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Homosexuals:
Victims of the
Nazi
Era
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As part of the Nazis' attempt to purify German society and propagate an 'Aryan master race,' they condemned homosexuals as 'socially aberrant.' Soon after taking office on January 30, 1933, Hitler banned all homosexual and lesbian organizations. Brownshirted storm troopers raided the institutions and gathering places of homosexuals. Greatly weakened and driven underground, this subculture had flourished in the relative freedom of the 1920s, in the pubs and cafes of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Bremen, and other cities.
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Mug shot of homosexual Auschwitz prisoner: August Pfeiffer, servant, born Aug. 8, 1895,
in Weferlingen, arrived to Auschwitz Nov. 1, 1941, and died there Dec. 28, 1941.
State Museum of Auschwitz, Oswiecim, Poland
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Friedrich Althoff (b. May 16, 1899), a waiter from Duesseldorf.
Nordrhein-Westfälische Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf RW 58-61940
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One man recounts how the Nazis' assumption of power in 1933 limited homosexuals' freedom and created an atmosphere of fear.
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In 1935 the Nazi regime revised Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code to make illegal a very broad range of behavior between men. This is the text of the revised law.
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Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jew and homosexual, founded the Institute for Sexual Sciences. Berlin, Germany, 1928.
Suddeutscher Verlag Bilderdienst, Munich Germany
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The closing of the Eldorado, a club where homosexuals socialized. Berlin, Germany, March 5, 1933.
Landesarchiv Berlin
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The Institute for Sexual Sciences during a Nazi raid. Berlin, Germany, May 6, 1933.
Landesarchiv Berlin
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In a speech that Himmler gave before a conference of SS officers on February 17, 1937, he included remarks on the question of homosexuality.
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Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim, one of the 'forgotten victims' of the Holocaust, recently broke his silence to give testimony.
USHMM
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On May 6, 1933, Nazis ransacked the "Institute for Sexual Science"
in Berlin; four days later' as part of large public burnings of books
viewed as "un-German," thousands of books plundered from the
Institute's library were thrown into a huge bonfire. The institute was
founded in 1919 by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 -1935). It sponsored research
and discussion on marital problems, sexually transmitted diseases,
and laws relating to sexual offenses, abortion, and homosexuality. The author
of many works, Hirschfeld, himself a homosexual, led efforts for three decades
to reform laws criminalizing homosexuality (In 1933 Hirschfeld happened
to be in France, where he remained until his death.)
In 1934, a special Gestapo (Secret State Police) division on homosexuals
was set up. One of its first acts was to order the police "pink lists"
from all over Germany The police had been compiling these lists of suspected
homosexual men since 1900. On September 1, 1935, a harsher, amended version
of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, originally framed in 1871, went
into effect, punishing a broad range of "lewd and lascivious"
behavior between men. In 1936 Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler created a Reich
Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion: Special
Office (II S), a subdepartment of Executive Department II of the Gestapo.
The linking of homosexuality and abortion reflected the Nazi regimes population
policies to promote a higher birthrate of its "Aryan" population.
On this subject Himmler spoke in Bad Tölz on February 18, 1937, before
a group of high-ranking SS officers on the dangers both homosexuality
and abortion posed to the German birthrate.
Under the revised Paragraph 175 and the creation of Special Office II
S, the number of prosecutions increased sharply, peaking in the years
1937-1939. Half of all convictions for homosexual activity under the Nazi
regime occurred during these years. The police stepped up raids on homosexual
meeting places, seized address books of arrested men to find additional
suspects, and created networks of informers to compile lists of names
and make arrests.
An estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928. Between
1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these,
some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced. Most of these
men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the
total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.
How many of these 5,000 to 15,000 "175ers" perished in the
concentration camps will probably never be known. Historical research
to date has been very limited. One leading scholar, Ruediger Lautmann,
believes that the death rate for "175ers" in the camps may have
been as high as sixty percent.
All prisoners of the camps wore marks of various colors and shapes, which
allowed guards and camp functionaries to identify them by category. The
uniforms of those sentenced as homosexuals bore, various identifying marks,
including a large black dot and a large "175" drawn on the back
of the jacket. Later a pink triangular patch (rosa Winkel) appeared. Conditions
in the camps were generally harsh for all inmates, many of whom died from
hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure to the cold, and brutal treatment.
Many survivors have testified that men with pink triangles were often
treated particularly severely by guards and inmates alike because of widespread
biases against homosexuals. As was true with other prisoner categories,
some homosexuals were also victims of cruel medical experiments, including
castration. At Buchenwald concentration camp, SS physician Dr. Carl Vaernet
performed operations designed to convert men to heterosexuals: the surgical
insertion of a capsule which released the male hormone testosterone. Such
procedures reflected the desire by Himmler and others to find a medical
solution to homosexuality.
The vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not
subjected to systematic persecution. While lesbian bars were closed, few
women are believed to have been arrested. Paragraph 175 did not mention
female homosexuality. Lesbianism was seen by many Nazi officials as alien
to the nature of the Aryan woman. In some cases, the police arrested lesbians
as "asocials" or "prostitutes." One woman, Henny Schermann,
was arrested in 1940 in Frankfurt and was labeled "licentious Lesbian"
on her mug shot; but she was also a "stateless Jew," sufficient
cause for deportation. Among the Jewish inmates at Ravensbrück concentration
camp selected for extermination, she was gassed in the Bernburg psychiatric
hospital, a "euthanasia" killing center in Germany, in 1942.
Homosexuality outside Germany (and incorporated Austria and other
annexed territories) was not a subject generally addressed in Nazi ideology
or policy; the concern focused on the impact of homosexuality on the strength
and birthrate of the Aryan population. During the war years, 1939 to 1945,
the Nazis did not generally instigate drives against homosexuality in
German-occupied countries.
Consequently, the vast majority of homosexuals arrested under Paragraph
175 were Germans or Austrians. Unlike Jews, men arrested as homosexuals
were not systematically deported to Nazi-established ghettos in eastern
Europe. Nor were they transported in mass groups of homosexual prisoners
to Nazi extermination camps in Poland.
It should be noted that Nazi authorities sometimes used the charge of
homosexuality to discredit and undermine their political opponents. Charges
of homosexuality among the SA (Storm trooper) leadership figured prominently
among justifications for the bloody purge of SA chief Ernst Röhm in June 1934. Nazi leader Hermann Göring used
trumped-up accusations of homosexual improprieties to unseat army supreme
commander Von Fritsch, an opponent of Hitler's military policy, in early
1938. Finally, a 1935 propaganda campaign and two show trials in 1936
and 1937 alleging rampant homosexuality in the priesthood, attempted to
undercut the power of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, an institution
which many Nazi officials considered their most powerful potential enemy.
After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not
acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused.
Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced
to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in
concentration camps. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect
in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation,
homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.
Research on Nazi persecution of homosexuals was impeded by the criminalization
and social stigmatization of homosexuals in Europe and the United States
in the decades following the Holocaust. Most survivors were afraid or
ashamed to tell their stories. Recently, especially in Germany, new research
findings on these "forgotten victims" have been published, and
some survivors have broken their silence to give testimony.
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