Gay Focus at Holocaust Museum

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 4, 2003
Gay Focus at Holocaust Museum
By ELIZABETH OLSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 — They were called the "175ers" —
homosexuals that the Nazis arrested, beat, used as
prison labor and sometimes castrated.

Charges were brought under Paragraph 175 of the German
criminal code, which outlawed "unnatural indecency"
between men, starting in 1871. The Nazis broadened the
statute to make "simple looking" and "simple touching"
reasons for tracking and rounding up gay men.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here,
where two million visitors a year learn about the
persecution of Jews under Hitler, has decided to focus
exhibitions on other groups, beginning with
homosexuals. For two years the museum's researchers
combed records, mainly in Germany. The somber result
is "Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945," an
exhibition that is running through March 16 at the
museum, at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, and will
then travel to New York, San Francisco and other
cities. (More information: ushmm.org.) 

While tens of thousands were incarcerated and an
unknown number killed, few homosexuals told their
stories then — or later. For decades after the Allied
victory they were subject to the same criminal statute
that Hitler's regime had used to pursue them. The law
was expunged in 1994, and it was only last May that
convicted "175ers" were pardoned by the German
government.

Only fragments of their brutal treatment in the Nazi
era are known....

[...] 

Since there was so little testimony from the victims
or the survivors, the museum built the exhibition
around disturbingly meticulous Nazi records.
Photographs, cartoons and art from the era show that
stamping out homosexuality became a priority for the
Nazis even though an openly gay Ernst Röhm, chief of
the storm troopers, helped bring Hitler to power. When
he was murdered in 1934, barriers to pursuing gays
were swept away, and homosexuality was equated with
treason.

In a country where bonding began early in all-male
youth groups, the Nazis publicly campaigned to stamp
out "indecent" acts. Yet "a considerable number of
cases of homosexual activity were found in just about
every part of the Nazi apparatus, from the storm
troopers to the Hitler Youth movement," said Geoffrey
Giles, a University of Florida historian, who
contributed some of his research to the exhibition....


Such behavior had to be righted, the Nazis argued,
because homosexuals were jeopardizing Germany's future
generations by failing to have children. Lesbians, by
contrast, were often spared, because they could be
re-educated to assume roles as wives and mothers.

[...]

By 1936 the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler had
established the Central Office to Combat Homosexuality
and Abortion, and surveillance of gays was legalized.
Over all, as many as 100,000 men were arrested and
charged with homosexual acts. About half were
convicted and imprisoned. Up to 15,000 were interned
in concentration camps, where pink triangles — like
the yellow star of David that Jews had to wear — were
sewn on their uniforms. Some prisoners wore both.

Despite Nazi zeal, no law prevented homosexuals from
serving in the German military. The Nazi Party feared
that an exemption "could exclude as many as three
million men," said Mr. Giles, who is writing a book
about homosexuals and the party. When World War II
began, accused and convicted "175ers" could legally
mingle in the ranks. About 7,000 were convicted but
were forced to return to military service, where they
were sometimes used in suicide missions on the front
lines.

The Nazis distinguished between offenders who had
"learned" their behavior from others and the
"incorrigibles," who actively sought partners. The
so-called incorrigibles were sent to concentration
camps ....

"They believed that homosexuality could be corrected,"
said Edward J. Phillips, the exhibition's curator.
"That included hormone treatments among other
experiments. Also, there was a notion that
homosexuality was developmental and those forced to
work in disciplined hard labor could overcome it."

[...]

Why where the Nazis so diligently anti-homosexual?
There have been claims that Hitler was gay, but Mr.
Giles believes the Nazi focus on gays stemmed from
close relationships among German men in wartime
trenches.

"The defining relationship for the older Nazis was
World War I, and they set out in the 1920's to
reproduce that feeling of comradeship," Mr. Giles
said. "But those relationships could stray into the
homoerotic area, and that's what they feared."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/04/arts/design/04HOLO.html

Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945

http://ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/

And cf. ...

"It wasn't always so.  In the trenches of the First
World War, English men came to love one another
decently, without shame or make-believe [...].  While
Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved.  But
the life-cry of that love has longed sinced hissed
away into no more than this idle and bitch faggotry. 
In this latest war, death was no enemy, but a
collaborator.  Homosexuality in high places is just a
carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking
is done on paper...."  (GR, Sec. III, p. 616)

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