Plaque à la mémoire des victimes homosexuelles du nazisme, apposée dans le camp de concentration de Neuengamme.
Photo : Arcigay Milano
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Neuengamme. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Neuengamme. Afficher tous les articles
Pink-triangle prisoners at Buchenwald
Pink-triangle prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp
Not long after the establishment of the Nazi regime homosexual men were already being sent to concentration camps. In many cases this happened as an exemplary measure of terror. Corresponding regulations were only issued some time later to give an appearance of legality. Himmler's order of 14 December 1937 and his decree of 12 July 1940 defined the target groups as sex criminals, by which he especially meant 'corrupters of youth', 'rent boys' and those with related previous convictions. Thus, not every man convicted under Section 175 had to reckon with deportation to a concentration camp after the end of his sentence. And yet, where political considerations were involved, the provisions could be interpreted in such a way that an arbitrary attribution of one of the above labels opened the way to such a harsh punishment.(1)
Buchenwald concentration camp started operating in 1937 and was soon admitting its first homosexual men. By the end of 1938 28 prisoners were already wearing the pink triangle; the figure went up to 46 by late 1939 and stood at 51 two years later. As a result of Himmler's directive of 12 July 1940 - 'in future, after their release from prison, all homosexuals who have seduced more than one partner should be taken into preventive police detention'- the number of male homosexuals also rose at Buchenwald, passing a hundred for the first time in 1942. At the end of 1943 the camp held 169, and a year later 189. The figures were small in comparison with the total number of prisoners there - well below one per cent in every year.(2)
Deportation was justified on the absurd grounds that 'encouragement to perform regular work' would help to cure male homosexuals of their unnatural inclinations'. According to Heydrich's cynical classification of 1941, Buchenwald was a Category II concentration camp. This meant that, together with Flossenbürg, Neuengamme and Auschwitz, it was to be used for 'severely disturbed persons in protective custody' who were still 'capable of being educated'.
Their daily life was governed by the inhuman conditions of the camp. In addition there was the stigma of being a homosexual, which gave them a dangerous special status. They were isolated in many different senses: from their friends, who did not dare write for fear of themselves being registered as homosexuals; from their family, which out of 'shame' might disown father or son and might in the case of death - as we know from the file of Karl Willy A. - even refuse to accept the urn or hold a funeral; and from other groups of prisoners, who avoided men with the pink triangle both to keep clear of suspicion and because they shared the widespread prejudices against 'queers'. But the homosexual prisoners were also isolated from others like themselves, for gay men are seldom bound together by anything more than their sexual orientation. There was no question of the kind of solidarity that was evident among political prisoners or Jehovah's Witnesses. And they had correspondingly little influence in the prisoners' structure of communication and authority.
Until autumn 1938 male homosexuals were allocated to the political blocks. But from October they were sent en masse to do quarry work in the punishment battalion, where inhuman working conditions and the arbitrary violence of the SS claimed ever more victims. In the summer of 1942 they started to work with other prisoners in the war industry, and in the autumn or winter of 1944 were deported to the centers producing V-2 weapons in the 'Dora' out-camp near Nordhausen.(3) Catastrophic conditions of internment, heavy labour in the underground galleries and a generally poor state of health brought death to most of them. Thus, 96 homosexual prisoners died between 8 and 13 February 1945 alone - more than half the number interned in Buchenwald up to that time.
Reports of fellow-prisoners, such as Walter Poller who worked as a doctor's secretary in the sick-bay in 1939 and 1940, indicate that most of the homosexuals deported to Buchenwald were castrated.(4) But it has since become known that they were also used for the dreadful typhus fever experiments. As these were very incompletely documented, we cannot definitively gauge the scale on which they were carried out.(5) So far five homosexual men have been identified in this context; and the refusal to hand over the dead body of Karl Willy A. suggests that he too should be counted among the victims.
The situation of homosexuals at Buchenwald concentration camp
Report from spring 1945 (Extracts)(6)
[... ] Until autumn 1938 homosexuals were divided among the political blocks, where they went relatively unnoticed. In October 1938 they were sent en masse to the punishment battalion and had to work in the quarry, whereas previously all other units had been open to them. Apart from a few recorded cases, every member of the punishment battalion had the prospect of being transferred after a certain time to a normal block where living and working conditions were significantly better, but this possibility did not exist for homosexuals.
Precisely during the hardest years they were the lowest caste in the camp. In proportion to their number they made up the highest percentage on transports to special extermination camps such as Mauthausen, Natzweiler and Gross Rosen, because the camp always had the understandable tendency to ship off less important and valuable members, or those regarded as less valuable. In fact, the wider deployment of labor in the war industry brought some relief to this type of prisoner too - for the labor shortage made it necessary to draw skills from the ranks of such people, although in January 1944 the homosexuals, with very few exceptions, were still going to the 'Dora' murder camp, where many of them met their death. The striking fates of a few homosexuals at Buchenwald may afford some insight into the conditions.
L. Adloff, a librarian at the State Library in Berlin and a collaborator of the left-leaning periodical Die Weltbühne, was arrested as a political suspect in 1938; he was also under suspicion of homosexuality. In summer 1938 he was sent as a political to Buchenwald concentration camp. In October 1938, when all homosexuals and others under suspicion were sent to the punishment battalion, he had the sign of homosexuals, a pink triangle, put on him and went to work in the quarry. In January 1939 he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where terrible conditions prevailed. While working in the quarry there he suffered a leg injury which developed into a huge inflammation, and in the same year he was shipped as an invalid to the concentration camp at Dachau. After severe mistreatment at the hands of the Dachau sick bay kapo 'Heathen joe' [Heiden-Sepp], he was sent as an invalid to Buchenwald camp, then returned as an invalid to Dachau, then sent back to Buchenwald in autumn 1941 where he finally remained and died. This constant moving of broken people had the result that they died off like flies with every change of conditions. In Dachau in 1941 he picked up a sentence for some trifling incident, and although he was already punished in Dachau he received 25 lashes twice more in Buchenwald as well as a few weeks in a detention cell. Jail was then an absolutely deadly place to be: he had long been written off in his block before the sheer miracle of his return. But meanwhile the leg inflammation, which had never healed, developed in such a way as to cause serious damage to his heart. As he was a naturally strong person and had enormous will-power, he pulled himself along for another month until pleurisy prepared the end in April 1943.
