Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany

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.[12] Germany under the Weimar Republic was characterized by a sort of cultural war between the traditional culture and the avant-garde Weimar culture, and the tolerance shown to homosexuals in Prussia was often used by traditionalists as an example of the "depravity" and "un-German" nature of Weimar culture.[12] Despite societal marginalization, a lively homosexual counterculture in Germany gradually developed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Berlin alone there were over forty gay clubs and meeting places, staffed by homosexuals, that served as popular pubs for the gay community, including more famous spots like 'Queer's Way' in Tiergarten.[13] Private baths and other places were used as fronts for homosexuals to gather and socialize. There was a vibrant social scene that grew along with the nightlife, including developments like the foundation of Der Eigene, the first gay magazine in the world.[14]

A 1924 cover of Der Eigene, a prominent German gay magazine which was the world's first gay magazine

Stories by Christopher Isherwood about the gay community's cabaret shows eventually served as the inspiration for the 1972 Hollywood film Cabaret.[15] Some of these clubs were quite popular, such as El Dorado, to the point that they were even frequented by tourists. Other clubs catered to different classes within the gay community.[15] As some venues catered for the upper income strata of gay Germans, other bars like the Mother Cat (Zur Katzenmutter) catered for soldiers.[15] While the majority of nightlife provided for gay and bisexual men, clubs like the Dorian Gray also had nights for lesbians.[15]

Eldorado, a well known gay nightclub in 1932 which featured cabaret performances

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".[12] 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 were deemed as racially "unfit" to join the Volksgemeinschaft. The German historian Detlev Peukert wrote that 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".[16]

In late February 1933, as the moderating influence of Ernst Röhm, the most prominent gay Nazi official, 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 subscribed to an ultra-macho "hard" image and despised the "soft" homosexuals. Parties opposing Hitler even used Röhm, who was known to visit many of Berlin's gay clubs and parlors and was a member of the League of Human Rights, to attack Hitler by discussing "Hitler's queer friend Röhm".[17] A climate of fear took hold over the homosexual community, with – for example – many lesbians marrying to avoid being sent to the concentration camps that had first appeared in March 1933. Within just weeks of Hitler's appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, the subsequent raids and crackdown throughout the year marked a stark turning point in the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In February Nazi storm troopers began to shut down bars and ban the sale of publications featuring sexual content.[18] As a result, the gay community withdrew from the clubs and groups that had dominated the homosexual community in Germany, thereby putting a rapid end to the vibrant gay communities at the time. The personal testimony of an anonymous subject described the change in political climate as a "thunderbolt", while many of his Jewish and homosexual friends started to disappear as they were presumably detained.[19] 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.[12] One homosexual man recounts regularly being summoned to the Gestapo office for interrogation for a period of weeks following the arrest of an earlier romantic partner. He, like many homosexuals at the time, had to break off all relations with all his friends in the homosexual community as he commented that "we lived like animals in a wild game park...always sensing the hunters." Arrested homosexuals were used to generate lists of other members in the gay community, leading towards a societal purge of the homosexual community.[13] Gay men who did not successfully emigrate to safety attempted to conceal their gay identities, with some engaging in heterosexual relationships and marriages with women.[20]

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.[21] 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."[22]

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).

Gestapo Radio Telegram for a list of suspected homosexuals for the Chief of Police in Dortmund

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.[23]

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".[24] Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were castrated under court order.[25]

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.[26] However, there are a number of recorded cases of lesbians imprisoned in concentration camps.[27] Henny Schermann was a shop assistant from Frankfurt, who was arrested in 1940 at a lesbian bar and murdered at Bernburg Euthanasia Centre in 1942; one doctor as Ravensbrück described her as a "licentious lesbian" on the back of her identity photograph.[28][29]

Gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps, facing tortures ranging from rape to having their testicles boiled off by water.[38] 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 gruelling and dangerous work assignments than other non-Jewish inmates, under the policy of "Extermination Through Work". For example, they were assigned the most dangerous tasks at the Dora-Mittelbau underground rocket factory and the stone quarries at Flossenbürg and Buchenwald.[24] 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, in camps such as the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.[39] Homosexuals were indiscriminately killed while they were creating artificial mound targets with earth and clay on the shooting range as guards often targeted homosexuals instead of the shooting range targets themselves.[40] It is noted that homosexuals in the Nazi regime were targeted "in a manner without parallel in any civilized state in the world."[7]

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. Additionally, homosexuals in concentration camps lacked the ability to practice group solidarity, which aided the morale of other persecuted groups, such as political prisoners. Peukert wrote that 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".[41] 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.[42]

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.[43] 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.[43] His rationale was that human experimentation was permissible if it was for the benefit of the state.[44]

Dachau[45] and Buchenwald[34] 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.[46] 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.[43] 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.[47][48] At least seventeen prisoners were used for Værnet's research, which also involved criminal and heterosexual participants.[43] Twelve gay men were subjected to the hormonal experiment and two of these men died due to infections.[46]

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.[49] Homosexuals were ordered to perform these acts once a week as conversion therapy.[50] 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.[24]

Other experiments included attempts to create immunization from typhus fever,[34] led by Erwin Ding-Schuler,[51] and castration.[52] The typhus experiments resulted with inoculations that made the Matelska strain of typhus rickettsia avirulent to patients.[53] One of these experiments was halted when it was determined that lice was a threat to the camp's health.[43] 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.[54]

Although there are no exact statistics regarding these experiments, it is recognized that they have caused illness, mutilation, and deaths[55] while yielding no scientific knowledge.[24]

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), Tel Aviv (Israel) and Sydney (Australia).[62] In 2002, the German government issued an official apology to the gay community. Following this apology, Berlin's memorial was created several years later. Berlin's Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism is located in the Tiergarten Park, which contained the location of the popular 'Queer's Way' for the early 20th century gay community. The memorial was approved by the Budenstag on December 12, 2003, opened to the public on May 27, 2008, and subsequently vandalized numerous times in the years following its opening.[63] The memorial was vandalized again in the autumn of August 2019, when vandals painted over a window in the monument that allowed visitors to see a picture of a gay couple kissing.[64]

In 2001, Pink Triangle Park was dedicated; it is the first permanent, free-standing memorial in America dedicated to the persecuted homosexuals in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.[65][66][67] Starting in 2003, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has displayed its traveling 30-panel exhibition dedicated to homosexual victims of the Holocaust across the country.[68]

Berlin's Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism located in Tiergarten Park

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.[69]

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, combined with continued western homophobic ideologies.[70]

The word genocide was generated from a need for new terminology in order to understand the gravity of the crimes committed by the Nazis.[71] First coined by Raphael Lemkin 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.[72] It is, however, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms "an age when collective apologies are becoming increasingly common",[73] 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 could be seen as an appropriate time to bring attention to the debate over the Gay Holocaust, even if the issue is not 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 labour than smaller targeted groups, such as the political prisoners, and furthermore suffered a much higher mortality rate.[74] They also lacked a support network within the camps and were ostracized in the prison community.[74] 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.[75]

The Jews and Roma[76] were the only groups targeted by the Nazi regime for complete annihilation regardless of their identification or place of residence. However, Jews and Roma were not the only groups to be targeted by the Nazis, leading to a debate as to whether other groups should be counted as Holocaust victims.[77] William J. Spurlin has suggested that restricting the definition of "Holocaust" to Jews fosters a misrepresentation of history, and devalues 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."[78] In the mid-1970s, new discourses emerged that challenged the exclusivity of the Jewish genocide within the Holocaust, though not without great resistance.