offence actually is, leaving it open to subjective interpretation. Men who practiced what was known to be harmless amusement with other men were now subject to arrest under the law.[15]

Homosexuality and the SS

According to Geoffrey J. Giles the SS, and its leader Heinrich Himmler, were particularly concerned about homosexuality. More than any other Nazi leader, Himmler's writing and speeches denounced homosexuality. However, despite consistently condemning homosexuals and homosexual activity, Himmler was less consistent in his punishment of homosexuals. In Geoffrey Giles' article "The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS", several cases are put forward where members of the Nazi SS are tried for homosexual offences. On a case by case basis, the outcomes vary widely, and Giles gives documented evidence where the judges could be swayed by evidence demonstrating the accused's "aryan-ness" or "manliness", that is, by describing him as coming from true Germanic stock and perhaps fathering children. Reasons for Himmler's leniency in some cases may derive from the difficulty in defining homosexuality, particularly in a society that glorifies the masculine ideal and brotherhood.[16]

Not only was Himmler's persecution of homosexuals based on this masculine ideal, but it was also driven by societal issues. On February 18, 1937 Himmler gave his most detailed speech on the topic in Bad Tölz.[17] Himmler starts his speech off covering the social aspect of the problem. He reminds his listeners of the number of registered members in homosexual associations. He was not convinced that every homosexual was registered in these clubs, but he was also not convinced everyone registered was a homosexual. Himmler estimated the number of homosexuals from one to two million people, or 7 to 10% of men in Germany. He explained "If this remains the case, it means that our nation (Volk) will be destroyed (lit. ‘go kaput’) by this plague." Adding the number of homosexuals to the number of men that died in the previous war, Himmler estimated that this would equal four million men. If these four million men are no longer capable of having sex with a female, then this 'upsets the balance of the sexes in Germany and is leading to catastrophe.' Apparently, Germany was having population issues with the number of killed men during the First World War. Himmler believed "A people of good race which has too few children has a sure ticket for the grave, for insignificance in fifty to one hundred years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years."[18]

Concentration camps

Memorial plaque at Sachsenhausen concentration camp

Homosexuals were considered to be the lowest of the low in the concentration camp hierarchy.[19] Estimates vary widely as to the number of gay men imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust, ranging from 5,000 to 15,000, many of whom died.[1] In addition, records as to the specific reasons for internment are non-existent in many areas, making it hard to put an exact number on exactly how many gay men perished in death camps. Homosexuals were often classified as "asocials" when sent to the concentration camps, which makes estimating the number of homosexuals in the concentration camps difficult.[20] "Asocials" were a very broad legal category in Nazi Germany consisting of people who were "work shy" (i.e lazy), drug addicts, homeless people, alcoholics, petty criminals, and people who were merely eccentric or non-conformist, and the authorities often classified homosexuals as "asocials" as a way of showing the "deviant" nature of "asocials" in general.

Peukert wrote the way in the authorities linked homosexuality to "asociability" showed that the campaign against homosexuals cannot be considered in isolation, and should be viewed as part of the wider project to "cleanse" the volksgemeinschaft (people's community) of all genetically "unfit" elements.[21] Lesbians who were sent to the concentration camps were always classified as "asocials", and as such lesbian inmates wore the black triangle given to "asocials" instead of the pink triangles given to male homosexuals.[22] Paragraph 175 only covered male homosexuality, so the authorities always sent lesbians to concentration camps as asocials which was such a broad category as to allow the authorities to send anyone of whose lifestyle they disapproved to the concentration camps.[23]

Gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. They had their testicles boiled off by water.[24] Survivor Pierre Seel said "The Nazis stuck 25 centimeters of wood up my ass". They faced persecution not only from German soldiers, but prisoners as well, and many gay men were beaten to death. Additionally, gay men in forced labor camps routinely received more grueling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination Through Work". For instance, they were assigned the most dangerous tasks at the Dora-Mittelbau underground rocket factory and the stone quarries at Flossenbürg and Buchenwald.[1] SS soldiers also were known to use gay men for target practice, aiming their weapons at the pink triangles their human targets were forced to wear.[25]