In the spring of 1942 a Berlin writer called Dähnke was sent to the camp as a homosexual. The main reason for his internment, however, was political statements which had brought him to the attention of the Gestapo. One morning, after he had been working for several months in the quarry, he was taken by someone on fatigue duty to the sick bay and presented to the camp doctor as suffering from TB. As a matter of fact he was having chest trouble. The camp doctor at first wanted to put him in the TB unit for treatment, but when D., not knowing how things stood, mentioned that he was really there for political reasons, the doctor sat up and took notice, realized that he was dealing with a homosexual, and had him taken into the room reserved for the death list. Two days later he was given the lethal injection. H. D., an office worker born in 1915, was arrested on 20.4.1938 because of an illegal trip abroad to Prague. He had tried to make contact with the Russian Consulate in Prague so as to get away from Germany; the Gestapo suspected him of being an underground Communist courier. At the same time, a friend with whom he had been in a relationship of trust was arrested and forced to confess. The charges of high treason had to be dropped, because nothing could be proved against D. and nothing could be got out of him. So he only received three-and-a-half years' imprisonment for unnatural sex acts. After serving his sentence, he was sent to Buchenwald in November 1941. The first impression he had was of the bodies of various people who had died in the punishment battalion, which were thrown in front of the door like sacks of flour. On the same evening a young homosexual hanged himself - everyone calmly went on eating, nobody cared a jot about it. Still on the same evening, a prisoner who had already been there a long time told him that he would have to work in the quarry, that the kapo was a terrible man, that especially §176 people (relations with juveniles) were done for, and that he should be careful although there was no point in keeping quiet about anything. After an agonizing sleepless night, D. decided to prepare himself for every eventuality: he mentioned to the kapo that he had been told such and such and that he did not want to hang himself, and asked him for advice about what he should do. But he got the exact opposite of what he wanted. The kapo, Herzog, was a former member of the foreign legion, extremely brutal, apparently homosexual-sadistic and with a frightening tendency to become frenzied; if someone was beaten by him it was all over. Herzog was determined to find out who had spoken to D. and he threatened him with some terrible things. But as D. realized that it would mean curtains for his comrade in suffering, he refused to reveal the name of the man who had warned him. The next day he was sent to work on the quarry wagon - an exhausting and dangerous job. Anyone who could not keep going was tossed on the wagon and then dumped on a heap of stones. Then Herzog either trampled them to death without further ado, or poured water down their throat for so long that they suffocated. If anyone still survived, Herzog treated him as a malingerer and crushed him underfoot. Although D. was young and strong, the work exhausted him so much that only the end of the day saved him from collapse. Next morning the friend who had warned him, now grateful for his silence, took him to another part of the quarry where the work was a little easier and where he was out of the kapo's line of sight for the next few weeks. After three weeks or so, however, Herzog remembered him, again asked for the name and presented him with an ultimatum: at a certain hour he would drive him through a cordon of duty sentries. D. knew this was deadly serious and he was ready for anything. He was saved by a sheer miracle. An hour before the appointed time, Herzog was called to the door and quite unexpectedly released from the camp. (The word later went round in the camp that he had been stabbed to death in his home area.) On 4.1.42 D. was sent to the typhus fever experimental ward, where young homosexuals were favorite guinea-pig material. He came through the illness but suffered from heart trouble as a result. On 15.7.42 he was discharged from the ward to perform light quarry work. Meanwhile things had become quite wild in the block. Assisted by isolation from the other camp and more supported than supervised by the SS, a number of bandits were completely terrorizing the workforce, stealing the packets they were supposed to receive since winter 1941, and holding real orgies of brutality and the most shameless sadism. Sexual abuse and the foulest murder were the order of the day. The battle still raging between politicals and the Greens (criminals) who wanted to get control still tied the hands of the Reds for the time being. Only after some months was it possible to clean out the Augean stables - which was made casier by the fact that some of the guys were sending each other to kingdom come. One incident described by D. throws a revealing light on the conditions. The punishment battalion was not allowed to smoke. But people on the typhus ward bought things like everyone else, and that included tobacco. As they had also not been allowed to smoke on the typhus ward, they all naturally had a small stock of tobacco and cigarettes. The first thing the block elder, a former SS man, did was to ask all those who returned to hand over their tobacco. When they hesitated for a moment, he singled one out, spread him over a table and counted out 25 lashes - whereupon the tobacco and cigarettes shifted double-quick into his pocket.
The liquidation methods had meanwhile changed somewhat. Until early 1942 a sorting of new arrivals had undoubtedly been carried out in the political department. People - especially §176 homosexuals - were called to the door a few days after their arrival and moved into the cells. Some days later came the announcement of death. From spring 1942 the cell murders stopped. But to make up for it the second camp Führer, Gust, turned to the now compliant quarry kapo, Müller, generally known as 'Waldmüller' [forest miller]: he came to see him nearly every day, shook hands and regaled him with cigarettes, and no doubt gave him instructions. The number of people 'shot white attempting to escape' was terrifyingly high in the summer of 1942. For the sake of appearances, it was felt necessary to post quarry trustees as sentries to hold people back. D., who stood out from the others by his human qualities, was made a sentry and witnessed some hideous scenes. [...]
In autumn 1942 these quarry shootings came to an end. The greater use of prisoners' labour forced the SS to be a little more sparing with its 'human material', and the forces of order in the camp finally managed to wrest away its instruments of murder. Later, when conditions eased a little, D. managed to get sent to a better unit, to hold on in the camp by keeping a clean slate, and to appear as a witness at trials as one of the few to have survived.
(1) See in general R. Lautmann/W. Grischkat/E. Schmidt, 'Der Rosa Winkel in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern', in R. Lautmann, ed., Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, Frankfurt/Main 1977, pp. 325-365.
(2) G. Grau, 'Homosexuelle im KZ. Buchenwald', in S. N. Rapoport and A. Thom, eds., Das Schicksal der Medizin im Faschismus, Berlin 1989, pp. 67-69; and W. Röll, Homosexuelle Häftlinge im KZ. Buchenwald, Weimar-Buchenwald 1991.
(3) For an account of the 'Dora'camp (but without any reference to the group of homosexual prisoners), see E. Pachaly and K. Pelny,'KZ Mittelbau Dora. Terror und Widerstand', Buchenwaldheft 28, Weimar-Buchenwald 1987.
(4) W. Poller, Arztschreiber in Buchenwald, Hamburg 1947.
(5) On the typhus experiments in general see W. Scherf, 'Die Verbrechen der SS-Ärzte im KZ Buchenwald. Der antifaschistische Widerstand. 2. Beitrag: juristische Probleme', diss., criminal law department, Humboldt University, Berlin 1987.
(6) Passages omitted here do not specifically refer to the situation of homosexual prisoners at Buchenwald. Cf. the unabridged version and commentary in Zeitschrift fur Sexualforschung, Vol. 2, 1989, pp. 243-253.
Source: Hidden Holocaust ?, Günter Grau, Cassell, 1995. Translated from German by Patrick Camiller.
Not long after the establishment of the Nazi regime homosexual men were already being sent to concentration camps. In many cases this happened as an exemplary measure of terror. Corresponding regulations were only issued some time later to give an appearance of legality. Himmler's order of 14 December 1937 and his decree of 12 July 1940 defined the target groups as sex criminals, by which he especially meant 'corrupters of youth', 'rent boys' and those with related previous convictions. Thus, not every man convicted under Section 175 had to reckon with deportation to a concentration camp after the end of his sentence. And yet, where political considerations were involved, the provisions could be interpreted in such a way that an arbitrary attribution of one of the above labels opened the way to such a harsh punishment.(1)
Buchenwald concentration camp started operating in 1937 and was soon admitting its first homosexual men. By the end of 1938 28 prisoners were already wearing the pink triangle; the figure went up to 46 by late 1939 and stood at 51 two years later. As a result of Himmler's directive of 12 July 1940 - 'in future, after their release from prison, all homosexuals who have seduced more than one partner should be taken into preventive police detention'- the number of male homosexuals also rose at Buchenwald, passing a hundred for the first time in 1942. At the end of 1943 the camp held 169, and a year later 189. The figures were small in comparison with the total number of prisoners there - well below one per cent in every year.(2)
Deportation was justified on the absurd grounds that 'encouragement to perform regular work' would help to cure male homosexuals of their unnatural inclinations'. According to Heydrich's cynical classification of 1941, Buchenwald was a Category II concentration camp. This meant that, together with Flossenbürg, Neuengamme and Auschwitz, it was to be used for 'severely disturbed persons in protective custody' who were still 'capable of being educated'.
Their daily life was governed by the inhuman conditions of the camp. In addition there was the stigma of being a homosexual, which gave them a dangerous special status. They were isolated in many different senses: from their friends, who did not dare write for fear of themselves being registered as homosexuals; from their family, which out of 'shame' might disown father or son and might in the case of death - as we know from the file of Karl Willy A. - even refuse to accept the urn or hold a funeral; and from other groups of prisoners, who avoided men with the pink triangle both to keep clear of suspicion and because they shared the widespread prejudices against 'queers'. But the homosexual prisoners were also isolated from others like themselves, for gay men are seldom bound together by anything more than their sexual orientation. There was no question of the kind of solidarity that was evident among political prisoners or Jehovah's Witnesses. And they had correspondingly little influence in the prisoners' structure of communication and authority.
Until autumn 1938 male homosexuals were allocated to the political blocks. But from October they were sent en masse to do quarry work in the punishment battalion, where inhuman working conditions and the arbitrary violence of the SS claimed ever more victims. In the summer of 1942 they started to work with other prisoners in the war industry, and in the autumn or winter of 1944 were deported to the centers producing V-2 weapons in the 'Dora' out-camp near Nordhausen.(3) Catastrophic conditions of internment, heavy labour in the underground galleries and a generally poor state of health brought death to most of them. Thus, 96 homosexual prisoners died between 8 and 13 February 1945 alone - more than half the number interned in Buchenwald up to that time.
