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In July 2003 Minnesota state Rep. Aryan Lindner viewed a travelling Holocaust exhibit after that he defended his position that gays and lesbians were never persecuted during the Holocaust. His latest allegation goes even further, saying that "the main gay participants in the Holocaust were Nazi concentration camp guards, " and he suggests that homosexuality helped lead to World War II. Lindner said he bases his accusations on the book "The Pink Swastika, " published by Abiding Truth Ministries, a right wing fundamentalist group based in Wisconsin that claims gays were responsible for the rise of Hitler.
Lindner, a transplanted Texan with a degree from a Baptist seminary has drawn fire since declaring that gays were rewriting history by "claiming" to have been victims of the Holocaust. "I'm not convinced that they were persecuted, " he said. During debate on a bill sponsored by Linder that would strip gays and lesbians of state human rights protections the Republican told legislators: "What I'm trying to prevent is the Holocaust of our children [from AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases]. If you want to sit around and wait until America becomes another African continent, you do that, but I'm going to do something. " That immediately drew severe criticism from the House's only two black members. Rep. Frank H ornstein, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, called Lindner's views "deeply offensive to millions of Americans whose relatives suffered during the Third Reich. " But lets to prove that the persecution of homosexuality were really in the time of Holocaust. With the coming of the Christian era in the first century A.
D. , homo- sexuality was defined as an unnatural act and a violation of God's law. This represented a significant departure from the status of homosexuality in ancient times and in the classical Greek and Roman era. In their survey of the literature on 76 preliterate societies, Ford and Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior, found homosexuality accepted in about half the societies studied. The one remarkable exception was in Hebrew culture; homosexuality was expressly prohibited in the Law of Moses. The Mosaic prohibitions were retained by the New Testament writers. Throughout the Medieval and early modern periods, these definitions were retained and punishments for violators became increasingly harsh, including the death penalty.
Laws prescribing the death penalty existed in France up to the French Revolution, in England until the early 1860 's and in Scotland until the 1880 's. The Enlightenment brought about some liberalization, i. e. , decriminalization, of homosexuality in France and some of the German states, e. g. , Bavaria.
An exception to this trend, however, was Prussia. In 1871, when the Prussian-dominated German Empire (the First Reich) was established, the Reich Criminal Code expressly prohibited unnatural sex acts, including sex acts "committed between persons of male sex or by humans with animals. " Such behaviors were "punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights." There had been a sodomy law since German unification in 1871, but it specifically targeted sodomy (anal intercourse), and due to the delicate matter of finding evidence, numbers of sentenced homosexuals stayed low until 1933. And in 1929 it seemed as if the gay and lesbian movement had reached one of their most important goals, the abolishment of the sodomy law 175. While rewriting the moral code, a majority within the parliamentary commission voted against the continuation of 175. But due to the growing influence of the Nazi party, the commission's endorsement was never introduced to the parliament. A male who indulges in criminally indecent behavior with another male, or who allows himself to participate in such activity, will be punished with imprisonment.
If one of the participants is under the age of twenty-one, and if the offense has not been grave, the court may dispense with the sentence of imprisonment. After Hitler's rise to power, both the Gestapo and SS pressed hard to broaden the old and "inefficient" sodomy law to an extent where evidence was not needed anymore. Homosexuality, so went the argument, was not just a criminal offense, but a danger to the future Aryan race. The Nazi party incorporated anti-gay laws into their ideology of racial hygiene and population politics. In 1935, the same year when the Nuremberg laws[furthered legal exclusion of persons considered alien from German life, drawing a distinction between so-called Aryans and so-called non-Aryans. The term "non-Aryan" applied to all non-Germanic peoples, but was applied to, and implemented primarily against Jews, Gypsies, and Afro-Germans.
The Nuremberg Laws removed their citizenship and defined them and prohibited them from engaging in sexual relations with Germans. ] were published, the revised law 175 was put on the books (june 28, 1935). Already the suggestion of homosexual intent was grounds for arrest. The numbers of sentenced gay men rose immediately. The legal changes came as no surprise; as early as the mid- 1920 's the Nazis had made clear that in a future Aryan Reich, there wouldn't be a place for homosexuals. In the 'Golden twenties' a visible gay and lesbian culture had - albeit cautiously -flourished in urban areas and a network of gay and lesbian organisations, publisher houses, journals, famous festivities and social groups had developped. In Berlin alone, close to 100 bars served their gay and lesbian customers.
Soon after taking office, Hitler banned all gay and lesbian organisations. Meanwhile, storm troopers raided the institutions and gathering places of the gay and lesbian community. In the famous book-burning in Berlin in May 1933, many books came from the looting of the "Institute for sexual science" which was founded by the Jewish homosexual Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. His institute was the first of its kind and world-famous for its collection and documentation on the field of sexology. Starting his work at the turn of the century, his work and his institute had been the centerpiece of the first gay and lesbian movement in Germany.
Being Jewish and gay, he became an early symbol within Nazi propaganda for the 'decay' of the Weimar Republic. Only the lucky coincidence that he was on a world tour in 1933 prevented his murder. In 1934, the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler created a special police department to combat male homosexuality. As early as December of that year, gay men were subjected to systematic criminal persecution. In 1936 the Federal Security Office for combating abortion and homosexuality was established, signalling the close connection between National Socialist population politics, race improvement and homophobia.