The harsh treatment can be attributed to the view of the SS guards toward gay men, as well as to the homophobic attitudes present in German society at large. Peukert wrote the campaign to crush homosexuality together with the campaign against the "asocials" was approved of by "wide sections of the population, including many who criticized the detention and torture of political opponents of the regime".[26] The marginalization of gay men in Germany was reflected in the camps. Many died from beatings, some of them inflicted by other prisoners. Experiences such as these can account for the high death rate of gay men in the camps as compared to the other "asocial" groups. A study by Rüdiger Lautmann found that 60% of gay men in concentration camps died, as compared to 41% for political prisoners and 35% for Jehovah's Witnesses. The study also shows that survival rates for gay men were slightly higher for internees from the middle and upper classes and for married bisexual men and those with children.[27]

Nazi experiments

The Nazi policies on homosexuals were largely driven by Himmler's disdain for homosexuality, which he believed was a menace to the German national reproductive capacities.[28] He also loathed the unmasculine and oppositional traits of homosexuals so that he sought its cure through initiatives that started in 1937 after Himmler's speech to the Reich Committee for Population and Racial Policy.[28] His rationale was that human experimentation was permissible if it was for the benefit of the state.[29]

Dachau[30] and Buchenwald[19] were the principal centers of human experimentation on homosexuals by Nazi doctors, who sought to find a "medical cure" for homosexuality, among other endeavors. At Buchenwald, Danish doctor Carl Værnet conducted hormonal experiments on gay men on the personal authority of Himmler.[31] He was awarded 1,500 German marks monthly from the SS funds to test his "cure," which involved incisions in the subject's groin where an artificial male sexual gland was implanted.[28] This was a metal tube that released testosterone over a prolonged period, as the doctor believed that a lack of testosterone was the cause of homosexuality. Although some of the men claimed to have become heterosexual, the results are largely unreliable as many are assumed to have stated they were "cured" in order to be released from the camp. Those who did not show improvement were determined to be "chronic" or "incurable" homosexuals.[32][33] At least seventeen prisoners were used for Værnet's research, which also involved criminal and heterosexual participants.[28] Twelve gay men were subjected to the hormonal experiment and two of these men died due to infections.[31]

The Third Reich forced Jewish women and lesbians to perform sex acts with men at German camp brothels in World War II. Heinrich Himmler ordered that pink triangles be forced to perform sex acts on female sex slaves. This proved to be psychologically damaging to both parties.[34] Homosexuals were ordered to perform these acts once a week as conversion therapy.[35] The therapy also included humiliation through beatings and ridicule as well as the policy of segregating homosexuals from other prisoners, which was also implemented out of the belief that homosexuality can be spread to other inmates and guards.[1]

Other experiments included attempts to create immunization from typhus fever,[19] led by Erwin Ding-Schuler,[36] and castration.[37] The typhus experiments resulted with inoculations that made the Matelska strain of typhus rickettsia avirulent to patients.[38] One of these experiments was halted when it was determined that lice was a threat to the camp's health.[28] Another experiment that used homosexuals involved placing the subjects under sun lamps that were so hot they burned the skin. A homosexual victim was said to have been repeatedly cooled to unconsciousness then revived with lamps until he was pouring sweat.[39]

Although there are no exact statistics regarding these experiments, it is recognized that they have caused illness, mutilation, and deaths[40] while yielding no scientific knowledge.[1]

Post-War

One point of the Homomonument, in Amsterdam, to gay and lesbian victims of persecution, which is formed of three large pink triangles made of granite.

Homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution. Reparations and state pensions available to other groups were refused to gay men, who were still classified as criminals — the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in force in West Germany until 1969 when the Bundestag voted to return to the pre-1935 version.[41] The German historian Detlev Peukert wrote "no homosexuals obtained reparations after 1945" and only a brave "few" even tried because the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 stayed in effect until 1969, and that despite the way that homosexual survivors had suffered "profound damage to their lives" that they remained outcasts in post-war Germany.[42] Peukert used the fact that the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 stayed on the statue books until 1969 because it was a "healthy law" as Chancellor Adenauer called it in 1962 and the complete refusal of the German state to pay compensation to gay survivors to argue that Nazi Germany was not some "freakish aberration" from the norms of the West, and the Nazi campaign against homosexuals should be considered part of a broader homophobic campaign throughout the world.[43] In 1960, Hans Zauner, the mayor of Dachau, told a British journalist Llew Gardner writing for The Sunday Express that the Nazi campaign against homosexuals and "asocials" was justified, saying: "You must remember that many criminals and homosexuals were in Dachau. Do you want a memorial for such people?".[44] On 12 May 1969, when Der Spiegel, Germany's most popular magazine, ran an editorial saying it was "scandalous" that the 1935 version of Paragraph 175 was still in effect and called for repealing Paragraph 175 completely, it attracted much controversy.[45] In 1981, it was discovered that many West German police forces still kept lists of known homosexuals included significantly under the category "asocials".[46] Paragraph 175 was not repealed until 1994, although both East and West Germany liberalized their laws against adult homosexuality in the late 1960s.

Holocaust survivors who were homosexual could be re-imprisoned for "repeat offences", and were kept on the modern lists of "sex offenders". Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps.[47]

The Nazis' anti-gay policies and their destruction of the early gay rights movement were generally not considered suitable subject matter for Holocaust historians and educators. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that there was some mainstream exploration of the theme, with Holocaust survivors writing their memoirs, plays such as Bent, and more historical research and documentaries being published about the Nazis' homophobia and their destruction of the German gay-rights movement.

Since the 1980s, some European and international cities have erected memorials to remember the thousands of homosexual people who were murdered and persecuted during the Holocaust. Major memorials can be found in Berlin, Amsterdam (Netherlands), Montevideo (Uruguay), San Francisco (United States of America), Tel Aviv (Israel) and Sydney (Australia).[48] In 2002, the German government issued an official apology to the gay community.

In 2005, the European Parliament marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp with a minute's silence and the passage of a resolution which included the following text:

...27 January 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany's death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a combined total of up to 1.5 million Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians and prisoners of various other nationalities, and homosexuals, were murdered, is not only a major occasion for European citizens to remember and condemn the enormous horror and tragedy of the Holocaust, but also for addressing the disturbing rise in anti-Semitism, and especially anti-Semitic incidents, in Europe, and for learning anew the wider lessons about the dangers of victimising people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, social classification, politics or sexual orientation...

An account of a gay Holocaust survivor, Pierre Seel, details life for gay men during Nazi control. In his account he states that he participated in his local gay community in the town of Mulhouse in the Alsace region of France. When Alsace was effectively annexed to Germany in 1940, his name was on a list of local gay men ordered to the police station. He obeyed the directive to protect his family from any retaliation. Upon arriving at the police station he notes that he and other gay men were beaten. Some gay men who resisted the SS had their fingernails pulled out. Others had their bowels punctured, causing them to bleed profusely. After his arrest he was sent to the concentration camp at Schirmeck. There, Seel stated that during a morning roll-call, the Nazi commander announced a public execution. A man was brought out, and Seel recognized his face. It was the face of his eighteen-year-old lover from Mulhouse. Seel states that the SS guards then stripped the clothes off his lover, placed a metal bucket over his head, and released trained German Shepherd dogs on him, which mauled him to death.

Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving person who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp because of his homosexuality, died in France in August 2011, aged 98. Brazda was sent to Buchenwald in August 1942 and held there until its liberation by U.S. forces in 1945. Brazda, who settled in France after the war, was later awarded the Legion of Honour.[49]

Early Holocaust and genocide discourse

Arising from the dominant discourse of the Jewish suffering during the years of Nazi domination, and building on the divergence of differential victimhoods brought to light by studies of the Roma and the mentally ill, who suffered massively under the eugenics programs of the Third Reich, the idea of a Gay Holocaust was first explored in the early 1970s. However, extensive research on the topic was impeded by a continuation of Nazi policies on homosexuals in post-war East and West Germany and continued western notions of homophobia.[50]

The word genocide was generated from a need for new terminology in order to understand the gravity of the crimes committed by the Nazis.[51] First coined by Raphael Limkin in 1944, the word became politically charged when The Genocide Act was enacted by the United Nations on December 9, 1948, which created an obligation for governments to respond to such atrocities in the future. The debate on the Gay Holocaust is therefore a highly loaded debate which would result in an international acknowledgement of state sponsored homophobia as a precursor to genocide should the proponents of the Gay Holocaust succeed. However the United Nations definition does not include sexual orientation (or even social and political groups) within its qualifications for the crime. Genocide by the U.N. definition is limited to national, ethnical, racial or religious groups and as this is the only accord to which nations have pledged allegiance, it stands as the dominant understanding of the term.[52] It is, however, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms "an age when collective apologies are becoming increasingly common"[53] as well as a time when the established Holocaust discourse has settled and legitimized claims of the Jewish, Roma and mentally ill victims of Nazi persecution so it would seem an appropriate time to at least bring attention to the debate of the Gay Holocaust, even if the issue is not to be settled.

A lack of research means that there is relatively little data on the dispersion of gay men throughout the camps. However, Heinz Heger suggests in his book The Men with the Pink Triangle that they were subjected to harsher labor than smaller targeted groups, such as the political prisoners, and furthermore suffered a much higher mortality rate.[54] They also lacked a support network within the camps and were ostracized in the prison community.[54] Homosexuals, like the mentally ill and many Jews and Roma, were also subjected to medical experimentation in the hopes of finding a cure to homosexuality at the camp in Buchenwald.[55]

The conception of Jewish exclusivity in the Holocaust went unchallenged in the early years of study on the subject. It is undeniable that the Jews suffered the greatest death toll, and entire communities were obliterated in Eastern Europe and to a great extent in western countries. The notion of exclusivity however is challenged by the existence of similar forces working against different social and ethnic groups such as homosexuals and the Roma, which resulted in the victimization and systematic destruction of homosexual lives and lifestyles, as well as those of the Roma. An inclusion of social groups in a definition of genocide would further challenge the notion of the Jewish genocide as unique within the context of the Holocaust. Other scholars such as William J. Spurlin have suggested that such positions foster a misrepresentation of history and devalue the suffering of other victims of Nazi atrocities. The Austrian Jewish Shoah survivor Simon Wiesenthal argued, for example, that "the Holocaust transcended the confines of Jewish community and that there were other victims."[56] In the mid-1970s new discourses emerged that challenged the exclusivity of the Jewish genocide within the Holocaust, though not without great resistance.

Changes with the civil rights movement

The Civil Rights Movement of the United States saw an emergence of victim claims through revision and appropriation of historical narratives. The shift from the traditionally conservative notion of history as the story of power and those who held it, social historians emerged with narratives of those who suffered and resisted these powers. African Americans created their own narrative, as firmly based on evidence as the discourses already in existence, as part of a social movement towards civil rights based on a history of victimization and racism. Along similar lines, the gay and lesbian movement in the United States also utilized revisionism to write the narrative that had only just garnered an audience willing to validate it.[57]

There were two processes at work in this new discourse, revisionism and appropriation, which Arlene Stein teases out in her article Whose Memory, Whose Victimhood?, both of which were used at different points in the movement for civil rights. The revisionist project was taken on in a variety of mediums, historical literature being only one of many. The play Bent and a limited number of memoirs which recall The Diary of Anne Frank coincided with the appropriation of the pink triangle as a symbol of the new movement and a reminder to "never forget."[57] While the focus of these early revisions was not necessarily to determine the Nazi policy on homosexuals as genocidal, they began a current towards legitimizing the victimization of homosexuals under the regime, a topic that had not been addressed until the 1970s.

Historical works would turn focus on the nature and intent of Nazi policy. Heinz Heger, Gunter Grau and Richard Plant all contributed greatly to the early Holocaust discourse which emerged throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.[57] Central to these studies was the notion that statistically speaking, homosexuals suffered greater losses than many of the smaller minorities under Nazi persecution such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and within the camps experienced harsher treatments and ostracization as well as execution.[58]

These early revisionist discourses were joined by a popular movement of appropriation, which invoked the global memory of the Holocaust to shed light on social disparities for homosexuals within the United States. Larry Kramer who was one of the founders of ACT UP, an HIV/AIDS activist group that used shock tactics to bring awareness to the disease and attention to the need for funding popularized the AIDS-as-Holocaust discourse. "The slowness of government response at federal and local levels of government, the paucity of funds for research and treatment, particularly in the early days of the epidemic stems, Kramer argued, from deep-seated homophobic impulses and constituted 'intentional genocide'."[59]

While the appropriation of the Holocaust discourse helped to grab the attention needed for an appropriate response to the pandemic it is highly problematic and perhaps counterproductive to the historical discourse of the time. The notion of AIDS-as-Holocaust and the accompanying notion of AIDS-as-genocide greatly oversimplify the meaning and the intention of genocide as a crime. While parallels can be drawn such as specific group experiencing disproportionate mortality resulting from a seeming neglect by the institutions designed to protect them, the central factors of intention and systematic planning are absent and the use of the word dilutes the severity of the act.

Pink Triangle memorial to gay men persecuted by the Nazi regime in Nollendorfplatz.

The Holocaust frame was used again in the early 1990s, this time in relation to right-wing homophobic campaigns throughout the United States. The conservative response yielded a new discourse working against the Gay Holocaust academia, which emphasized the gay and lesbian revisionism as a victimist discourse which sought sympathy and recognition as a pragmatic means of garnering special status and civil rights outside those of the moral majority.[59] Arlene Stein identifies four central elements to the conservative reaction to the Gay Holocaust discourse: she argues that the right is attempting to dispel the notion that gays are victims, pit two traditionally liberal constituencies against one another (gays and Jews), thereby drawing parallels between Jews and Christians and legitimating its own status as an oppressed and morally upright group.

The victimist argument raises a central tenet as to the reasons for which the discourse of a Gay Holocaust has experienced so much resistance politically and popularly (in the conscious of the public). Alyson M. Cole addresses the anti-victim discourse that has emerged in western politics since the end of the 1980s. She asserts "anti-victimists transformed discussions of social obligation, compensations and remedial or restorative procedures into criticisms of the alleged propensity of self-anointed victims to engage in objectionable conduct." Though she is clear that the anti-victimist discourse is not limited to right-wing politics, the case of the Gay Holocaust situates itself along these political boundaries and the anti-victim discourse is highly relevant to the debate on homosexual claims to genocide under the Third Reich. Cole refutes what she sees as problems in the anti-victim arguments.[60]

Post-revisionist framing of the "Gay Holocaust"

Memorial "Stolperstein" for Arnold Bastian, a homosexual victim of the Nazis. It is located at Große Straße 54 in Flensburg. The text reads: "Here lived Arnold Bastian, born 1908. Arrested 15 January 1944. Penitentiary at Celle. Dead on 17 February 1945 at the penitentiary in Hameln."