Reports of fellow-prisoners, such as Walter Poller who worked as a doctor's secretary in the sick-bay in 1939 and 1940, indicate that most of the homosexuals deported to Buchenwald were castrated.(4) But it has since become known that they were also used for the dreadful typhus fever experiments. As these were very incompletely documented, we cannot definitively gauge the scale on which they were carried out.(5) So far five homosexual men have been identified in this context; and the refusal to hand over the dead body of Karl Willy A. suggests that he too should be counted among the victims.
The situation of homosexuals at Buchenwald concentration camp
Report from spring 1945 (Extracts)(6)
[... ] Until autumn 1938 homosexuals were divided among the political blocks, where they went relatively unnoticed. In October 1938 they were sent en masse to the punishment battalion and had to work in the quarry, whereas previously all other units had been open to them. Apart from a few recorded cases, every member of the punishment battalion had the prospect of being transferred after a certain time to a normal block where living and working conditions were significantly better, but this possibility did not exist for homosexuals.
Precisely during the hardest years they were the lowest caste in the camp. In proportion to their number they made up the highest percentage on transports to special extermination camps such as Mauthausen, Natzweiler and Gross Rosen, because the camp always had the understandable tendency to ship off less important and valuable members, or those regarded as less valuable. In fact, the wider deployment of labor in the war industry brought some relief to this type of prisoner too - for the labor shortage made it necessary to draw skills from the ranks of such people, although in January 1944 the homosexuals, with very few exceptions, were still going to the 'Dora' murder camp, where many of them met their death. The striking fates of a few homosexuals at Buchenwald may afford some insight into the conditions.
L. Adloff, a librarian at the State Library in Berlin and a collaborator of the left-leaning periodical Die Weltbühne, was arrested as a political suspect in 1938; he was also under suspicion of homosexuality. In summer 1938 he was sent as a political to Buchenwald concentration camp. In October 1938, when all homosexuals and others under suspicion were sent to the punishment battalion, he had the sign of homosexuals, a pink triangle, put on him and went to work in the quarry. In January 1939 he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where terrible conditions prevailed. While working in the quarry there he suffered a leg injury which developed into a huge inflammation, and in the same year he was shipped as an invalid to the concentration camp at Dachau. After severe mistreatment at the hands of the Dachau sick bay kapo 'Heathen joe' [Heiden-Sepp], he was sent as an invalid to Buchenwald camp, then returned as an invalid to Dachau, then sent back to Buchenwald in autumn 1941 where he finally remained and died. This constant moving of broken people had the result that they died off like flies with every change of conditions. In Dachau in 1941 he picked up a sentence for some trifling incident, and although he was already punished in Dachau he received 25 lashes twice more in Buchenwald as well as a few weeks in a detention cell. Jail was then an absolutely deadly place to be: he had long been written off in his block before the sheer miracle of his return. But meanwhile the leg inflammation, which had never healed, developed in such a way as to cause serious damage to his heart. As he was a naturally strong person and had enormous will-power, he pulled himself along for another month until pleurisy prepared the end in April 1943.
In the spring of 1942 a Berlin writer called Dähnke was sent to the camp as a homosexual. The main reason for his internment, however, was political statements which had brought him to the attention of the Gestapo. One morning, after he had been working for several months in the quarry, he was taken by someone on fatigue duty to the sick bay and presented to the camp doctor as suffering from TB. As a matter of fact he was having chest trouble. The camp doctor at first wanted to put him in the TB unit for treatment, but when D., not knowing how things stood, mentioned that he was really there for political reasons, the doctor sat up and took notice, realized that he was dealing with a homosexual, and had him taken into the room reserved for the death list. Two days later he was given the lethal injection. H. D., an office worker born in 1915, was arrested on 20.4.1938 because of an illegal trip abroad to Prague. He had tried to make contact with the Russian Consulate in Prague so as to get away from Germany; the Gestapo suspected him of being an underground Communist courier. At the same time, a friend with whom he had been in a relationship of trust was arrested and forced to confess. The charges of high treason had to be dropped, because nothing could be proved against D. and nothing could be got out of him. So he only received three-and-a-half years' imprisonment for unnatural sex acts. After serving his sentence, he was sent to Buchenwald in November 1941. The first impression he had was of the bodies of various people who had died in the punishment battalion, which were thrown in front of the door like sacks of flour. On the same evening a young homosexual hanged himself - everyone calmly went on eating, nobody cared a jot about it. Still on the same evening, a prisoner who had already been there a long time told him that he would have to work in the quarry, that the kapo was a terrible man, that especially §176 people (relations with juveniles) were done for, and that he should be careful although there was no point in keeping quiet about anything. After an agonizing sleepless night, D. decided to prepare himself for every eventuality: he mentioned to the kapo that he had been told such and such and that he did not want to hang himself, and asked him for advice about what he should do. But he got the exact opposite of what he wanted. The kapo, Herzog, was a former member of the foreign legion, extremely brutal, apparently homosexual-sadistic and with a frightening tendency to become frenzied; if someone was beaten by him it was all over. Herzog was determined to find out who had spoken to D. and he threatened him with some terrible things. But as D. realized that it would mean curtains for his comrade in suffering, he refused to reveal the name of the man who had warned him. The next day he was sent to work on the quarry wagon - an exhausting and dangerous job. Anyone who could not keep going was tossed on the wagon and then dumped on a heap of stones. Then Herzog either trampled them to death without further ado, or poured water down their throat for so long that they suffocated. If anyone still survived, Herzog treated him as a malingerer and crushed him underfoot. Although D. was young and strong, the work exhausted him so much that only the end of the day saved him from collapse. Next morning the friend who had warned him, now grateful for his silence, took him to another part of the quarry where the work was a little easier and where he was out of the kapo's line of sight for the next few weeks. After three weeks or so, however, Herzog remembered him, again asked for the name and presented him with an ultimatum: at a certain hour he would drive him through a cordon of duty sentries. D. knew this was deadly serious and he was ready for anything. He was saved by a sheer miracle. An hour before the appointed time, Herzog was called to the door and quite unexpectedly released from the camp. (The word later went round in the camp that he had been stabbed to death in his home area.) On 4.1.42 D. was sent to the typhus fever experimental ward, where young homosexuals were favorite guinea-pig material. He came through the illness but suffered from heart trouble as a result. On 15.7.42 he was discharged from the ward to perform light quarry work. Meanwhile things had become quite wild in the block. Assisted by isolation from the other camp and more supported than supervised by the SS, a number of bandits were completely terrorizing the workforce, stealing the packets they were supposed to receive since winter 1941, and holding real orgies of brutality and the most shameless sadism. Sexual abuse and the foulest murder were the order of the day. The battle still raging between politicals and the Greens (criminals) who wanted to get control still tied the hands of the Reds for the time being. Only after some months was it possible to clean out the Augean stables - which was made casier by the fact that some of the guys were sending each other to kingdom come. One incident described by D. throws a revealing light on the conditions. The punishment battalion was not allowed to smoke. But people on the typhus ward bought things like everyone else, and that included tobacco. As they had also not been allowed to smoke on the typhus ward, they all naturally had a small stock of tobacco and cigarettes. The first thing the block elder, a former SS man, did was to ask all those who returned to hand over their tobacco. When they hesitated for a moment, he singled one out, spread him over a table and counted out 25 lashes - whereupon the tobacco and cigarettes shifted double-quick into his pocket.
The liquidation methods had meanwhile changed somewhat. Until early 1942 a sorting of new arrivals had undoubtedly been carried out in the political department. People - especially §176 homosexuals - were called to the door a few days after their arrival and moved into the cells. Some days later came the announcement of death. From spring 1942 the cell murders stopped. But to make up for it the second camp Führer, Gust, turned to the now compliant quarry kapo, Müller, generally known as 'Waldmüller' [forest miller]: he came to see him nearly every day, shook hands and regaled him with cigarettes, and no doubt gave him instructions. The number of people 'shot white attempting to escape' was terrifyingly high in the summer of 1942. For the sake of appearances, it was felt necessary to post quarry trustees as sentries to hold people back. D., who stood out from the others by his human qualities, was made a sentry and witnessed some hideous scenes. [...]