Of course, lesbian women were forced like gay men to go underground; according to the few testimonies we have, many married to protect themselves, often to their gay friends. Throughout the 30 's and early 40 's, Nazi officials were engaged in discussions about whether lesbianism was not to be included into law 175. Despite many supporters of expanding the law, three arguments prevented a systematic persecution of lesbian women: Lesbianism was seen by many Nazi officials as "essentially alien" to the nature of the German woman; women in general were excluded from power positions and the "threat of a lesbian conspiracy" within high Nazi circles was not considered likely in the same way that it was with gay men. But the most influential and cynical Nazi argument was that lesbian "Aryan" women could be used as breeders despite their own feelings, and reproduction was the most urgent goal of Nazi population politics. There are very few documented cases of lesbian women in the camps who were incarcerated solely because of their sexual orientation. We don't have historical evidence that lesbian women were marked with pink triangles or black triangles despite two disputing survivor testimonies.
Nonetheless, we do know more about lesbian relationships in the camps through the autobiographical accounts of Jewish and political prisoners who survived the camps. The lives of lesbian women were shaped by the state-sponsored homophobia encouraged in Nazi propaganda and policies, but a more significant factor in their lives was the general marginalisation of women and contempt for female sexuality in Nazi Germany. They were effected differently than heterosexual "Aryan" women were by the Nazi propaganda that exalted motherhood, marriage, and the ideal German woman as the breeder of a future "Aryan" race. So far, we lack sufficient research about how "Aryan" women in general were effected by gender-biased Nazi policies, not to mention the difficult position of lesbian women in Nazi Germany. Police raids and mass arrests of gay men had become common since the end of 1934, when many arrested homosexuals were imprisoned in concentration camps. The uniforms sometimes bore an identifying mark, like the letter 'A' (for ass-fucker).
Later, this mark was replaced by a pink triangle. Only in the 80 's and early 90 's has research allowed for the first time a clearer picture of the Nazi persecution of gay men, leaving many of the most essential questions open: At first research provided us with an estimation of 10. 000 to 15. 000 men with the pink triangle imprisoned in concentration camps, but a systematic survey of the number of male homosexuals in different camps is lacking, as is research on the reasons for the high percentage of gay prisoners in certain camps, an example of which are the smaller England-camps. In addition, insufficient research has been done on the regular practice of special slave-labor squads for homosexuals and the medical experiments that were performed on them. A pink triangle meant harsher treatment in the camps: In comparison with other relatively small victim groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners, the mortality rate of gays was much higher. The men with the pink triangle couldn't count on a support network within the camps and often were viewed and treated with contempt by their fellow-prisoners. Many of them died within a few months of arrival because they often were given the hardest work.
Sometimes gay men were segregated in special 175 -barracks. There is very little documentation on the treatment of Jewish camp inmates who were marked with a pink triangle. However, some testimonies suggest that there was a pattern of special brutality during police raids towards gay men if they were discovered to be Jewish as well. Despite the pink triangle being the symbol of the gay and lesbian community, we today still know very little about the individual fate of those who suffered wearing it. The Nazi invention of the pink triangle was able to become an international symbol of gay and lesbian pride because we are not haunted by concrete memories of those who were forced to wear them in the camps. No names, no faces...
an empty memory. We don't have a record of more than 10 - 15 stories from individual gay Holocaust victims and survivors. When gay survivors were liberated from the camps, they thought like everyone else that they would have the chance to at least try to start a new life. They soon realized that they wouldn't get the sympathy and moral support they had hoped for. Facing ongoing persecution, they were especially vulnerable to the rather active police raids in post-war Germany because their camp imprisonment was filed as a previous conviction in their police record.
The numbers of convicted homosexual men in the 50 's and 60 's were as high as they had been in Nazi Germany. Having survived the camps, some gay men didn't survive a second persecution: We know of different cases of former camp inmates who were charged for violation of law 175 again after the war (still the same Nazi law) and committed suicide either in prison or before the trial. Escape into marriage or complete isolation became common. To be a "survivor" reflects the individual and collective experience of those who escaped the camps, but it also connotes social and collective recognition from the outside world and the feeling of dignity expressed in the memory-culture of the Holocaust. The men with the pink triangle never received this recognition nor were they included in the memory-culture of the Holocaust.
Seen as criminals and perverts, they didn't regain their dignity in post-war society. In that sense, they are not "survivors", they survived. Worked Cite: Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany, 1933 - 1945. New York: Cambridge, 1991. Here, Heinz.
The Men With the Pink Triangle. Boston: Alyson Publishing Co. , 1980. Holocaust Denier Now Claims Gays Responsible For WWII St. Paul, Minnesota | 2003 - 03 - 12 Laska, Vera. Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses.
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983. Rector, Frank. "The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals" (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), p. 116 Stanley, Homosexual Emancipation Movement, pp. 111 - 13. Personalizing Nazis' Homosexual Victims David W. Dunlap PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS IN THE THIRD REICH web web web web
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