From ecl@mtgzy.att.com Fri Jan 15 09:42:05 1993 Return-Path: Received: from rpi.edu by mail1.its.rpi.edu (4.1/SMHUB40); id AA28439; Fri, 15 Jan 93 09:42:04 EST for buckmr Received: from att.att.com (att-out.att.com) by rpi.edu (4.1/SMHUB41); id AA21211; Fri, 15 Jan 93 09:41:44 EST for buckmr@rpi.edu Message-Id: <9301151441.AA21211@rpi.edu> Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 09:36 EST From: ecl@mtgzy.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070) To: buckmr@rpi.edu Subject: Nazis Status: U .H 1 "Nazi Persecution of Gays" .BL .LI .I Konnilyn G. Feig, "Hitler's Death Camps, The Sanity of Madness," Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, 1983, pp. 24, 80-82. .R .P 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. .P ...[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. .P 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. .P 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. .P 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." .P 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. .P 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. .P 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. .P 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. .P 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. .P 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. .P 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: .BL .LI "" "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." .LE .P 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. .P 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. .P 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. .LE