History of gays during the Holocaust

Prior to the Third Reich, Berlin was considered a liberal city, with many gay bars, nightclubs and cabarets. There were even many drag bars where tourists straight and gay would enjoy female impersonation acts. There had also been a fairly significant gay rights movement under Magnus Hirschfeld around the turn of the century. However the advancements of the gay community were soon erased with the coming of power of the Nazi Party.

Nazi ideology held that homosexuality was incompatible with National Socialism because gays did not reproduce and perpetuate the master race. For the same reasons, onanism was also considered harmful to the Reich, but treated lightly.

Ernst Röhm, a man Hitler perceived as a potential threat, and the leader of the SA, the Nazi Party's first militia, was discreetly gay, as were some other top leaders of the SA, such as Edmund Heines.

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, a purge of those who Hitler deemed threats to his power, he had Röhm murdered and used Röhm’s homosexuality as a justification to subside outrage within the ranks of the SA. And, in the following Holocaust launched after Hitler's solidification of power in the Nazi Party, he would include gay men among those sent to concentration camps.

Shortly after the purge in 1934, a special division of the Gestapo was instituted to compile lists of gay individuals. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion."

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." (Plant, 1986, p. 99).

Hitler believed that homosexuality was "degenerate behavior" which posed a threat to the capacity of the state and the "masculine character" of the nation. Gay men were denounced as "enemies of the state" and charged with "corrupting" public morality and posing a threat to the German birthrate. About one million gay men were victimized by the Nazi regime. However gays were not initially treated in the same fashion as the Jews. Nazi Germany thought of German gay men as part of the "Master Race" and sought to force gay men into sexual and social conformity. Gay men who would not conform and switch sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under extermination through work campaign.

Nazi persecution of gay men was carried out primarily through harsh enforcement of anti-gay laws, under which about 100,000 were arrested. 50,000 were sentenced to prison terms, with an unknown number committed to mental hospitals. Hundreds of gay men were castrated under court order. 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 of the laws were repealed.

Estimates vary wildly as to the number of gay men killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust ranging from 15,000 to 600,000. Reason for the wide variances are whether the researcher counted people who were both Jewish and gay, and reasons for arrival in death camps are non-existent in many areas. See pink triangle.

Gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. It can be attributed to the harsh view of the SS guards toward gay men, as well as to the homophobic attitudes present in Nazi society at large. The marginalization of gay men in Germany was reflected in the camps. Many died from harsh beatings, some of them caused by other prisoners. And Nazi doctors often used gay men for scientific experiments in an attempt to locate a "gay gene" to cure any future Aryan children who were gay.

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. When the Nazis gained power over the town 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 were raped with broken rulers and had their bowels punctured, causing them to bleed profusely. After his arrest he was sent to the concentration camp at Schirmeck. There Mr. Seel stated that during a morning roll-call the Nazi commander announced a public execution. A man was brought out, and Mr. Seel recognized his face. It was the face of his eighteen year old lover from Mulhouse. Mr. Seel then claims that the Nazi guards stripped the clothes of his lover and placed a metal bucket over his head. Then the guards released trained German Shepherds on him, which mauled him to death.

Experiences such as these can account for the relatively high death rate of gay men in the camps as compared to the other "anti-social groups". A study by Ruediger Lautmann found that 60 percent of gay men in concentration camps died, as compared to 41 percent for political prisoners and 35 percent 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.

Many cities around the world have erected memorials to remember the thousands of gay men who were murdered during the Holocaust. Major memorials can be found in Berlin, Germany, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and San Francisco, United States. In 2002 the German government released an official apology to the gay community.

The European Parliament marked the anniversary of the Holocaust in 2005 with a minute of silence and the passage of this resolution:

• "the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Poles and other prisoners of various nationalities 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 victimizing people on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, politics, or sexual orientation."

Women were not widely persecuted under Nazi anti-gay laws. However, lesbians were considered a threat to state values and marked as 'anti-social'. See black triangle.

External Links

• Nazi Persecution of Gays 1933-1945 - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/)
• Official Site Of German Government's Memorial For Gay Victims Of The Holocaust In Berlin (http://www.gedenkort.de/eng-start.htm)
• Night of the Long Knives - Murder of Ernst Röhm (http://www.fatherryan.org/holocaust/homogenocide/WWII.html)
• Boston Globe - Gay Holocaust Survivor Speaks (http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/germany/genews008.htm)
• BBC News - Berlin To Mark Nazis' Gay Victims (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3314887.stm)
• The Independent - Survivors Of A Forgotten Holocaust (http://www.petertatchell.net/history/survivors.htm)
• History Of The Gay Men & Lesbian Experience During World War 2 (http://www.pink-triangle.org/)
• The Nazi Persecution Of Gays - Annotated Bibliography of Nonfiction Sources (http://members.aol.com/dalembert/lgbt_history/nazi_biblio.html)
• Pierre Seel - An Account Of A Gay Holocaust Survivor (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/seel.html)
• Gays & the Holocaust (http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/homobg.html)
• Article On Various Experiments Conducted On Gay Men In Concentration Camps (http://users.cybercity.dk/~dko12530/hunt_for_danish_kz.htm)zh:纳粹德国的同性恋者

de:Schwule während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus