JUNE 10, 1994 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
5
Gay Holocaust horrors are just now being told
Persecution laws lasted until 1969
by Andrew Lang
Fifty years ago, they were still dying in German prisons and concentration camps.
American, British and French troops were striking into Normandy. The Red Army was driving toward Warsaw. The Nazi empire was crumbling at its edges--but in the interior of Germany, the industrial machinery of the SS penal system was still operating at full speed. The Allies would not reach the gates of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen until the following spring. Thousands of men imprisoned for "crimes against nature" did not live to see the day of liberation.
Nazi eugenic theory condemned homosexuality as "racial treason." In 1927, Nazi parliamentary leader Wilhelm Frick warned that "men practicing unnatural lechery between men must be persecuted with utmost severity." In 1929, the racist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg denounced homosexuality as a Jewish conspiracy and promised that a future Nazi state would criminalize homosexual relations: "We will punish them by banishment or hanging."
The Nazis made good on their promises when Hitler seized power in 1933. The Gestapo compiled dossiers on gay men and arrested them by the hundreds. In the colorcoding scheme for Nazi prisoners, German gays wore a pink triangle.
But the American Jewish Committee reports that only one in four Americans knows that German homosexuals were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
Attempts to tell the story of the Nazi campaign to exterminate gays have enraged both Christian and Jewish fundamentalists. In May, Jewish gays were punched and kicked as they tried to chant the Mourner's
Kaddish-the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. One of the assailants shouted: "Don't touch me! You are full of shit and AIDS!"
Most German gays who survived the Holocaust were silenced by postwar persecution, says Dr. Klaus Müller of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Unlike the Nuremberg laws that deprived German Jews of their civil rights, the victorious Allies never nullified Paragraph 175-the Nazi law against homosexuals. "Gays were subject to arrest under Paragraph 175, and West German police even used Nazi records to organize mass arrests of gay men in the 1950s and '60s. In some cases, gay prisoners were sentenced to longer jail terms because they had already served time in Nazi prisons." Paragraph 175 remained in force until
1969.
Courts in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany refused to classify homosexuals as victims of Nazi racial terror, Müller says. Not one SS prison guard or camp official faced trial for the murder of gay
men.
Müller spoke May 21 at the Hillel Center on the Case Western Reserve University campus. The event was sponsored by Congregation Chevrei Tikva, Liberation United Church of Christ and Lutherans Concerned.
The Nazis believed homosexuality was a crime both against nature and the state, Müller said. SS leader Heinrich Himmler "argued that every German man had a racial duty to expand Germany's population— particularly to beget the soldiers needed to fight future wars of conquest.”
In a secret speech to SS cadets in 1937, Himmler described homosexuality as “an
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The joy of inmates upon being liberated from Dachau after April 29, 1945 was short-lived for the gay prisoners; they continued to be arrested under Paragraph 175.
error of degenerate individualism that is contrary to nature."
"[N]ations with many children can gain supremacy and mastery of the world," he said. "It is essential for a nation to guide sex in the right direction."
Himmler dreamed of a racially pure German nation cleansed of homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies and the disabled. As supreme police commander and organizer of Germany's vast network of forced-labor camps, he had the power to translate his dream into reality.
Gays swept into the machinery of Himmler's police state died from the same conditions that killed other prisoners: disease, starvation, beatings, torture and hanging. Some were castrated to "cure" their homosexuality. In the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin, gays were assigned to special labor detachments designed to work the prisoners to death.
No one knows the exact number of gay men held in Nazi prisons and labor camps. Until recently, Holocaust documentation
centers refused to count the number of homosexual prisoners. The survivors "were conditioned to be silent," Müller says. "They internalized feelings of shame, believing that somehow they were responsible for their own persecution." Only in the past few years have the aging survivors begun to tell their stories.
Even less is known about the fate of lesbians in Nazi Germany, Müller says. Paragraph 175 did not criminalize lesbian behavior-an oversight Müller attributes to Nazi contempt for women in general. “According to Nazi officials, lesbians could still be useful as breeders for a future generation of German warriors," he said. But the Nazis persecuted lesbians and systematically destroyed their institutions. Lesbians, like gay men, were forced to conceal their identity during the Third Reich.
Andrew Lang is a reporter for United Church News, a newspaper published by the United Church of Christ.
We were marked
Three gay Holocaust survivors tell their story for the first time in We Were Marked with a Big 'A', a video documentary produced for German television and available from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"It is so absurd to be punished for love," says one of the survivors. He was arrested after a friend broke under torture and revealed the names of his gay acquaintances.
"You learned to turn off your emotions," says another survivor.
No gay survivors told their story before television cameras until this documentary was produced in 1991. Subject to arrest by West German police under the same law used by the Nazis to imprison thousands of German gays, they kept silent. The video, with English subtitles, is available for $24.95 from the Holocaust Museum, 202-488-6144 or 202-488-6146.
-Andrew Lang
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