In autumn 1942 these quarry shootings came to an end. The greater use of prisoners' labour forced the SS to be a little more sparing with its 'human material', and the forces of order in the camp finally managed to wrest away its instruments of murder. Later, when conditions eased a little, D. managed to get sent to a better unit, to hold on in the camp by keeping a clean slate, and to appear as a witness at trials as one of the few to have survived.
(1) See in general R. Lautmann/W. Grischkat/E. Schmidt, 'Der Rosa Winkel in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern', in R. Lautmann, ed., Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität, Frankfurt/Main 1977, pp. 325-365.
(2) G. Grau, 'Homosexuelle im KZ. Buchenwald', in S. N. Rapoport and A. Thom, eds., Das Schicksal der Medizin im Faschismus, Berlin 1989, pp. 67-69; and W. Röll, Homosexuelle Häftlinge im KZ. Buchenwald, Weimar-Buchenwald 1991.
(3) For an account of the 'Dora'camp (but without any reference to the group of homosexual prisoners), see E. Pachaly and K. Pelny,'KZ Mittelbau Dora. Terror und Widerstand', Buchenwaldheft 28, Weimar-Buchenwald 1987.
(4) W. Poller, Arztschreiber in Buchenwald, Hamburg 1947.
(5) On the typhus experiments in general see W. Scherf, 'Die Verbrechen der SS-Ärzte im KZ Buchenwald. Der antifaschistische Widerstand. 2. Beitrag: juristische Probleme', diss., criminal law department, Humboldt University, Berlin 1987.
(6) Passages omitted here do not specifically refer to the situation of homosexual prisoners at Buchenwald. Cf. the unabridged version and commentary in Zeitschrift fur Sexualforschung, Vol. 2, 1989, pp. 243-253.
Source: Hidden Holocaust ?, Günter Grau, Cassell, 1995. Translated from German by Patrick Camiller.
The Nazi persecution of Gays
For many decades, next to nothing was published on the Nazi persecution of gay men for the simple reason that both German governments in cooperation with the occupying forces continued to persecute gay men after the war until the late sixties. In the West, they used the laws of the Nazi's, in the East those from before the nazi-period, in both cases the infamous paragraph 175. Only since the seventies, books and articles began being published on the theme, for example Harry Wilde's Das Schicksal der Verfemten (1969), Heinz Heger's The Men with the Pink Triangle (1972) which was made into a successful play, Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle. The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (1986) and Ruediger Lautmann's important article in Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität (1977) that offered a first survey of the history of this persecution including concrete numbers of victims.(1) Since, the number of books and articles has grown rapidly while in the last two years six new books were published in German on specific aspects of the Nazi treatment of homosexuals. The Berlin Schwules (gay) Museum and the Sachsenhausen museum in Orianenburg (20 miles to the north of Berlin) co-organized the first major exhibit on the topic in their rooms in the summer of 2000.
In 1977, Lautmann and his co-authors established that between 5,000 and 15,000 men had been sent to concentration camps because of homosexual offenses, while about half of them died or were murdered there. Before, this persecution had often been denied while, at the pro-gay side, the Protestant Church of Austria had claimed 220,000 murdered homosexuals.(2) Rainer Hoffschildt is preparing a list of the names of all men persecuted for homosexual offenses by the Nazis. In the book of essays edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, he expects to come to a number of 5-7,000 men but does not speak out about the number that died in these camps of death. He warns also not to use the number of cases of homosexual offenses persecuted by the Nazis in the period 1933-1945 (about 50,000) as equalling the number of victimized men because many were repeat offenders. At the other hand, gay men as well as lesbian women were persecuted under other legal provisions for example against asocials, insane people or vagrants.
The main importance of the new books is however not establishing numbers but reporting the life histories and social conditions of gay men, sometimes also of lesbian women, in Nazi times. In all books, except the one published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the faces of gay men can be seen and their moving stories can be read. Most of the Nazi victims were utterly unprepared for their fate, and those who survived the war, had to confront afterwards the refusal to offer gay men « Wiedergutmachung « . Some men even remained imprisoned, or were sentenced again to severe penalties by judges and public prosecutors who made their careers in the Nazi period. For gay men, the « liberation « of 1945 meant no end to discrimination and prosecution. The capitalist West of Germany was even worse than the communist East. It kept the Nazi extension of paragraph 175 of 1935 as it was not deemed to be a result of Nazi ideology. The extension of 1935 broadened the crime from a limited number of homosexual acts that resembled coitus to all forms of desire, including mutual masturbation or intimacies. But the East had also its flaws: some gay men who dared to request after the war a special status as Nazi victims, were prosecuted because of fraud.
The collection of essays on Berlin edited by Pretzel and Rossbach includes a chronology of the Nazi prosecution of gay men. Within a month after the take-over at the end of January 1933, the Nazi minister of interior issued an order to close all gay bars. He also forbade obscene literature. In May, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Sciences was sacked by the SA. The first gay and transgender men were sent in the autumn to the newly built concentration camps.(3) The legal provisions to arrest « sex criminals « were broadened. Without any attempt to produce legal proof, many SA leaders were murdered in the summer of 1934, among them their chief of staff, Hitler's buddy Ernst Roehm. As official reason was given that the regime wanted to clean society of such dens of sexual debauchery. The same year, the Gestapo got a section for homosexual crimes, and in 1936 a « National Institute to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion « was founded (the combination makes clear that a main nazi issue was promoting reproduction).
In 1935, paragraph 175 was broadened. Two years later, SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave his infamous lecture on the homosexual danger implying that it could menace through infection the homosocial institutions of the Nazi regime. After the beginning of the war in 1939, it was decided that no prisoner would be released from concentration camps. Persons who were considered to endanger the social body could be exterminated. The death penalty for homosexual offenses was introduced in 1941 for the SS and the police, in 1943 for the army. At that time, many gay men had already succumbed to the terror in the camps.
The book on Berlin is important for its stories of horror, idiocy but sometimes also tenderness. It is astonishing to realize that a vivid gay culture and an active movement had disappeared within a month after the Nazis took power. More than a third of homosexual offenses in Berlin came to the attention of the police through non-involved private persons, mostly neighbors. Another third was discovered by the police itself while also family members or the workplace denounced supposed sex-criminals. There were in fact no spaces where a gay man could feel safe, not even at home. Gay men of all social classes and political persuasions were prosecuted. The Nazi men who were judged for homosexual offenses faced the harshest destiny. The book offers essays on legal material from numbers to policies, on interrogations, on meeting places, on Sachsenhausen. The best part that makes up half of the book is a wide range of personal stories on the Nazi persecutions that are recuperated mainly from official archives. The police pictures of arrested men look dreadful, at the other hand the book has many lovely private pictures. There is a nice story of a gay fetishist who dressed his secretary in « Samt und Seide « (velvet and silk), kissed and touched him and got thus excited. The poor man was sentenced to prison even though there was no proof of a sexual act.
The book edited by Mueller and Sternweiler on Sachsenhausen that complements the exhibit is the most gruesome in its details and illustrations. It opens with « a list of the dead « , the 300 known names of men who were persecuted for homosexual offenses and died in Sachsenhausen. It continues with articles on the architecture of and the procedures in the camp. Gay men were separated from other prisoners because of the risks of homosexual infection. The worst jobs were reserved for them. In the « Klinkerwerke « or brickworks, they had to dig up and transport mud. In the summer of 1942 89 gay men were brutally killed on this location. Building a firing range for the SS was another place of death as the SS men used the prisoners as targets while they were forced to continue the construction work. In the « shoe-company « heavily packed gay men were coerced to walk for hours on new models to try them out in adverse circumstances. More benign locations were the kitchen and hospital that sometimes could offer some extra food. For young men, there was the possibility of becoming the secret beloved of a prison warden. In this way Heinz Heger survived the worst time in Sachsenhausen. Some men consented to be castrated in the vain hope of getting out of the camp.
Before 1939, gay men were considered the lowest rank in the hierarchy of prisoners with Jews and Gypsies. After the war started, the camps were flooded with political prisoners and prisoners of war from outside Germany, and gay men became only a tiny part of the camp population (nearly no non-German gay men were slept there). After 1942, the camps changed largely from places of extermination to labour camps. The prisoners were dearly needed to contribute to the war effort. Now, with many foreigners in the camps, gay men could even rise to positions of power that had always been withheld from them. The book ends with several essays on the continuation of discrimination of gay men after the war. Men who had hoped to be free after the liberation, had sometimes to stay in prison, and no gay Nazi victim ever received appropriate indemnification for his ordeal.
Hoffschildt's book begins with an explanation of the legal system that was used against gay men. It continues with an overview of some camps where they were held, namely the Emsland camps and Bergen-Belsen, Moringen and Neuengamme, and several « outside-camps « which were established next to a factory or another place where prisoners were forced to labor. The next chapter discusses prisons which began always more to resemble the camps in their organization and function. A last chapter is devoted to death penalties. Except for the first chapter, most material concerns personal histories. The material on Moringen is about three lesbian prisoners.
The book by Rahe and others is a special gay issue of a regular publication on the history of camp Neuengamme but the contents extend beyond this camp. Some of the main authors mentioned above have articles in this collection like Lautmann and Hoffschildt who discusses Bergen Belsen and the prison of Celle. Two articles tell the lesbian story, one by Claudia Schoppmann who is the main author on the Nazi persecution of lesbians.(4) Stefan Micheler has both an article on gays in Neuengamme, and another on the scandal that recently 80% of the court archives from the period 1935-1949 was destroyed by the National Archive in Hamburg, including much material on the persecution of homosexual offenses.
The book on the Cologne region went also with an exhibit.(5) It opens with an overview of the Nazi persecution of gays, and a second one on lesbians. Most articles discuss specific topics like the closing down of bars, raids on cruising places and preventive policies in Cologne, a theatre scandal in Essen, castration. An interesting article concerns Hanns Heinz Ewers, a gay author who contributed to the gay press before 1933 and wrote Fundvogel (1927), an early novel on a transsexual operation. He was the official biographer of the Nazi hero Horst Wessel (1932). After Hitler came to power, most of his books were forbidden but strangely enough not the gay ones. He died in oblivion during the war. The collection of essays ends with four personal stories.
The publication of the Heinrich Böll Foundation offers some general essays on the topic, for example by George Mosse, Schoppmann, the omnipresent Hoffschildt while another important author on the topic, Gunter Grau, gives an overview of the relevant literature.(6) It includes discussions on and proposals for a monument to commemorate the gay victims of the Nazi regime. Even two places are already suggested, in Tiergarten near the location of Hirschfeld's destroyed Institute, or on Nollendorferplatz where the gay scene was before 1933 and again is nowadays.
The books raise many important questions. A recurring theme is the strange mixture of anti-homosexuality and homo-eroticism in Nazism. For a long time, many Nazi victims and leftist Nazi opponents represented their persecutors and enemies as gay men, and denied the anti-gay ideologies and practices of the Nazis. Some authors claim that the gay experience of Nazism has therefore a unique specificity in the sense that gay men were mixed up between the Nazis and their opponents. But not only gay men were active on both sides, all prosecuted groups had their traitors who cooperated with the Nazis, often helping them in the annihilation of their own group.
Another question concerns the place gay men should occupy in the list of victims. It has become politically correct nowadays to delineate the victims of the Nazis as being Jews, Gypsies, leftists, resistance fighters, Eastern-Europeans, Jehovah-witnesses, the insane, homosexuals. But when I see, for example, after visiting the exposition on the gay victims of the Nazis, that mention is made of 17,000 prisoners of war from the Soviet-Union murdered in one single year in Sachsenhausen, the destiny of perhaps 5,000 murdered gay men seems to be minor. The authors deal in very different ways with this fact. Ilse Kokula has the unhappy formulation that « the suffering is not less when the number of dead people is smaller « (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 137). Grau found a better way to express the discussion of numbers « it is absurd to measure in numbers the suffering done to humans « (id, 100).
There is no doubt any longer that gay men were persecuted harshly by the Nazis, and especially the gay Nazis that Nazi victims have singled out for opprobrium. There is no doubt that among all the victims gay men have a real and special, but also minor place. One difference between gay and most other groups is that gay men were prosecuted in nearly all Western states at that point in time, perhaps less cruelly and systematically than by the Nazis, but nonetheless they had to face prison, castration, therapies, ostracism, and other forms of social and personal discrimination everywhere. As Florence Tamagne in her Histoire de l'homosexualité en Europe (Paris 2000) (7) and I myself argued in an article in Sexual Cultures in Europe (Vol 2, Manchester 1999), the thirties saw a steady decline in acceptance of homosexuality and an increasing persecution of gay men all over Europe that did not end in 1945, but only from the sixties on in Western Europe, and from the eighties on in Eastern-Europe.
Another major point is about Wiedergutmachung. Germany, but also The Netherlands, have promised a retribution to gay victims of the Nazis in the nineties. But as most men hid themselves very deep in their closets, while the few who opened up, are dead by now, minor indemnifications have come to less than a handful of gay victims. The question for the Berliners is the next step, a national homomonument to commemorate the victims. Amsterdam and Frankfurt have already one, Berlin will probably discuss it for a lengthy period with its ominous separatist traditions. In the Netherlands, some have suggested to pay substantial amounts of money for gay projects, not only because of persecutions and discriminations during the Second World War, but also for the periods before and after. The range of legal, financial, medical and other damage being done to gay men and lesbian women until recent seems to justify indeed major, probably collective, indemnifications by most Western governments.
The books offer a broad overview but show also that some topics are still under-researched. Most needed is research on persecutions in the Southern parts of Germany, in Austria and in Bohemia. Gay men in most occupied countries suffered little from the Nazis because they did not endanger the German race (except when they seduced German soldiers).(8) Very little is known on the attitudes of the general population regarding the gay persecutions. They probably supported them seen the number of denunciations in « tolerant « Berlin. Major gay scandals involving the army (false accusations against the highest officer in charge, general von Fritsch, in 1938) or catholic institutions deserve specific attention. Grau suggests to do research on the persecutors of gay men and on the treatment of homosexuals in homosocial Nazi institutions like SA, SS and Hitlerjugend.(9)
Several older books and articles have already brought forward material on gay exiles, gay resistance fighters, the stereotype of the gay nazi, fascist theories of homosexuality and their consequences.(10) Recently, leading German gay historian Manfred Herzer has accepted « à contre coeur « the thesis that many gay men were seduced by the homoerotic masculinity of the Nazis, and supported Hitler's party.(11) This entanglement of gay men with their oppressors certainly earns a full-blown study. This love for the enemy, so brilliantly depicted in the work of Jean Genet who was seduced like many of his French gay compatriots by German homoeroticism, was difficult to gauge for the gay libbers of the seventies. It should also be worthwhile to have a new general study on homosexuality in the Nazi period for which all these books and articles contribute parts and parcels.
Another important discussion concerns the modernity of the nazi-persecution. Many people consider it to have been a regressive phase in the progress promised by the Enlightenment, others have analyzed Nazism, like the equally murderous Stalinism, as a modern movement. Its use of media, technology and mass psychology certainly made it to a form of politics that very much belongs to the present and in fact happened again in other parts of the world. For gay emancipation, the question is if discourses and practices regarding homosexuality nowadays are so different from those of the Nazis that they offer a safeguard against future disasters. I do not see such fundamental changes.
All the recent books and exhibits on the Nazi persecution of gay men have made the topic inevitable. The statistics of the persecution are becoming more precise, while the personal stories in the discussed books have given the victims faces and voices. They confront us very directly with one of the ugliest periods of gay history. They will certainly contribute to a feeling of « never again « . But seen the activities of the extreme right, religious fundamentalists and other groups and the lack of support for gay emancipation by governments and international institutions, such hope does not offer certainty. Gay emancipation and sexual liberation need a much firmer base in society than they have nowadays even in the most liberal countries to counter such murderous politics.
THE BOOKS
Heinrich Böll Stiftung (ed), Der homosexuellen NS-Opfer gedenken (homosexual nazi-victims), Berlin: Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung, 1999, 175 pp.