In the 2000s, work was done on the Gay Holocaust and rather than emphasizing the severity of destruction to communities or the exclusivity of the genocidal process of the Nazi regime, it focuses on the intersections of social constructions such as gender and sexuality within the context of social organization and political domination. Spurlin claims that these all functioned with one another in forming Germany’s social order and final solution to these social problems. Rather than being autonomous policies, "They were part of a much larger strategy of social disenfranchisement and the marking of enemies..."[61]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved February 26, 2018.
  2. ↑ "Last gay Jewish Holocaust survivor dies". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. Retrieved 2018-05-09.
  3. ↑ Melissa Eddy (May 18, 2002). "Germany Offers Nazi-Era Pardons". Associated Press.
  4. ↑ Mathis Winkler (January 18, 2006). "European Parliamentarians Stand Up Against Homophobia". Deutsche Welle.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Cushman 2017, p. 302.
  6. ↑ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany, New Haven: Yale, 1987 p. 208.
  7. ↑ Rector, Frank (1981). The Nazi extermination of homosexuals. Stein and Day. ISBN 0-812827295.
  8. ↑ Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (New York: Holt, 1986), 99.
  9. ↑ Neander, Biedron. "Homosexuals. A Separate Category of Prisoners". Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Retrieved August 10, 2013.
  10. ↑ Giles, Geoffrey J (1992). "'The Most Unkindest Cut of All': Castration, Homosexuality and Nazi Justice". Journal of Contemporary History. 27: 41–61. doi:10.1177/002200949202700103.
  11. ↑ Huneke, Samuel Clowes (2017). "The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin". Journal of Contemporary History. doi:10.1177/0022009417690596.
  12. ↑ Schoppmann, Claudia (1993). "The Position of Lesbian Women in the Nazi Period". In Grau, Günter. Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933-1945. Translated by Camiller, Patrick. Berlin. pp. 8–15.
  13. ↑ Giles, Geoffrey J (2001). Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 240.
  14. ↑ Domeier, Norman The Eulenburg Affair: A Cultural History of Politics in the German Empire, Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2015 pages 103–104
  15. ↑ Giles, Geoffrey J. (2001). Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 240–242.
  16. ↑ Giles, Geoffrey J., "The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS", Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 11, No. 1/2, Special Issue: Sexuality and German Fascism (Jan. – Apr. 2002), pp. 256–290
  17. ↑ Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 232.
  18. ↑ Himmler, Heinrich. "Heinrich Himmler – Speech about Homosexuality to the SS Group Leaders" (PDF). Retrieved 2014-03-15.
  19. 1 2 3 Röll, W (1996). "Homosexual inmates in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp". J Homosex. 31: 1–28. doi:10.1300/J082v31n04_01. PMID 8905527.
  20. ↑ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany, New Haven, Yale, 1987 p. 220.
  21. ↑ Peukert (1987), p.208.
  22. ↑ Cushman, Sarah "Homosexuals" pp 302-303 from The Holocaust Encyclopedia, Santa Monica, ABC-CLIO, 2017 p.302.
  23. ↑ Cushman, Sarah "Homosexuals" pp 302-303 from The Holocaust Encyclopedia, Santa Monica, ABC-CLIO, 2017 p.302.
  24. ↑ "Warm Brothers in the Boomtowns of Hell: The Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany", Robert Franklin. University of Hawai'i. Retrieved 3 feb 2017
  25. ↑ "LGBT Experience Under the Nazis". .
  26. ↑ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany, New Haven, Yale, 1987 p.199.
  27. ↑ Lautmann, Rüdiger. "Gay Prisoners in Concentration Camps as Compared with Jehovah's Witnesses and Political Prisoners".
  28. 1 2 3 4 5 Weindling, Paul (2015). Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 183. ISBN 9781441179906.
  29. ↑ Epstein, Catherine (2015). Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. p. 166. ISBN 9781118294796.
  30. ↑ "Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies", Timothy Murphy. Routledge, Oct 18, 2013. Retrieved 3 feb 2017
  31. 1 2 Tatchell, Peter (2015-05-05). "The Nazi doctor who experimented on gay people – and Britain helped to escape justice | Peter Tatchell". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-08-10.
  32. ↑ Tamagne, Florence (2004). A History of Homosexuality in Europe Vol. II: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939. Algora Publishing. p. 290. ISBN 0875863574.
