Subject: Nazis

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070)
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 09:36 EST

.H 1 "Nazi Persecution of Gays"
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Konnilyn G. Feig, "Hitler's Death Camps, The Sanity of Madness," 
Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, 1983, pp. 24, 80-82. 
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The Nazis poured into their concentration camps the normal categories of
people whom victors always shut away--the political dissidents, the
revolutionaries, the clergy, the resisters, the criminals, people simply
disliked by someone, and those whose jobs some Nazis wanted.  But they
also interned four groups that were different, four groups against whom
they employed the severest methods:  the Jews, whom they intended to
totally exterminate from the face of Europe, and failed only because
they lost the War against Europe; the Gypsies whom they intended to
exterminate on a tribal and individual basis, and certainly did
exterminate a sizable percentage;  the Jehovah's Witnesses (probably
about 3,000), whom they incarcerated and ridiculed but seldom killed
outright;  and the homosexuals (mostly male), whom they relentlessly
persecuted and incarcerated in the camps from the opening moments of the
Third Reich.  Historians possess well-documented knowledge about the
Jews, but only minimal information about the Gypsies.  There is very
little written about the Jehovah's Witnesses, and no major research on
the homosexuals.
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 ...[p. 80] The Nazis focused furious energy and hatred upon four groups.
We know little about the sufferings of one of those groups--the
homosexuals.  We do know that the Nazis collected Germany's homosexuals,
threw them into jails and camps, and labeled them with a pink triangle
on their striped uniforms.  Most camps had homosexual inmates, but
Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald housed the largest numbers.  Since the only
significant published memoir of a homosexual camp survivor details his
life in Sachsenhausen, the Sachsenhausen environment can be used to
analyze general Nazi treatment of homosexuals.
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Himmler's race theory put a peculiar emphasis on homosexuals.  The
combination of an absurd race theory and pseudoscientific myths about
homosexuals was the basis for Nazi actions against them.  To the Nazis,
it made pragmatic sense to destroy all the homosexuals they could find.
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In the aftermath of World War I Germany suffered a severe population
drop.  As one of its most important missions, the government embarked on
a campaign for the production of children.  It coupled its pragmatic
need for children with a whole Pandora's box of racial theory.  Germany
meant to double its population and to ensure that all its citizens had
pure blood.  Women had as their single mission the bearing of children,
and men were required, an an absolute duty, to sire children.  The
population campaign began with a line of incentives, coupled with a
furious crusade against contraceptives, abortion, prostitution, and
above all, against homosexuality.  Eventually sterile women and women
too old for childbearing were also termed superfluous to the
population.
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Himmler opened his war against homosexuality in 1933 on a grand scale.
But the savage persecution began with the Roehm Putsch of June 1934.
Theory and philosophy sprang out of the leaders' mouths to rejustify the
actions.  The Reich legal director, Hans Frank, wrote that homosexual
activity meant the negation of the community.  If the community did not
exist, the race would perish.  "That is why homosexual behavior, in
particular, merits no mercy."  His language concealed a simple piece of
arithmetic in terms of the population policy so critical to Germany:
homosexuals were considered zeroes.  They negated the community by
failing to produce children, and that action in a country so hungry for
population was an unpardonable crime.  As an SS newspaper stated,
"Homosexuality was a political, not a medical, problem."
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The Nazis stylized the homosexually inclined male into a prototype of
sexual abnormality.  Homosexually inclined females seldom figured in the
pronouncements of National Socialist guardians of morality.  What
mattered to them was the man--the warrior and the father of children.
They considered a woman equipped for motherhood by nature.  Even a
lesbian could and must bear children, so she presented no practical
reproduction problem.
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Himmler dished up all the old cliches and added some ideas of his own.
Besides being mentally diseased, feminine, and cowardly, homosexuals
were declared by Himmler to be liars and blabbermouths, incapable of
population growth.  He deemed homosexuals fair game for SS actions, but
the main danger as he saw it was that homosexuals would infiltrate the
political leadership and constitute themselves a secret order of the
third sex.
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Himmler's approach was crude and dramatic.  By the time he finished
painting the effects of homosexuality on population growth, the
"problem" had exploded to the point where it constituted a major threat
to national survival.  A sociologist in 1928 had estimated the number of
homosexually inclined men in Germany at 1,200,000.  Himmler rounded that
figure off to 2,000,000 men, or 10 percent of male Germans!  Himmler
thought it was possible to lock up prostitutes and reeducate them, but
not millions of homosexuals.  Therefore he preached their total
elimination.  To his SS generals, he extolled the wisdom of the ancient
Germans whose custom it was to drown their homosexuals in bogs.  Since
the bogs were no longer available, other means would have to be devised.