Centrum Schwule Geschichte (ed), « Das sind Volksfeinde! « Die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen an Rhein und Ruhr 1933-1945 (« Those are the people's enemies! « The persecution of homosexuals on Rhine and Ruhr 1933-1945), Cologne: EL-DE-Haus, 1998, 259 pp, ill.
Rainer Hoffschildt, Die Verfolgung der Homosexuellen in der NS-Zeit. Zahlen und Schicksale aus Norddeutschland (The persecution of homosexuals in the nazi period. Numbers and fates from Northern-Germany), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1999, 195 pp, ill.
Joachim Mueller & Andreas Sternweiler (eds), Homosexuelle Maenner im KZ Sachsenhausen (Homosexual men in concentration camp Sachsenhausen), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000, 396 pp, ill.
Andreas Pretzel & Gabriele Rossbach (eds), Wegen der zu erwartenden hohen Strafe... Homosexuellenverfolgung in Berlin 1933-1945 (Because of the expected high penalties ... Persecution of homosexuals in Berlin 1933-1945), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000, 348 pp, ill.
Thomas Rahe a.o. (eds), Verfolgung Homosexueller im Nationalsozialismus (Persecution of homosexuals under national socialism), Bremen: Temmen, 1999, 205 pp, ill. (=Beitraege zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland 5)
Notes:
1. Translated in condensed form for the Journal of Homosexuality 6:1/2 (1981).
2. Mentioned in James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York 1975, p. 106.
3. Gay leader Kurt Hiller was imprisoned already in March of the same year, see Steakley, o.c., p. 103.
4. See her Zeit der Maskierung (1993), translated as Days of Masquerade. Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich, New York 1996.
5. The Center had earlier an exhibit and a book on « The life of the Cologne-homosexuals in the Third Reich: Cornelia Limpricht, Juergen Mueller, Nina Oxenius (eds), « Verfuehrte « Maenner. Das Leben der Koelner Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, Cologne 1991.
6. Gunter Grau (ed), Homosexualitaet in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung, Frankfurt, 1993.
7. Tamagne, Histoire de l'homosexualité en Europe, Paris 2000, a 700-page-long study comparing London, Berlin and Paris for the period 1900-1945 and including a lengthy discussion of Nazi politics with regard to homosexuality; Gert Hekma, « Same-sex relations among men in Europe, 1700-1990 « , in: Franz Eder, Lesley & Gert Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe, Vol. 2: Themes in Sexuality, Manchester 1999, pp. 79-103.
8. See for the Netherlands: Pieter Koenders, Tussen Christelijk R'veil en seksuele revolutie. Bestrijding van zedeloosheid met de nadruk op repressie van homoseksualiteit, Amsterdam 1996.
9. Franz Seidler, Prostitution, Homosexualität, Selbstverstuemmelung. Probleme der deutschen Sanitaetsfuehrung 1939-1945, Neckargemuend 1977 has a chapter on homosexuality in the German army, with short paragraphs on the SS and Hitlerjugend.
10. Several articles on gay resistance fighters and exiles and on nazi theories of homosexuality were published by Manfred Herzer in Capri. On the « gay Nazi « , see Joern Meve, « Homosexuelle Nazis « . Ein Stereotyp in Politik und Literatur des Exils, Hamburg 1990; Alexander Zinn, Die soziale Konstruktion des homosexuellen Nationalsozialisten. Zu Genese und Etablierung eines Stereotyps, Frankfurt 1997.
11. He says in an article on gay resistance against the Nazis that he thinks nowadays that an above average number of gay men were sympathetic to the Nazis until the murder of Röhm in 1934 (Capri 28, July 2000, p. 34). See also his article in this journal, Vol. 29:2/3 (1995). See for the homoeroticism of Nazi culture, Harry Oosterhuis, « Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany, in: Journal of Contemporary History32:2 (April 1997), pp. 187-205.
Texte : Gert Hekma, University of Amsterdam.
In 1977, Lautmann and his co-authors established that between 5,000 and 15,000 men had been sent to concentration camps because of homosexual offenses, while about half of them died or were murdered there. Before, this persecution had often been denied while, at the pro-gay side, the Protestant Church of Austria had claimed 220,000 murdered homosexuals.(2) Rainer Hoffschildt is preparing a list of the names of all men persecuted for homosexual offenses by the Nazis. In the book of essays edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, he expects to come to a number of 5-7,000 men but does not speak out about the number that died in these camps of death. He warns also not to use the number of cases of homosexual offenses persecuted by the Nazis in the period 1933-1945 (about 50,000) as equalling the number of victimized men because many were repeat offenders. At the other hand, gay men as well as lesbian women were persecuted under other legal provisions for example against asocials, insane people or vagrants.
The main importance of the new books is however not establishing numbers but reporting the life histories and social conditions of gay men, sometimes also of lesbian women, in Nazi times. In all books, except the one published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the faces of gay men can be seen and their moving stories can be read. Most of the Nazi victims were utterly unprepared for their fate, and those who survived the war, had to confront afterwards the refusal to offer gay men « Wiedergutmachung « . Some men even remained imprisoned, or were sentenced again to severe penalties by judges and public prosecutors who made their careers in the Nazi period. For gay men, the « liberation « of 1945 meant no end to discrimination and prosecution. The capitalist West of Germany was even worse than the communist East. It kept the Nazi extension of paragraph 175 of 1935 as it was not deemed to be a result of Nazi ideology. The extension of 1935 broadened the crime from a limited number of homosexual acts that resembled coitus to all forms of desire, including mutual masturbation or intimacies. But the East had also its flaws: some gay men who dared to request after the war a special status as Nazi victims, were prosecuted because of fraud.
The collection of essays on Berlin edited by Pretzel and Rossbach includes a chronology of the Nazi prosecution of gay men. Within a month after the take-over at the end of January 1933, the Nazi minister of interior issued an order to close all gay bars. He also forbade obscene literature. In May, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Sciences was sacked by the SA. The first gay and transgender men were sent in the autumn to the newly built concentration camps.(3) The legal provisions to arrest « sex criminals « were broadened. Without any attempt to produce legal proof, many SA leaders were murdered in the summer of 1934, among them their chief of staff, Hitler's buddy Ernst Roehm. As official reason was given that the regime wanted to clean society of such dens of sexual debauchery. The same year, the Gestapo got a section for homosexual crimes, and in 1936 a « National Institute to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion « was founded (the combination makes clear that a main nazi issue was promoting reproduction).
In 1935, paragraph 175 was broadened. Two years later, SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave his infamous lecture on the homosexual danger implying that it could menace through infection the homosocial institutions of the Nazi regime. After the beginning of the war in 1939, it was decided that no prisoner would be released from concentration camps. Persons who were considered to endanger the social body could be exterminated. The death penalty for homosexual offenses was introduced in 1941 for the SS and the police, in 1943 for the army. At that time, many gay men had already succumbed to the terror in the camps.
The book on Berlin is important for its stories of horror, idiocy but sometimes also tenderness. It is astonishing to realize that a vivid gay culture and an active movement had disappeared within a month after the Nazis took power. More than a third of homosexual offenses in Berlin came to the attention of the police through non-involved private persons, mostly neighbors. Another third was discovered by the police itself while also family members or the workplace denounced supposed sex-criminals. There were in fact no spaces where a gay man could feel safe, not even at home. Gay men of all social classes and political persuasions were prosecuted. The Nazi men who were judged for homosexual offenses faced the harshest destiny. The book offers essays on legal material from numbers to policies, on interrogations, on meeting places, on Sachsenhausen. The best part that makes up half of the book is a wide range of personal stories on the Nazi persecutions that are recuperated mainly from official archives. The police pictures of arrested men look dreadful, at the other hand the book has many lovely private pictures. There is a nice story of a gay fetishist who dressed his secretary in « Samt und Seide « (velvet and silk), kissed and touched him and got thus excited. The poor man was sentenced to prison even though there was no proof of a sexual act.
