Germany’s Third Reich considered homosexuals common criminals; many were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Once there, they were forced to wear a pink triangle as a brand of their supposedly ‘special’ perversion. Given the fear many gay people lived under back then, it is little wonder how little of their experiences in the death camps is known. However, it is thought that their death rate was higher than any other group.
“97 year-old Rudolf Brazda is probably the last surviving man to have been deported by the Nazis for being a homosexual. In a video interview.. he remembers his years as a prisoner at the Buchenwald concentration camp.” via Pink Triangles: The Last Known Survivor Tells His Story
The following is excerpted from Daily Kos: Gays in the Holocaust: Examining the persecution of gays in the Holocaust is not “rewriting history”. It is discovering it. And those who attempt to revise or ignore this history may want to do some soul searching and be brutally honest with themselves why the fact that the Nazis – the undisputed “evil doers” of all time – oppressed gays using the same rationale that is being used today to deny basic civil rights and the opportunity to marry to homosexuals.
What were these justifications for the imprisonment, forced castration and murder of gays in Nazi Germany? It seems to have been a combination of fear of homosexuality – specifically among men – as being a cancer to the nation, that left unfettered would expand and eventually decay the body politic from within, literally like a cancer. This fear of homosexuality was combined by the Nazi desire to increase Aryan birthrate, and they viewed gay men as specifically standing in the way of this goal.
The following is excerpted from the Houston Voice about a traveling memorial to the homosexual holocaust victims: They were only numerals, three of them, but the very mention of 175 could instill fear in the hearts of gays living in Nazi Germany.
Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code was all the authorities needed to detain homosexuals, throw them in prison, send them to concentration camps, conduct medical experiments on them and even kill them.
[Auschwitz mug shot of homosexual August Pfeiffer, a servant. who was born August 8, 1895, in Weferlingen, Germany. He arrived at Auschwitz on November 1, 1941, and died there December 28, 1941.]
“When the Nazis came to power, they closed the gay bars,” he (survivor Harry Pauly) recalled. “Some homosexuals, especially those who were Jewish, were killed by Nazi hooligans; my friend ‘Susi,’ a drag queen, was stabbed to death.”
Schermann, a 24-year-old Jewish shop girl living in Frankfurt, was arrested in 1940 and deported to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women.
Written on the back of her prisoner identification are these words: “Jenny (sic) Sara Schermann, born February 19, 1912, Frankfurt am Main. Unmarried shopgirl in Frankfurt am Main. Licentious lesbian, only visited such [lesbian] bars. Avoided the name ‘Sara.’ Stateless Jew.”
She was gassed at Bernberg in 1942.
When the concentration camps were liberated at the end of World War II, Keel (museum director) said, there was no liberation for homosexuals. Paragraph 175 remained in force.
“At the liberation in 1945, the homosexuals remained in prison to serve out their terms,” Keel said. “They weren’t given any reparations for what they had been through.”
It wasn’t until 1995, 40 years after the war’s end, that homosexuals murdered by the Nazis were recognized.
“On the 40th anniversary, a monument was set up in Germany for homosexual victims of the Holocaust,” Keel said. “In 2002, the German parliament pardoned all homosexuals.”
With a hint of sarcasm in his voice, Keel added, “It only took 60 years.”
“Homosexuals have long been targets of systematic hatred and discrimination. These images and the stories they tell document a horrible time in the history of mankind and remind us that prejudice still exists in both subtle and overt ways even today,” said Coy Tow, executive director of the Greater Houston GLBT Chamber of Commerce.
Also see: A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust-Homosexuals; Homosexuals, Genocide of in the Holocaust; Homosexuals, Victims of the Nazi Era; The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals; Men With the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-And-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps.
Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1945, Allied forces liberating Europe found evidence of atrocities which have tortured the world’s conscience ever since. As the troops entered the German concentration camps, they made a systematic film record of what they saw. Work began in the summer of 1945 on the documentary, but the film was left unfinished. FRONTLINE found it stored in a vault of London’s Imperial War Museum and, in 1985, broadcast it for the first time using the title the Imperial War Museum gave it, “Memory of the Camps.”
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