The medieval church, he thought, had missed the point when it burned
homosexuals merely as heretics.
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The Nazis marched into the arena to combat homosexuality by propaganda
films, decrees, repressive laws, prison sentences, incarceration in the
harsher camps, and finally, by a campaign to bring the sexes together.
In the autumn of 1934 the Gestapo requested local departments to submit
lists of all persons known to have engaged in homosexual activities
(they took serious notice of mere suspicion).  In 1935 they incorporated
even harsher indecency provisions into the penal code.  They also began
a smear campaign against the Catholic Church, attempting to tar all
priests as homosexuals.  Between 1934 and 1938 the prosecutions for sex
crimes in all areas rose, but it rose by 900 percent for homosexuality!
For homosexuals, of course, prosecution was indistinguishable from
persecution.  They were predestined as concentration camp fodder.
Paragraph 175, a sixty-five-year-old law, punished sodomy.  The
strengthened statute of 1935, known as Paragraph 175a, made nine
possible acts punishable for homosexuals, including an embrace and even
homosexual fantasies.  A man's intentions were more important than his
actions in determining guilt.  Under the 1935 legislation, one court
brought in a verdict of guilty against a man who when apprehended for
watching a copulating couple in the park confessed to having watched
only the male.
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The campaign reached its height with the publication by Himmler in
November 1943 of a decree laying down the death penalty for any member
of the SS or the police who engaged in sexual relations with another
man.  Most of those who escaped the death penalty ended up in the
concentration camps.  Himmler is supposed to have had his own nephew
executed at Dachau for homosexuality.
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We possess statistics on the number of men brought to trial on
violations of Paragraph 175.  Many more homosexuals were sent to camps
without the benefit of trial.  Firing squads summarily executed a large
number, particularly in the military.  At least 50,000 were sent
officially to camps, but many thousands more went.  The police in one
Berlin district had an index of 30,000 homosexuals.  Beginning with the
annexation of Austria in 1938, the SS also gathered homosexuals from the
countries Germany occupied and interned them in German camps.  No one
has a final count of the homosexual dead, but some guesses exceed
500,000.  The Protestant Church of Austria recently estimated that
220,000 homosexuals were killed during the Third Reich.
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The SS brutally assaulted and sexually abused the Sachsenhausen
homosexuals.  Commandant Hoss of Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs that the
Sachsenhausen homosexuals were given as hard work as any of the
prisoners at the camp.  One survivor recalled the first weeks of his
imprisonment:  "I was the only available target on whom everyone was
free to vent his aggressions."  The guards referred to homosexuals as
criminal deviants.  They placed them in an intensified penal company and
transferred them to the Klinker Brickworks.  In two months the 300 men
numbered 50.  Recaptured escapees returned with "homo" scrawled across
their clothing for their last march through the camp.  Homosexuals
served as prime fodder for the Sachsenhausen medical experimentation
program.  A survivor described an ordinary death of one the young
healthy homosexuals.  The guards beat him to a pulp and then put him in
an icy shower.  Thoroughly drenched, he was forced to stand outside in
the bitter cold night:
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"When morning came, his breathing had become an audible rattle.
Bronchial pneumonia was later given as the cause of his death.  But
before it had come to that, he was again beaten and kicked.  Then he was
tied to a post and placed under an arc lamp until he began to sweat,
again put under a cold shower and so on.  He died toward evening."
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As in all camps, when demands for labor by essential industries reached
a hysterical level, the Nazis allowed some of the Sachsenhausen
homosexuals to be rehabilitated and released as civilian laborers.
Rehabilitation took two forms.  The guards took rehabilitation
candidates to the SS brothel.  If the candidate performed "properly"
with a prostitute, he was released as cured.  If he failed and agreed to
castration, he might be released for heavy labor.
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Although the East German government revoked Paragraphs 175 and 175a
immediately after the war, they remained on the books in West Germany
until 1969, when the government abolished most provisions of 175.
Although it granted some form of restitution payments to most camp
survivors, the West German government defined homosexuals as criminal
inmates and refused them any restitution.
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It is, then, no accident that Sachsenhausen's most imposing monument,
the towering obelisk, bears at its top rows of inverted pink
triangles--the Nazi identification mark for homosexuals.  But it also
seems strange that the prestigious historians and scholars who wrote
about Nazi Germany from 1945 to 1965 usually  described the Nazis as
predominantly homosexual, and "charged that the Nazi elite was largely
made up of 'sexual perverts.'"  Apparently the Himmler/Hitler propaganda
on homosexuality found extremely fertile ground outside of Germany.
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