The book edited by Mueller and Sternweiler on Sachsenhausen that complements the exhibit is the most gruesome in its details and illustrations. It opens with « a list of the dead « , the 300 known names of men who were persecuted for homosexual offenses and died in Sachsenhausen. It continues with articles on the architecture of and the procedures in the camp. Gay men were separated from other prisoners because of the risks of homosexual infection. The worst jobs were reserved for them. In the « Klinkerwerke « or brickworks, they had to dig up and transport mud. In the summer of 1942 89 gay men were brutally killed on this location. Building a firing range for the SS was another place of death as the SS men used the prisoners as targets while they were forced to continue the construction work. In the « shoe-company « heavily packed gay men were coerced to walk for hours on new models to try them out in adverse circumstances. More benign locations were the kitchen and hospital that sometimes could offer some extra food. For young men, there was the possibility of becoming the secret beloved of a prison warden. In this way Heinz Heger survived the worst time in Sachsenhausen. Some men consented to be castrated in the vain hope of getting out of the camp.
Before 1939, gay men were considered the lowest rank in the hierarchy of prisoners with Jews and Gypsies. After the war started, the camps were flooded with political prisoners and prisoners of war from outside Germany, and gay men became only a tiny part of the camp population (nearly no non-German gay men were slept there). After 1942, the camps changed largely from places of extermination to labour camps. The prisoners were dearly needed to contribute to the war effort. Now, with many foreigners in the camps, gay men could even rise to positions of power that had always been withheld from them. The book ends with several essays on the continuation of discrimination of gay men after the war. Men who had hoped to be free after the liberation, had sometimes to stay in prison, and no gay Nazi victim ever received appropriate indemnification for his ordeal.
Hoffschildt's book begins with an explanation of the legal system that was used against gay men. It continues with an overview of some camps where they were held, namely the Emsland camps and Bergen-Belsen, Moringen and Neuengamme, and several « outside-camps « which were established next to a factory or another place where prisoners were forced to labor. The next chapter discusses prisons which began always more to resemble the camps in their organization and function. A last chapter is devoted to death penalties. Except for the first chapter, most material concerns personal histories. The material on Moringen is about three lesbian prisoners.
The book by Rahe and others is a special gay issue of a regular publication on the history of camp Neuengamme but the contents extend beyond this camp. Some of the main authors mentioned above have articles in this collection like Lautmann and Hoffschildt who discusses Bergen Belsen and the prison of Celle. Two articles tell the lesbian story, one by Claudia Schoppmann who is the main author on the Nazi persecution of lesbians.(4) Stefan Micheler has both an article on gays in Neuengamme, and another on the scandal that recently 80% of the court archives from the period 1935-1949 was destroyed by the National Archive in Hamburg, including much material on the persecution of homosexual offenses.
The book on the Cologne region went also with an exhibit.(5) It opens with an overview of the Nazi persecution of gays, and a second one on lesbians. Most articles discuss specific topics like the closing down of bars, raids on cruising places and preventive policies in Cologne, a theatre scandal in Essen, castration. An interesting article concerns Hanns Heinz Ewers, a gay author who contributed to the gay press before 1933 and wrote Fundvogel (1927), an early novel on a transsexual operation. He was the official biographer of the Nazi hero Horst Wessel (1932). After Hitler came to power, most of his books were forbidden but strangely enough not the gay ones. He died in oblivion during the war. The collection of essays ends with four personal stories.
The publication of the Heinrich Böll Foundation offers some general essays on the topic, for example by George Mosse, Schoppmann, the omnipresent Hoffschildt while another important author on the topic, Gunter Grau, gives an overview of the relevant literature.(6) It includes discussions on and proposals for a monument to commemorate the gay victims of the Nazi regime. Even two places are already suggested, in Tiergarten near the location of Hirschfeld's destroyed Institute, or on Nollendorferplatz where the gay scene was before 1933 and again is nowadays.
The books raise many important questions. A recurring theme is the strange mixture of anti-homosexuality and homo-eroticism in Nazism. For a long time, many Nazi victims and leftist Nazi opponents represented their persecutors and enemies as gay men, and denied the anti-gay ideologies and practices of the Nazis. Some authors claim that the gay experience of Nazism has therefore a unique specificity in the sense that gay men were mixed up between the Nazis and their opponents. But not only gay men were active on both sides, all prosecuted groups had their traitors who cooperated with the Nazis, often helping them in the annihilation of their own group.
Another question concerns the place gay men should occupy in the list of victims. It has become politically correct nowadays to delineate the victims of the Nazis as being Jews, Gypsies, leftists, resistance fighters, Eastern-Europeans, Jehovah-witnesses, the insane, homosexuals. But when I see, for example, after visiting the exposition on the gay victims of the Nazis, that mention is made of 17,000 prisoners of war from the Soviet-Union murdered in one single year in Sachsenhausen, the destiny of perhaps 5,000 murdered gay men seems to be minor. The authors deal in very different ways with this fact. Ilse Kokula has the unhappy formulation that « the suffering is not less when the number of dead people is smaller « (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 137). Grau found a better way to express the discussion of numbers « it is absurd to measure in numbers the suffering done to humans « (id, 100).
There is no doubt any longer that gay men were persecuted harshly by the Nazis, and especially the gay Nazis that Nazi victims have singled out for opprobrium. There is no doubt that among all the victims gay men have a real and special, but also minor place. One difference between gay and most other groups is that gay men were prosecuted in nearly all Western states at that point in time, perhaps less cruelly and systematically than by the Nazis, but nonetheless they had to face prison, castration, therapies, ostracism, and other forms of social and personal discrimination everywhere. As Florence Tamagne in her Histoire de l'homosexualité en Europe (Paris 2000) (7) and I myself argued in an article in Sexual Cultures in Europe (Vol 2, Manchester 1999), the thirties saw a steady decline in acceptance of homosexuality and an increasing persecution of gay men all over Europe that did not end in 1945, but only from the sixties on in Western Europe, and from the eighties on in Eastern-Europe.
Another major point is about Wiedergutmachung. Germany, but also The Netherlands, have promised a retribution to gay victims of the Nazis in the nineties. But as most men hid themselves very deep in their closets, while the few who opened up, are dead by now, minor indemnifications have come to less than a handful of gay victims. The question for the Berliners is the next step, a national homomonument to commemorate the victims. Amsterdam and Frankfurt have already one, Berlin will probably discuss it for a lengthy period with its ominous separatist traditions. In the Netherlands, some have suggested to pay substantial amounts of money for gay projects, not only because of persecutions and discriminations during the Second World War, but also for the periods before and after. The range of legal, financial, medical and other damage being done to gay men and lesbian women until recent seems to justify indeed major, probably collective, indemnifications by most Western governments.
The books offer a broad overview but show also that some topics are still under-researched. Most needed is research on persecutions in the Southern parts of Germany, in Austria and in Bohemia. Gay men in most occupied countries suffered little from the Nazis because they did not endanger the German race (except when they seduced German soldiers).(8) Very little is known on the attitudes of the general population regarding the gay persecutions. They probably supported them seen the number of denunciations in « tolerant « Berlin. Major gay scandals involving the army (false accusations against the highest officer in charge, general von Fritsch, in 1938) or catholic institutions deserve specific attention. Grau suggests to do research on the persecutors of gay men and on the treatment of homosexuals in homosocial Nazi institutions like SA, SS and Hitlerjugend.(9)
Several older books and articles have already brought forward material on gay exiles, gay resistance fighters, the stereotype of the gay nazi, fascist theories of homosexuality and their consequences.(10) Recently, leading German gay historian Manfred Herzer has accepted « à contre coeur « the thesis that many gay men were seduced by the homoerotic masculinity of the Nazis, and supported Hitler's party.(11) This entanglement of gay men with their oppressors certainly earns a full-blown study. This love for the enemy, so brilliantly depicted in the work of Jean Genet who was seduced like many of his French gay compatriots by German homoeroticism, was difficult to gauge for the gay libbers of the seventies. It should also be worthwhile to have a new general study on homosexuality in the Nazi period for which all these books and articles contribute parts and parcels.