  33. ↑ Austin, Ben. "Homosexuals & the Holocaust: Background & Overview". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved August 1, 2016.
  34. ↑ Heinz Heger, Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel, 5th ed., 2001, p. 137
  35. ↑ Heinz Heger, Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel, 5th ed., 2001, p. 137
  36. ↑ "Nazi Doctors & Other Perpetrators of Nazi Crimes", Webster University. Retrieved 3 feb 2017
  37. ↑ "Persecution of Homosexuals", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 3 feb 2017
  38. ↑ "Experimentation with Human Beings: The Authority of the Investigator, Subject, Professions, and State in the Human Experimentation Process", Jay Katz, Alexander Morgan Capron, Eleanor Swift Glass. Russell Sage Foundation, Jul 24, 1972. p. 302. Retrieved 3 feb 2017
  39. ↑ "Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine | The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org". The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org. Retrieved 2018-08-10.
  40. ↑ "Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich". www.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2018-08-10.
  41. ↑ Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945. New York: Cambridge, 1991. p.183
  42. ↑ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany, New Haven: Yale, 1987. p. 220.
  43. ↑ Peukert, Detlev Inside Nazi Germany, New Haven: Yale, 1987. p. 220.
  44. ↑ Jensen, Erik "The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution" from The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 11 p.321
  45. ↑ Jensen, Erik "The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution" p.324
  46. ↑ Jensen, Erik "The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution" p.328
  47. ↑ Angela Chu (October 18, 2002). "Prosecution of Homosexuals in the Holocaust: Aftermath". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. USHMM.
  48. ↑ Memorials of the Gay Holocaust, Matt & Andrej Koymasky
  49. ↑ News in brief (5 August 2011). "Last homosexual Holocaust survivor dies at 98". Ha'aretz. The Associated Press.
  50. ↑ Heinz Heger, The Men With the Pink Triangle (Hamburg: Melin-Verlag, 1980) pp. 14
  51. ↑ David Scheffer, Genocide and Atrocity Crimes, Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 3 (2006) pp. 230
  52. ↑ David Scheffer, Genocide and Atrocity Crimes, Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 3 (2006)
  53. ↑ Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era, Interventions 2, (2000) pp. 172
  54. 1 2 Heinz Heger, The Men With the Pink Triangle (Hamburg: Melin-Verlag, 1980) pp. 13
  55. ↑ Heinz Heger, The Men With the Pink Triangle (Hamburg: Melin-Verlag, 1980) pp. 12
  56. ↑ William J. Spurlin, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009) pp. 4
  57. 1 2 3 Arlene Stein, "Whose Memories? Whose Victimhood? Contests for the Holocaust Frame in Recent Social Movement Discourse", Sociological Perspectives; 41, no. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
  58. ↑ Heinz Heger (1980). The Men With the Pink Triangle (Hamburg: Melin-Verlag).
  59. 1 2 Arlene Stein, Whose Memories? Whose Victimhood? Contests for the Holocaust Frame in Recent Social Movement Discourse, Sociological Perspectives 41, no. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) p. 527
  60. ↑ Alyson Cole, "Situating Anti-Victim Discourse," The Cult of True Victimhood: From The War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007)
  61. ↑ William J. Spurlin, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009) pp. 17.

Further reading

Popular reading

  • Beck, Gad (1999). An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-16500-0.
  • Fridgen, Michael (2014). The Iron Words. Dreamlly Books. ISBN 0-615-99269-2.
  • Seel, Pierre (1997). Liberation Was for Others: Memoirs of a Gay Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. Perseus Book Group. ISBN 0-306-80756-4.
  • Seel, Pierre (1995). I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04500-6.
  • Heger, Heinz (1994). Men With the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-And-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps. Alyson Books. ISBN 1555830064.
  • Non-Jewish Victims of Persecution in Germany on the Yad Vashem website
  • Becker le marqué, Quasimodo
  • "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 2012-01-19.
  • "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 2009-09-03.
  • Official Site Of German Government's Memorial For Gay Victims of the Holocaust in Berlin
  • Pierre Seel – An Account of a Gay Holocaust Survivor
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