Another important discussion concerns the modernity of the nazi-persecution. Many people consider it to have been a regressive phase in the progress promised by the Enlightenment, others have analyzed Nazism, like the equally murderous Stalinism, as a modern movement. Its use of media, technology and mass psychology certainly made it to a form of politics that very much belongs to the present and in fact happened again in other parts of the world. For gay emancipation, the question is if discourses and practices regarding homosexuality nowadays are so different from those of the Nazis that they offer a safeguard against future disasters. I do not see such fundamental changes.
All the recent books and exhibits on the Nazi persecution of gay men have made the topic inevitable. The statistics of the persecution are becoming more precise, while the personal stories in the discussed books have given the victims faces and voices. They confront us very directly with one of the ugliest periods of gay history. They will certainly contribute to a feeling of « never again « . But seen the activities of the extreme right, religious fundamentalists and other groups and the lack of support for gay emancipation by governments and international institutions, such hope does not offer certainty. Gay emancipation and sexual liberation need a much firmer base in society than they have nowadays even in the most liberal countries to counter such murderous politics.
THE BOOKS
Heinrich Böll Stiftung (ed), Der homosexuellen NS-Opfer gedenken (homosexual nazi-victims), Berlin: Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung, 1999, 175 pp.
Centrum Schwule Geschichte (ed), « Das sind Volksfeinde! « Die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen an Rhein und Ruhr 1933-1945 (« Those are the people's enemies! « The persecution of homosexuals on Rhine and Ruhr 1933-1945), Cologne: EL-DE-Haus, 1998, 259 pp, ill.
Rainer Hoffschildt, Die Verfolgung der Homosexuellen in der NS-Zeit. Zahlen und Schicksale aus Norddeutschland (The persecution of homosexuals in the nazi period. Numbers and fates from Northern-Germany), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1999, 195 pp, ill.
Joachim Mueller & Andreas Sternweiler (eds), Homosexuelle Maenner im KZ Sachsenhausen (Homosexual men in concentration camp Sachsenhausen), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000, 396 pp, ill.
Andreas Pretzel & Gabriele Rossbach (eds), Wegen der zu erwartenden hohen Strafe... Homosexuellenverfolgung in Berlin 1933-1945 (Because of the expected high penalties ... Persecution of homosexuals in Berlin 1933-1945), Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000, 348 pp, ill.
Thomas Rahe a.o. (eds), Verfolgung Homosexueller im Nationalsozialismus (Persecution of homosexuals under national socialism), Bremen: Temmen, 1999, 205 pp, ill. (=Beitraege zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland 5)
Notes:
1. Translated in condensed form for the Journal of Homosexuality 6:1/2 (1981).
2. Mentioned in James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York 1975, p. 106.
3. Gay leader Kurt Hiller was imprisoned already in March of the same year, see Steakley, o.c., p. 103.
4. See her Zeit der Maskierung (1993), translated as Days of Masquerade. Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich, New York 1996.
5. The Center had earlier an exhibit and a book on « The life of the Cologne-homosexuals in the Third Reich: Cornelia Limpricht, Juergen Mueller, Nina Oxenius (eds), « Verfuehrte « Maenner. Das Leben der Koelner Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, Cologne 1991.
6. Gunter Grau (ed), Homosexualitaet in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung, Frankfurt, 1993.
7. Tamagne, Histoire de l'homosexualité en Europe, Paris 2000, a 700-page-long study comparing London, Berlin and Paris for the period 1900-1945 and including a lengthy discussion of Nazi politics with regard to homosexuality; Gert Hekma, « Same-sex relations among men in Europe, 1700-1990 « , in: Franz Eder, Lesley & Gert Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe, Vol. 2: Themes in Sexuality, Manchester 1999, pp. 79-103.
8. See for the Netherlands: Pieter Koenders, Tussen Christelijk R'veil en seksuele revolutie. Bestrijding van zedeloosheid met de nadruk op repressie van homoseksualiteit, Amsterdam 1996.
9. Franz Seidler, Prostitution, Homosexualität, Selbstverstuemmelung. Probleme der deutschen Sanitaetsfuehrung 1939-1945, Neckargemuend 1977 has a chapter on homosexuality in the German army, with short paragraphs on the SS and Hitlerjugend.
10. Several articles on gay resistance fighters and exiles and on nazi theories of homosexuality were published by Manfred Herzer in Capri. On the « gay Nazi « , see Joern Meve, « Homosexuelle Nazis « . Ein Stereotyp in Politik und Literatur des Exils, Hamburg 1990; Alexander Zinn, Die soziale Konstruktion des homosexuellen Nationalsozialisten. Zu Genese und Etablierung eines Stereotyps, Frankfurt 1997.
11. He says in an article on gay resistance against the Nazis that he thinks nowadays that an above average number of gay men were sympathetic to the Nazis until the murder of Röhm in 1934 (Capri 28, July 2000, p. 34). See also his article in this journal, Vol. 29:2/3 (1995). See for the homoeroticism of Nazi culture, Harry Oosterhuis, « Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany, in: Journal of Contemporary History32:2 (April 1997), pp. 187-205.
Texte : Gert Hekma, University of Amsterdam.
"Même un paysage tranquille, même une prairie avec des vols de corbeaux, des moissons et des feux d'herbe, même une route où passent des voitures, des paysans, des couples, même un village pour vacances, avec une foire et un clocher peuvent conduire tout simplement à un camp de concentration. Le Struthof, Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau, Mauthausen furent des noms comme les autres sur les cartes et les guides."Texte : Nuit et Brouillard, Jean Cayrol, Fayard, 1997 (texte du film d'Alain Resnais).
Photo : Trois photos du camp de concentration d'Oranienburg, près de Berlin, prises en 1933. Le système est alors embryonnaire. Placés sous la supervision de la police et des SA, les premiers détenus (essentiellement des opposants politiques) arrivent au camp dès mars 1933. Le 20 mars 1933, soit moins de deux mois après l'arrivée au pouvoir d'Hitler, les nazis ouvrent le camp de concentration de Dachau, près de Munich.
"En 1939, Karl a 26 ans. Alors qu'il ne se doute de rien, la Gestapo vient l'appréhender chez lui. Plus tard, les fonctionnaires lui apprennent que quelqu'un l'aurait dénoncé pour infraction à l'article 175. Karl B. est mis en détention par la Gestapo. Quelques jours plus tard, un officier SS le force, sous la menace d'un revolver, à signer des aveux. Au bout de quelques semaines, sans même qu'il comparaisse devant un tribunal, il est transféré comme "triangle rose" dans le camp de concentration que l'on construit depuis décembre 1938 à Neuengamme, tout juste à trente kilomètres à l'est de Hambourg."
Texte : La déportation des homosexuels. Onze témoignages, Allemagne 1933-1945, Lutz van Dijk, Editions H&O, 2000.
Photo : Photo anthropométrique de Karl B., prise lors de son arrivée à Auschwitz. (orig : Editions H&O)
La Forêt Chantante.Supplice infligé aux déportés. Le détenu, suspendu par les mains liées dans le dos, agonise sous le poids de son propre corps.
Supplice au camp de concentration de Neuengamme.
Texte : Webmaster
Photo : Lithographie de Richard Grune, déporté au titre du §175, (1945). (Orig : Schwules Museum, Berlin)
"Himmler, un gratte-papier arriviste, borné et méticuleux, accidentellement nanti de moyens disproportionnés par rapport à sa médiocrité, avait, dès 1933, organisé l'empire souterrain du nazisme : Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Gross-Rossen, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Natzweiler."Heinrich Himmler fut le principal architecte de la politique de répression et d'éradication mise en oeuvre à l'encontre des homosexuels. Petit-bourgeois issu d'une famille catholique très stricte, il adhère à la SS alors qu'elle n'est qu'un groupuscule. En 1929, Hitler le remarque et le nomme chef suprême de la SS avec le titre de Reichsführer. Himmler fera de cette organisation le fer de lance du nazisme et réunira entre ses mains un appareil répressif et policier d'une redoutable efficacité. A la tête de l'Etat SS, il dirigera la politique d'extermination du Troisième Reich.
Texte : Ravensbrück, Germaine Tillion, Hachette, 1992
Photo : Le Reichsführer--S.S. Heinrich Himmler. (orig : USHM)
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